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

September 16, 2019 12:35 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then to Lose Him, to Lose this Young One with Whom I Felt Such Utter Communion—Ah, that was Such Rich Pain!

September 14, 2019 12:13 am

This is what I believe happened. I brought the inventions of the modern World to her as offerings. At first it was the machines that played music, and then came those which would show moving pictures. At last, I brought the most powerful of all, the television that would play constantly. I set it in her shrine as though it were a sacrifice. In all modern societies, the autonomous associations standing between the various classes and the state tend to lose the effectiveness as vehicles of reasoned opinion and instruments for the rational exertion of political will. Such associations can be deliberately broken up and thus turned into passive instruments of rule, or they can more slowly wither away from lack of use in the face of centralized means of power. However, whether they are destroyed in a week, or wither away in a generation, such associations are replaced in virtually every sphere of life by centralized organizations, and it is such organizations with all their new means of power that can take charge of the terrorized—or as the case may be—merely intimidated, society of masses. The institutional trends that make for a society of masses are to a considerable extent a matter of impersonal drift, but the remnants of the public are also exposed to more personal and intentional forces. Rather like the music of the violin, I think, just as deeply colored, such terrible pain. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

With the broadening of the base of politics within the context of a folk-lore of democratic decision-making, and with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of intensive efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate. In political, military, economic realms, power becomes, in varying degrees, uneasy before the suspected opinions of masses, and, accordingly, opinion-making becomes an accepted technique of power-holding and power-getting. The minority electorate of the propertied and the educated I replaced by the total suffrage—and intensive campaigns for the vote. The small eighteenth-century professional army is replaced by the mass army of conscripts—and by the problems of nationalist morale. The small shop is replaced by the mass-production industry—and the national advertisement. As the scale of institutions has become larger and more centralized, so has the range and intensity of the opinionmakers’ efforts. The means of opinion-making, in fact, have paralleled in range and efficiency the other institutions of greater scale that cradle the modern society of masses. Accordingly, in addition to their enlarged and centralized means of administration, exploitation, and violence, the modern elite have had placed within their grasp historically unique instruments of psychic management and manipulation, which include universal compulsory education as well as the media of mass communication. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Early observers believed that the increase in the range and volume of the formal means of communication would enlarge and animate the primary public. In such optimistic of animating the primary public—written before radio and television and movies—the formal media are understood as simply multiplying the scope and pace of personal discussion. Enlarge indefinitely the competition of ideas, and whatever has owed its persistence merely to lack of comparisons is likely to go, for that which is really congenial to the choosing mind will be all the more cherished and increased. There is a reason to be excited by the break-up of the conventional consensus of the local community, as the new means of communication are furthering the conversational dynamic of classic democracy, and with it the growth of rational and free individuality. No one really knows all the functions of the mass media for in their entirety these functions are probably so pervasive and so subtle that they cannot be caught by the means of social research now available. However, we do no have reason to believe that these media have helped less to enlarge and animate the discussions of primary publics than to transform them into a set of media markets in mass-like society. I do not refer merely to the higher ratio of deliverers of opinion to receivers and to the decreased chance to answer back; nor do I refer merely to the violent banalization and stereotyping of our very sense organs in terms of which these media now compete for attention. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

I have in mind a sort of psychological illiteracy that is facilitated by the media, and that is expressed in several ways: Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the World have found out first-hand. Most of the pictures in our hears we have gained from these media—even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about in in the paper or hear about it on the radio. The media not only gives us information; they guide our very experiences, and that is why many are producing fictional and sensualized stories. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience. Accordingly, even if the individual has direct, personal experience of events, it is not really direct and primary: it is organized stereotypes. It takes long and skillful trainings to so uproot such stereotypes that an individual sees things freshly, in an unstereotyped manner. One might suppose, for example, that is all the people went through a depression they would all experience it, and in terms of this experience, that they would all debunk or reject or at least refract what the media say about it. However, experience of such a structural shift has to be organized and interpreted if it is to count in the making of opinion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The kind of experience, in short, that might serve as a basis for resistance to mass media is not an experience of the raw events, but the experience of meanings. If we are to use the word experience seriously, the fleck of interpretation must be there in the experience. And the capacity for such experience is socially implanted. The individual does not trust one’s own experience, as I have said, until it is confirmed by others or by the media. If it disturbs loyalties and beliefs that the individual already hold, usually such direct exposure is not accepted. To be accepted, it must relieve or justify the feelings that often are possessed in the back of one’s mind as key features of one’s ideological loyalties. Stereotypes of loyalty underlie beliefs and feelings about given symbols and emblems; they are the very ways in which beings see the social World and in terms of which beings make up their specific opines and views of the event. They are the result of previous experience, which affect present and future experience. It goes without saying that being are often unaware of these loyalties, that often they could not formulate them explicitly. Yet such general stereotypes make for the acceptance or the rejection of specific opinions not so much by the force of logical consistency as by their emotional affinity and by the way in which they relieve anxieties. To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

When ideological stereotypes and specific opinions are linked in this way, there is a lowering of the kind of anxiety which arises when loyalty and belief are not in accord. Such ideologies lead to a willingness to accept a given line of belief; then there is no need, emotionally or rationally, to overcome resistance to give items in that line; cumulative selections of specific opinions and feelings become the pre-organized attitudes and emotions that shape the opinion-life of the person. These deeper beliefs and feelings are not a sort of lens through which beings experience their Worlds, they strongly condition acceptance or rejection of specific opinions, and they set being’s orientation toward prevailing authorities. Eight decades ago, Walter Lippmann saw such prior convictions as biases: they kept beings from defining reality in an adequate way. They are still biased. However, today they can often be seen as good biases; inadequate and misleading as they often are, they are less so than the crackpot realism of higher authorities and opinion-makers. They are first generation to be so exposed. So long as the media are not entirely monopolized, the individual can play one medium off against another; one can compare them, and hence resist what any one of them put out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The more genuine competition there is among the media, the more resistance the individual might be able to command. However, how much is this now the case? So people compare reports on public events or policies, playing one medium’s content off against another’s? The answer is: generally no, very few do: We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a kind of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings. Given radio programs and social media and video streaming and magazines and newspapers often get a rather consistent public, and thus reinforce their messages in the mind of pubic. The idea of playing one medium off against another assumes that the media really have varying contents. It assumes genuine competition, which is not widely true. The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues. The freedom to raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those few interests that have ready and continual access to these media. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The media have not only filtered into our experience of external realities, they have also entered into our very experience of our own selves. They have provided us with new identities and new aspirations of what we should like to be. They have provided in the models of conduct they hold out to us a new and larger and more flexible set of appraisals of our very selves. In terms of the modern theory of the self, we may say that the media bring the reader, listener, viewer into the sight of larger, higher reference groups—groups, real or imagined, up-close or vicarious, personally known or distractedly glimpsed—which are looking glasses for one’s self-image. They have multiplied the groups to which we look for confirmation of our self-image. More than that: the media tell the being in the mass who he or she is—they give one identity; they tell one what one wants to be—they give one aspirations; they tell one how to get that way—they give one technique; and they tell one how to feel that one is that way even when one is not—they give one an escape. The gaps between the identity and aspirations lead to technique and/or to escape. That is probably the basic psychological formula of a pseudo-World which the media invent and sustain. As they now generally prevail, the mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

They are an important reason why they only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force: they do not articulate for the viewer or listener the broader sources of one’s private tensions and anxieties, one’s inarticulate resentments and half-formed hopes. They neither enable the individual to transcend one’s narrow milieu nor clarify its private meeting. The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the World, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect one’s daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual. They do not increase rational in identified with the ruing institutions and their agents, who ay use authority explicitly and nakedly. They do not in the extreme case, have to gain or retain power by hiding its exercise. Manipulation becomes a problem wherever beings have power that is concentrated and willful but do not have authority, or when, for any reason, they do not wish to use their power openly. Then the powerful seek to rule without showing their powerfulness. They want to rule, as it were, secretly, without publicized legitimation. It is in this mixed case—as in the intermediate reality of the American today—that manipulation is a prime way of exercising power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Small circles of beings are making decisions which they need to have at least authorized by indifferent or recalcitrant people over whom they do not exercise explicit authority. So the small circle tries to manipulate these people into willing acceptance or cheerful support of their decisions or opinions—or at least to the rejection of possible counter-opinions. Authority formally resides in the people, but the power of initiation is in fact held by small circles of beings. That is why the standard strategy of manipulation is to make it appear that the people, or at least, a large group of them really made the decision. That is why even when the authority is available, beings with access to it may still prefer the secret, quieter ways of manipulation. However, are not the people now more educated? Why not emphasize the spread of the education rather than the increased effects of the mass media? The answer, in brief is that mass education, in many respects, has become another mass medium. It is thought by environmentalists that human behavior is exclusively molded by the influence of the environment. According to this their theory behavior is controlled by social and cultural, as opposed to innate factors. This is particularly true with regard to aggression, one of the main obstacles to human progress. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In its most radical form this view was already presented by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Beings were supposed to be born good and rational, and it was due to bad institutions, bad educations, and bad example that one developed evil strivings. Some denied that there were any physical differences between the genders (L’ame n’a pas de sex) and proposed that whatever differences existed, aside from the anatomical ones, were exclusively due to education and social arrangements. In contrast to behaviorism, however, these philosophers were not concerned with methods of human engineering and manipulation but wit social and political change. They believed that the good society would create the good being, or rather, allow the natural goodness of beings to manifest itself. However, many who accept Neobehaviorism as true believe that to consider human behavior as impelled by intentions, purposes, aims or goals, would be a prescientific and useless way of looking at it. Psychology has to study what reinforcements tend to shape human behavior and how to apply the reinforcements most effectively. B. F. Skinner’s psychology is the science of the engineering of behavior; its aim is to find the right reinforcements in order to produce a desired behavior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Skinner spears of operant conditioning. Briefly, this means that unconditioned behavior, provided it is desirable from the experimenter’s standpoint, is rewarded, for instance, followed by pleasure. (Skinner believes that the rewarding reinforcement to be much more effect than the punishing.) As a result, the subject will eventually continue to behave in the desired fashion. For example, Leo does not like spinach particularly; he eats it, mother rewards him with a praising remark, an affectionate glance, or an extra piece of cake, whichever is most reinforcing for Leo as measured by what works best—for instance, Leo’s mother administers beneficial reinforcements. Leo will eventually love to eat spinach, particularly if the reinforcements are effectively administered in terms of their schedules. In hundreds of experiments, it has been shown that the techniques for this operant conditioning of beneficial reinforcement when used with animals and humans can be altered to an amazing degree, even in opposition to what some would loosely call innate tendencies. To have shown this is undoubtedly the great merit of Skinner’s experimental work; it also supports the views of those who believe that the social structure (or culture in the parlance of most American anthropologists) can shape the being, even though not necessarily through operant conditioning. It is important to add that Skinner does not neglect genetic endowment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

In order to render Skinner’s position correctly, one should say that apart from genetic endowment, behavior is determined entirely by reinforcement. Reinforcement can occur in two ways: it happens in the normal cultural process, or it can be planned, according to Skinnerian teaching and thus lead to a design for culture. The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public’s expense. However, educating children and keeping them off the streets is beneficial for parents, society, and the economy. Public education provides society with a facilitator, who educates your children and keep the off the streets and out of trouble while you are at work. This reduces childcare cost, law enforcement costs, medical costs, and keeps your children out of jail, while fostering the tools they will need to become productive members in society. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties, which is why to instill national pride, many Americans think the kids should still pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The training of skills that are of more or less direct use in the vocational life is an important task to perform, but ought not to be mistake for liberal education: job advancement, no matter on what levels, is not the same as self-development, although the two are now systematically confused. Among skills, some are more and some are less relevant to the aims of liberal—that is to say, liberating—education. Skills and values cannot be so easily separated as the academic search for supposedly neutral skills causes us to assume. And especially not when we speak seriously of liberal education. Of course, there is a scale, with skills at one end and values at the others, but it is the middle range of this scale, which one might call sensibilities, that are of most relevance to the classic public. To train someone to operate a lathe or to read and write is pretty much education of skill; to evoke from people an understanding of what they really want out of their lives or to debate with them stoic, Christian and humanist ways of living, is pretty much a clear-cut education of values. However, to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills in an education of values. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The skills and values include a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of one’s self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking; and with others, which we call not fighting, not arguing, but debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman. The knowledgeable being in the genuine public is able to turn one’s personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for one’s entire community and one’s community’s relevance for them. One understands that what on thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which one lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society. Beings in masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source. Beings in public confront issues, and they are aware of their terms. It is the task of the liberal institutions, as of the liberally educated beings, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual. In the absence of deep and wide political debate, schools for adults and adolescents could perhaps become hospitable frameworks for just such debate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be to keep the public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass live. However, educational practice has not made knowelegde directly relevant to the human need of the troubled person of the twenty first century or to the social practices of the citizens. This citizen cannot now see the roots of one’s own biases and frustrations, not think clearly about one’s self, nor for that matter about anything else. One does not see the frustration of idea, of intellect, by the present organization of society, and one is not able to meet the tasks now confronting the intelligent citizen. Educational institutions have not done these things and, expect in rare instances, they are not doing them. They have become mere elevators of occupational and social ascent, and, on all levels, they have become politically timid. Moreover, in the hands of professional educators, many schools have come to operate on an ideology of life adjustment that encourages happy acceptance of mass ways of life rather than the struggle for individual and public transcendence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

There is not much doubt that modern regressive educators have adapted their notions of educational content and practice to the idea of the mass. They do not effectively proclaim standards of cultural level and intellectual rigor; rather they often deal in the trivia of vocational tricks and adjustment to life—meaning the slack of life masses. Deomcratic schools often mean the furtherance of intellectual mediocrity, vocational training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else. This is causing people to be frightened by the expanding culture and of its image, and feel threatened by the possible loss of their own theoretical identity because their students are no longer trying as hard to become educated and successful leaders, meanwhile in China, students are going to school six days a week and spend all of their free time studying. America has enjoyed a prosperous lifestyle due to the hard work of our ancestors, which has allowed the youth to slack off, but it is time to make our kids realize how important an education is not just for themselves, but for their family and for the prosperity and security of our nation. By 2020, China will have an affluent population of 280 million people, which is equal to 86 percent of the total American population. That means these people have money and are not worried about their future, they have worked hard enough to take care of all their needs and save money. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Some American cities like Sacramento, California USA are extremely corrupt because of the present painful effects of a too sudden transition from serfdom to industrialization. They were willing to elect a mayor who had a criminal background and to allow an investor from the Middle East with a scandalous history to virtually have control over the entire city. The people in Sacramento are living closer to irrational elements than the older European countries, and, therefore, being more threatened by untamed irrationality, and are not in need of greater effort to control it by regulation. Scientific, economic, moral, as well as political—are threatened by the rampant corruption in the city of Sacramento. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the possible destroyers have control of our nicely ordered systems. “Yea, he saw great inequality among the people, some lifting themselves up with their pride, despising others, turning their backs upon the needy and the vulnerable and those who were hungry, and those who were athirst, and those who were sick and afflicted,” reports Alma 4.12. Many people feed on this thing called the media, as gods are wont to do when they come down to their altars. They feed on its terrible electric violence. Lurid colors flash over their faces, and images accost them. And I wonder sometimes if the endless public talk of the great World is not in itself inspiring an imitation of behavior in the public’s mind causing them to awake with an ugly sense of purpose. That they will rule the World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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If We Do Not Know Why We are Here, the Universal Mind Does—We May and Must Trust it!

September 13, 2019 1:52 am

There beyond stood the glass city, and beyond it a blue sky, blue as a sky at midday, only one which was now filled with every known star. I started out for the city. Indeed, I started with such impetuosity and such conviction that it took three people to hold me back. I stopped. I was quite amazed. However, I knew these men. These were priests, old priests of my homeland, who had died long before I had even come to my calling, all of which was quite clear to me, and I knew their names and how they had died. They were in fact the saints of my city, and of the great house of catacombs where I had lived. To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such terms with life that the only comfort left one is to brood on the assurance, “You my end it when you will.” What reasons can we plead that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides, have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, “Thou shalt not.” God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. However, can we find nothing richer or more beneficial than this, no reflections to urge whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel, that in spite of adverse appearances even for one life is still worth living? #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

There are suicides and suicides (in the United States of America suicide is the tenth leading cause of death overall claiming the lives of about 47,173 people each year. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 54. However, globally, close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every years, which is one person every 40 seconds), and I must frankly confess that with perhaps the majority of these my suggestion are impotent to deal. Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse, reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only offer considerations and tending toward religious patience at the at the end of this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitoe which is peculiar to reflecting beings. Most of you are devoted, for good or ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. However, to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy and Weltschmerz bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak. Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious faith. So far my argument is to be destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply. Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight view of things, and I must treat of them in turn. The second stage is the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise of religious trust and fancy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

There are, as is well known, persons who are naturally very free in this regard, other who are not at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to their heart’s content in prospects of immortality; and there are others who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem real to them, moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call hard facts, which is absolutely shocked by the easy excursions into the unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total soul of things. However, the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and a better World. This is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

What philosophers call natural theology has been one way of appeasing this craving; that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has been another way. Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its facts hard; suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or poetically,–and what result can there be but inner discord and contradiction? Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or, supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the religious reading to go on. These two ways of relief are the two stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make more clear. However, this kind of picture risks putting primitive beings even further beyond our comprehension, even though it seems logically to explain what they were doing. The problem is in the key motive, guilt. Unless we have a correct feeling for what guilt is, what the experience means, the sacred nature of primitive economics may escape us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

We may even prefer our illusionless economic being to the pitiful primitives—and this result will entirely undo other thesis from the past. Some prefer the idea of these pitiful primitives because scorn of guilt as a weakness seems to have rubbed off on them. They are not as prosperous and inventive so they have to make the primitive man and woman look bad to justify their lack luster lives. Even more seriously, these scornful individuals do not have any theory of the nature of guilt. Many people make the explanation of guilt as a simple reflect of the repression of enjoyment—something for which one has explained by the thought the repression of full enjoyment in the present inevitably releases aggression against those ancestors out of love of whom the repression was instituted. And furthermore, by stating the aggression against those simultaneously loved is guilt. However, this one explanation of guilt that comes from psychoanalysis the child in one’s boundless desires for gratification cannot help feeling love for those who respond to one; at the same time, when they inevitably frustrate one for one’s own good, one cannot help feeling hate and destructive impulses toward them, which puts one in an impossible bind. The bind is one kind of guilt, but only one aspect of the total bind of life which constitutes the immense burden of guilt on the human psyche. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

One of the reasons guilt is so difficult to analyze is that it is itself dumb. It is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why. It is the peculiar experience of an organism which can apprehend a totality of things, and not be able to move in relation to it. Beings experience this uniquely as a feeling of the crushing awesomeness of things and one’s helplessness in the face of them. This real guilt partly explains why being’s willing subordinacy to one’s culture; after all, the World of beings is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature. Also, subordinacy comes naturally from the being’s basic experiences of being nourished and cared for; it is a logical response to social altruism. Especially when one is sick or injured, one experiences the healing forces as coming from the superordinate cultural system of tools, medicines, and the hard-won skills of persons. An attitude of humble gratitude is a logical one to assume toward the forces that sustain one’s life; we see this very plainly in the learning and development of children. Another reason that guilt is so diffuse is that it is many different things: there are many different binds in life. One can be in a bind in relation to one’s own development, can feel that one has not achieved all one should have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

One can be in a bind relation to one’s own development, can feel that one has not achieved all one should have. One can be in a bind in relation to one’s body, which is guilt of anality: to feel bound and doomed by one’s physical appendages and orifices. Beings also experience guilt because one takes up space and has unintended effects on others—for example, when we hurt others without intending to just by being what we are or by following our natural desires and appetites, not to mention when we hurt others physically by accident or thoughtlessness. This, of course, is part of the guilt of our bodies, which have effects that we do not intend in our inner selves. This guilt we feel for being a fate-creating object. We feel guilt in relation to what weighs on us, a weight that we sense is more than we can handle, and so our wives or husbands, and children are a burden of guilt because we cannot possibly foresee and handle all the accidents, sicknesses, and so forth, that can happen to them; we feel limited and bowed down, we cannot be as carefree and self-expansive as we would like, the World is too much with us. When we have not developed our potential, if we feel guilt, we also are put into a bind by developing too much. Our own uniqueness becomes a burden to us we stick out more than we can safely imagine. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Guilt make sense in relation to evolution itself. Being are on the cutting edge of evolution; one is the animal whose development is not prefigured by instincts, and so one is open to becoming what one can. This means literally that each person is already somewhat ahead of oneself simply by virtue of being human and not animal. No wonder people have almost universally feared the evil eye in traditional society: it expresses a natural and age-old reaction to making oneself too prominent, detaching oneself too much from the background of things. In traditional Jewish culture, for example, each time the speaker made a favorable remark about the health or achievement of someone dear to one, one immediately followed this remark with the invocation “Kein Ayin-Hara” (no evil eye), as to say “may this good fortune and prominence not be undone by being too conspicuous.” Some individual achieve an intensity of individuation in which they stick out so far that almost each day is an unbearable exposure. However, even the average person in any society is already more of an individual than any animal can be; the testimonial to this is in the human face, which is the most individuated animal expression in nature. Faces fascinate us precisely because they are unique, because they stick out of nature and evolution as the most fully developed expression of the pushing of the life force in the intensity of its self-realization. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We do not understand why the life force is personalizing in this way, what it is trying to achieve; but we flatly know that it is personalizing because we have our heads and faces as empirical testimony, and as a burden of guilt. We might say that the development of life is life’s own burden. I linger on these ontological thoughts for a very good reason: they tell us what is bothering us deep down. If your face is the most individual part of nature, and if its sticking out is a burden to you because you are an embodiment of the cutting edge of evolution and are no longer safely tucked into the background of nature—if this is so, then it follows that it is dangerous to have a head. And I think humankind has always recognized this implicitly, especially on primitive levels of experience. It is a crime to own a head in society; historically societies have not tolerated too much individuation, especially on primitive levels. This is the simplest explanation of head-hunting. Well, there can be no more explanation for the widespread passion for head-hunting; but probably the underlying thing that the various forms of head-taking have in common is that the head is prized as a trophy precisely because it is the most personal part, the one that juts most prominently out of nature. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

In some sense, too, headhunting may be a way of projecting onto others one’s own guilt for sticking out so much, so that their heads are taken as scapegoats to atone for the guilt. It is as if to say, “This will teach you to stick out so blatantly.” Certainly we feel something of this in societies in which decapitation as punishment was practiced and the heads were publicly displayed. This was a destruction of individuality at its most intensive point, and so a vindication of the pool of faces of the community whose laws had been transgressed. If we extend these thoughts one logical step, we can understand a basic psychoanalytic idea that otherwise seems ridiculous: “in the eyes of culture, to live is a crime.” In other words, to live is to stick out, to go beyond safe limits; hence it is to court sanger, to be a locus of the possibility of disaster for the group. If we take all this into view, we should find more palatable to our understanding of what it is mean when so say that social organization is a structure of shared guilt, a symbolic mutual confession of it. Humankind has so many things that put it into a confession of it. Humankind has so many things that put it into a bind that it simply cannot stand them unless it expiates them in some way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Each person cannot stand one’s own emergence and the many ways in which one’s organism is dumbly baffled from within and transcended from without. If one did not tuck oneself back into something, each person would literally be pulled off one’s feet and blown away or would gnaw away one’s own insides with acid anxiety. This is why the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared: beings cannot stand alone. And this is precisely what is meant when one says, “Archaic men and women give because one wants to lose; the psychology is self-sacrificial…whatever the giver wants to lose is guilt.” Or, metaphorically, “In the gift complex dependence on the mother is acknowledged, and then overcome by mothering others.” Society, in other words, is a dramatization of dependence and an exercise in mutual safety by the one animal in evolution who had to figure out a way of appeasing oneself as well as nature. We can conclude that primitives were more honest about these things—about guilt and debt—because they were more realistic about being’s desperate situation vis-à-vis nature. Primitive beings embedded social life in a sacred matrix not necessarily because one was more fearful or masochistic than beings in later epochs, but because one saw reality more clearly in some basic ways. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Once we acknowledge this, we have to be careful not to make too much of it; I mean that group living though the motive of guilt is not all humble and self-effacing. As we saw in our consideration of gift giving, not only expiation but the blatant affirmation of power is a primary impetus behind it. If guilt is the experience of fear and powerlessness, then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it: groups alone can make big surplus, can generate extravagant power in the form of large harvests, the capture of dangerous animals and many of them, the manufacture of splendid and intricate items based on sophisticated techniques, and so forth. From the beginning of time the group has presented big power, big victory, much life. If we thus look at both sides of the picture of guilt, we can see that primitive beings allocated to themselves the two things that beings need most: the experience of prestige and power that constitutes beings a hero, and the experience of expiation that relieves one of the guilt of being human. The gift complex took care of both these things superlatively. Being worked for economic surplus of some kind in order to have something to give. In other words, one achieved heroism and expiation at the same time, like the dutiful son or daughter who brings home one’s paper-route earnings and puts them in the family coffer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

One protruded out of nature and tucked oneself in with the very same gesture, a gesture of heroism-expiation. Beings need self-esteem more than anything; one wants to be a cosmic hero, contributing with one’s energies to nothing less than the greatness and pleasures of the gods themselves. At the same time this risks inflating one to proportions one cannot stand; one becomes too much like the gods themselves, and one must renounce this dangerous power. Not to do so is to be unbalanced, to run the great sin of hubris as the Greeks understood it. Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power is possessed and imagining that it is in oneself. The neurotic personality is one suffering from fragmentation—that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. Depression and despair result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement from oneself proceeds to different in forms and degrees of severity. Blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility, and aggression. These fragmentations are symptoms of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual disintegration occurring in the culture and in the individual. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

One can observe the fragmentation in the family life through the respectable citizen who keeps his wife and family in one compartment and his business and other Worlds in others is making his one a doll’s house and preparing its collapse. Reduction to poverty of life is not healing. However, where there is abundance there is also the danger of conflict, of disease and demonic bondage. In the light of this insight, let us look at a most important example, most important certainly for you who are sent to heal and to cast out demons—the church that sends you. It may well be that the disease of many churches, denominations and congregations is that they try to escape disease by cutting off what can produce disease, and what also can produce greatness of life. A church that has creased to risk sickness and even demonic influences has little power to heal and to cast out demons. Every minister who is proud of a smooth-running or gradually growing church should ask oneself whether or not such a church is able to make its members aware of their sickness, and to give them the courage to accept the fact that they are healed. One should ask oneself why the great creativity in all realms of being’s spiritual life keeps itself consistently outside the churches. In many expressions of our secular culture, especially in the present decades, the awareness of being’s sickness is great. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

It is only because of prejudice that these people, who powerfully express the demonic bondage of beings, do not look to the church or to you, the ministers, for healing and casting out demons? Or is it because of the lack of healing power in the church, sick in its fears of sickness? When Jesus asks the disciples to heal and cast out demons, he does not distinguish between bodily and mental or spiritual diseases. However, every page of the gospels demonstrates that he means all of them, and many stories show that he sees their interrelationship, their unity. We see this unity today more clearly than many generations just behind us. This is a great gift, and you who have studied in the places you now are leaving have had much occasion to share in this gift. Above all, you have learned the truth of the good news—that laws and commands do not heal, but increase, the sickness of the sick. You have learned that the name of the healing power is grace, be it the grace of nature on which every physician depends, as even ancient medicine knew, or the grace in history that sustains the life of humankind by traditions and heritage and common symbols of grace of revelation that conquers the power of the demons by the message of forgiveness and of a new reality. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

And you have learned that disease that seems bodily may be mental at root, and that a disease that seems individual may be social at the same time, and that you cannot heal individuals without liberating them from the social demons that have contributed to their sickness. Beyond this, you may have become aware of the fact that both physical and mental, individual and social, illness is a consequence of the estrangement of being’s spirit from the divine Spirit, and that no sickness can be healed nor any demon cast out without the reunion of the human spirit with the divine Spirit. For this reason you have become ministers of the message of healing. You are not supposed to be physicians; you are not supposed to be psychotherapists; you are not supposed to become political reformers. However, you are supposed to pronounce and to represent the healing and demon-conquering power implied in the message of Christ, the message of forgiveness and of a new reality. You must be conscious of the other ways of healing. You must cooperate with them, but you must not substitute them for what you represent. Can you represent the Christian message? This may be your anxious questions in this solemn hour. Should you ask me—can we heal without being healed ourselves?—I would answer you—you can! #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

For neither the disciples nor you could ever say—we are healed, so let us heal other. One who would believe this of oneself is least fit to heal others; for one would be separating oneself from them. Show them who you counsel that their predicament is also your predicament. And should you ask me—can we cast out demons without being liberated from demonic power ourselves?—I would answer—you can! Unless you are aware of the demonic possibility in yourselves, you cannot recognize the demon in others, and cannot do battle against it by knowing its name and thus depriving it of its power. And there will be no period in your life, so long as it remains creative and had healing power, in which demons will not split your souls and produce doubts about your faith, your vocation, your whole being. If they fail to succeed, they may accomplish something else—self-assurance and price with respect to your power to heal and to cast out demons. Against this pride Jesus warns—“Do not rejoice in this that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in Heaven.” And “written in Heaven” means written in spite of what is written against you in the records of your life. There is no greater vocation on Earth than to be called to heal and to cast out demons. Be joyous in this vocation! #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Do not be depressed by its burden, nor even by the burden of having to deal with those who do not want to be healed. Rejoice in your calling. In spite of your own sickness, in spite of the demons working within you and your churches, you have a glimpse of what can heal ultimately, of one in Whom God made manifest His power over demons and disease, of one who represents the healing power that is in the World, and sustains the World and lifts it up to God. Rejoice that you are his messengers. When you leave this place, take with you this joy! The pat is union with Higher Self and is a ray from the Logos, it is as near as a human being can get to it anyway. The goal is to bring beings into touch with Reality. What one chooses at the beginning of one’s quest will predetermine what one will become at its end. And the choice is between self-centered escape and selfless activity. Both paths will give one a greater peace. Both will permit one to remain true to one’s inner call. However, the harder one will give something to suffering humanity also. A merely personal salvation will not satisfy the philosophical aspirant. “Nevertheless Alma labored much in the spirit, wrestling with God in mighty prayer, that he would pour out his Spirit upon the people who were in the city; that he would also grant that he might baptize them unto repentance,” reports Alma 8.10. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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I Give You Power so that You May Have Power—The More You Give, the More Everyone Gets!

September 12, 2019 1:13 am

There was something altogether more Nordic and icy about him than there was about Lestat, whose hair tended more to golden, for all its luminous highlights, and whose eyes were forever prismatic, drinking up the colors around him, becoming even a gorgeous violent with the slightest provocation from the worshipful outside World. In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern wilderness, eyes of steady radiance which rejected any outside color, perfect portals to his own most constant soul. In official circles, the very term itself, “the public”—as Walter Lippmann noted eight seven years ago—has come to have a phantom meaning, which dramatically reveals its eclipse. From the standpoint of the deciding elite, some of those who clamor publicly can be identified as Labor, others as Business, still others as Farmer. Those who can not readily be so identified make up The Public. In this usage, the public is composed of the unidentified and the non-partisan in a World of defined and partisan interest. It is socially composed of well-educated salaried professionals, especially college professors; of non-unionized employees, especially white-collar people, along with self-employed professionals and small business people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

In this faint echo of the classic notion, the public consists of those remnants of the middle class, old and new, those interests are not explicitly defined, organized, or clamorous. In a curious adaption, the public often becomes, in fact, the unattached expert, who, although well informed, has never taken a clear-cut, public stand on controversial issues which are brought to a focus by organized interests. These are the public members of the board, the commission, the committee. What the public stands for, accordingly, is often a vagueness of policy (called open-mindedness), a lack of involvement in public affairs (known as reasonableness), and a professional disinterest (known as tolerance). Some such official members of the public, as in the field of labor-management meditation, start out very young and make a career out of being careful to be informed but never taking a strong position; and there are many others, quite unofficial, who take such professionals as a sort of model. The only trouble is that they are acting as if they were disinterested judges but they do not have the power of judges; hence their reasonableness, their tolerance, and their open-mindedness do not often count for much in the shaping of human affairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

All those trends that make for the decline of the politician and of his or her balancing society bear decisively upon the transformation of public into mass. One of the most important of the structural transformations involved is the decline of the voluntary association as a genuine instrument of the public. As we have already seen, the executive ascendancy in the economic, military, and political institutions has lowered the effective use of all those voluntary associations which operate between the state and the economy on the one hand, and the family and the individual in the primary group on the other. It is not only that institutions of power have become large-scale and inaccessibly centralized; they have at the same time become less political and more administrative, and it is within this great chance of framework that the organized public has waned. In terms of organization, the transformation has become underpinned by the shift from the individual and one’s primary community to the voluntary association and the mass party as the major units of organized power. Voluntary associations have become larger to the extent that they have become effective; and to just that extent they have become inaccessible to the individual who would shape by discussion the policies of the organization to which one belongs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Accordingly, along with the older institutions, these voluntary associations have lost their grip on the individual. As more people are drawn into the political arena, these associations become mass in scale; and as the power of the individual becomes more dependent upon such mass associations, they are less accessible to the individual’s influence. Mass democracy means the struggle of powerful and large-scale interest groups and associations, which stand between the big decisions that are made by state, corporation, army, and the will of the individual citizens as a member of the public. Since these middle-level associations are the citizen’s major link which decision, one’s relation to them is of decisive importance. For it is only through them that one exercises such power as one may have. The gap between the members and the leaders of the mass association is becoming increasingly wider. As soon as a being get to be a leader of an association large enough to count one readily becomes lost in an instrument of that association. One does so in the interests of maintaining one’s leading position in, or rather over, one’s mass association and so one does so because one comes to see oneself not as a mere delegate, instructed or not, of the mass association one represent, but as a member of an elite comped of such beings as oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

These facts, in turn, lead to the big gap between the terms in which issues are debated and resolved among members of this elite, and the terms in which they are presented to the members of the various mass associations. For the decisions that are made must take into account those who are important—other elites—but they must be sold to the mass memberships. The gap between speaker and listener, between power and public, leads less to any iron law of oligarchy than to the law of the representative of others in a professional capacity: as the pressure group expands, its leaders come to organize the opinions they represent. So elections, as we have seen, become contests between two giant and unwieldy parties, neither of which the individual can truly feel that one influences, and neither of which is capable of winning psychologically impressive or politically decisive majorities. And, in all this, the parties are of the same general form as other mass associations. When we say that a being in the mass is without any sense of political belonging, we have in mind a political fact rather than merely a style of feeling. We have in mind a certain way of belonging to a certain kind of organization. The way of belonging here rests upon a belief in the purposes and in the leaders of an organization, and thus enables men and women freely to be at home within it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

To belong in this way is to make the human association a psychological center of one’s self, to take into our conscience, deliberately and freely, its rules of conduct and its purposes, which we thus shape and which in turn shape us. We do not have this kind of belonging to any political organization. The kind of organization we have in mind is a voluntary association which has three decisive characteristics: first, it is a context in which reasonable opinions may be formulated; second, it is an agency by which reasonable activities may be undertaken; and third, it is a powerful enough unit, in comparison with other organizations of power, to make a difference. It is because they do not find available association at once psychologically meaningful and historical effective that beings often feel uneasy in their political and economic loyalties. The effective units of power are not the huge corporation, the inaccessible government, the grim military establishment. Between these, on the one hand, and the family and the small community on the other, we find no intermediate associations in which beings feel secure and with which they feel powerful. There is little live political struggles. Instead, there is administration from above, and the political vacuum below. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The primary publics are now either so small as to be swamped, and hence give up; or so large as to be merely another feature of the generally distant structure of power, and hence in accessible. Public opinion exists when people who are not in the government of a country claim the right to express political opinions freely and publicly, and the right that these opinions should influence or determine the policies, personnel, and actions of their government. In this formal sense there has been and there is a definite public opinion in the United States. And yet, with modern developments this formal right—when it does still exist as a right—does not mean what it once did. The older World of voluntary organization was as different from the World of the mass organization, as was Tom Paine’s World of pamphleteering from the World of the mass media. Since the French Revolution, conservative thinkers have Viewed With Alarm the rise of the public, which they called the masses, of something to that effect. “The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts,” wrote Gustave Le Bon. “The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of the kings,” and already “the destinies of nations are elaborated at the present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

During the twentieth century, liberal and even socialist thinkers have followed suit, with more explicit references to what we have called the society of masses. From Le Bon to Emil Leader and Ortega y Gasset, they have held that the influence of the mass is unfortunately increasing. However, surely those who have supposed the masses to be all powerful, or at least well on their way to triumph, are wrong. In our time, as Chakhotin knew, the influence of autonomous collectivities within political life is in fact diminishing. Furthermore, such influence as they do have is guided; they must now be seen not as publics acting autonomously, but as masses manipulated at focal points into crowds of demonstrators. For as publics become masses, masses sometimes become crowds; and, in crowds, the physical rape by the mass media is supplemented up close by the harsh and sudden harangue. Then the people in the crowd disperse again—as atomized and submissive masses. For the primitive the gift was a part of the stream of nature’s bounty. Many people today think that the primitive saw the World more under the aspect of miracle and awe than we do, and so one appreciated elemental things more than we do. In order to recapture this was of looking at nature, we moderns usually have to experience a breakdown and rebirth into naïve perception. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

When asked about what Christianity means to some, many people say it is about the search for the elements of bread and wine. However, we do not need to romanticize about primitive (whether truly or not) in order to understand one’s valuation of nature’s bounty. We saw that the main organismic motive was self-perpetuation; its is logical that when self-perpetuation became a conscious problem at the level of being one naturally tended to value those things that gave one the power to endure, those things that incorporated the Sun’s energy and that gave warmth and life. The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life. “Give us our daily break.” Furthermore, if food contains power, it is always more than itself, more than a physical thing: it has a mysterious inner essence or spirit. Milk is the essence of the cow, shark’s teeth are the essence of the shark’s vitality and murderousness, and so forth. So when the primitive being gave these things as gifts, one did not give a dead thing, a mere object as it appears to us—but a piece of life, of spirit, even a part of oneself because one was immersed in the stream of life. The gifts had mana power, the strength of supernatural life. This is what made the bond and allowed the stream to follow between giver and receiver: to give and then to counter-give kept the motion going, preserved the cycle of power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This is how we are to understand the potlatch giving and one-upmanship, the destruction of quantities of goods: the eternal flux of power in the broad stream of life was generated by the greatest possible expenditure; beings wanted that stream to follow as bountifully as possible. It then became hard to distinguish who gave and who received, since all were bathed in the power of the movement: everyone participated in the powers that were opened up—the giver, the community, the gods. “I give you power so that you may have power.” The more you give, the more everyone gets. This feeling of expenditure as power is not strange to us moderns either. We want to keep our goods moving with the same obsessive dedication—BMW 4 Series automobiles, General Electric refrigerators, Cresleigh homes, and cold hard cash money. If the economy moves, if there is a frenzy of buying and trading on the stock market, activity in the banks and record low employment, we feel that there is health and strength in the World; and this is not only because the movement of goods piles up money in the bank, but actually reflects, I think, the sense of trust and security that the magical free-enterprise powers are working for us so long as we continue to buy, sell, and move goods. And the Trump economy has done this with the Dow Jones reaching a record high of 27,359.16 on 15 July 2019. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

China is experiencing the same thing as it continues to rack up one of the most enviable growth rates in the World. Consumers continue to trade up to more expensive premium goods and some companies are registering record sales. And as China looks to shift its export dependent community to a greater reliance on domestic consumption, the total number of affluent consumers in China is expected to read 280 million by 2020—more than doubling the current total of 120 million. Affluent people are described and households with disposable incomes of between $20,000 and $1 million. Disposable income is money left over after taxes are taken out of your paycheck, but many people also define disposable income as the money you have left over after taxes and other bills such as mortgage, car payment, student loans and electric bill have been paid. The upper affluent in China—those earning between $40,000 and $1 million per year will account for 40 percent of the 280 million. There are 327 million people in the Untied States and the affluent in China, by year 2020, will match 86 percent of the total United States of America population. So the sense of exhilaration and self-celebration in China is a movement of production and consumption of goods. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Like the primitive men and women, modern beings feel that one can prosper only if one shows that one already has power. Yet of course in its one-dimensionality this is a caricature on the primitive potlatch, as much of modern power ideology is; it has no anchor in the invisible World, in the deference to the gods. Primitive beings gave to the gods. This is the origin of trade: the fact the one group made offerings to the gods of their kinsmen and vice versa. This led to the exchange of different groups, and in it we see the direct motive of the creation of a surplus for exchange. The exchange of offerings was always a kind of contest—who could give the most to their gods of their kinsmen. We can see that this did for a person: it gave one a contest in which one could be victorious if one’s offerings of surplus exceeded those of the clan. In a word, it gave one cosmic heroism, the distinction of releasing the most power in nature for the benefit of all. One was a hero in the eye not only of the gods but also o beings; one earned social honor, the right to crow. One was a big power being. Thus we can see in gift giving and potlatch the continuation of the triumph of the hunter, but not in the creation and distribution of one’s own fabricated surplus. This state of things is called narcissistic capitalism: the equation of wealth with magic power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

And so all this seemingly useless surplus, dangerously and painstakingly wrought, yields the highest usage of all in terms of power. Humans, the animals who knows they are not safe here, who need continued affirmation of one’s powers, is one animal who is implacably driven to work beyond animal needs precisely because one is not a secure animal. The origin of human drivenness is religious because beings experience creatureliness; the amassing of a surplus, then, goes to the very heart of human motivation, the urge to stand out as a hero, to transcend the limitations of the human condition and achieve victory over impotence and finitude. We see, too, that in the strict utilitarian sense in which we understand the term, primitive work cannot be economic; for instance, our common ownership and collective enterprise in which the person is a partner do not do justice to the multidimensionality of the primitive World. Primitive beings worked so that one could win a contest in which the offering was made to the gods; one got spiritual merit for one’s labors. I suppose early Calvinism was an echo of this performance for the eyes of beings and the gods, but without the continual giving, the redistribution of the most goods. Big men in primitive society were those who gave away the most, had nothing for themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Sometimes a chief would even offer his own life to appease an injured party in a quarrel; one’s role was often nothing else than to be a vehicle for the smooth flow of life in the tribe. (The resemblance of historical Calvinism ends abruptly at this kind of performance for spiritual merit.) This reveals a central fact about social life: primitive beings immersed themselves in a network of social obligations for psychological reasons. Beings have to have a core psychological motive for being in the group in the first place, otherwise one would not be a group-living animal. Or, to call a spade a space, beings entered social organizations in order to share guilt. You know fat meat is greasy, and trying to hide the truth from some people is like trying to hide Sunrise from a rooster. Social organizations is a structure of shared guilt…a symbolic mutual confession of guilt. And so in one sweep we can understand how primitive economics is inexorably sacred, communal, and yet psychologically motivated at the same time. We must accept that facts that human beings reveal themselves in art and literature and philosophy, and by profiting from the insights of the particular cultural movements which express the anxiety and conflicts of contemporary beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

It is also important here to remind ourselves that every scientific method rests upon philosophical presuppositions. These presuppositions determine not only how much reality the observer with this particular method can see—they are indeed the spectacles through which one perceives—but also whether or not what is observed is pertinent to real problems and, therefore, whether the scientific work will endure. It is a gross, albeit common, error to assume naively that one can observe facts best if one avoids all preoccupation with philosophical assumptions. All one does, then, is mirror uncritically the particular parochial doctrines of one’s own limited culture. The result in our day is that science gets identified with methods of isolating factors and observing them from an allegedly detached house base—a particular method which arose out of the split between subject and object made in the seventeenth century in Western culture and then developed into its special compartmentalized form in the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We in our day are no less subject to methodolatry than are members of any other culture. However, it seems especially a misfortune that our understanding in such a crucial area as the psychological study of beings, with the understanding of emotional and mental health depending upon it, should be curtailed by uncritical acceptance of limited assumptions. Science offers more leeway than graduate students are permitted to realize. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Is not the essence of science the assumption that reality is lawful and, therefore, understandable, and is it not an inseparable aspect of scientific integrity that any method continuously criticize its own positions? The only way to widen one’s blinders is to analyze one’s philosophical assumptions. In my judgment it is very much to the credit of the psychiatrists and psychologists in this existential movement that they seek to clarify their own bases. This enables them to see their human subjects with a fresh clarity and to shed original light on many facets of psychological experience. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command the Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll? Therefore, repent ye, and humble yourselves before him, lest he shall come out in justice against you—least a remnant of the seed of Jacob shall go forth among you as a lion, and tear you in pieces, and there is none to deliver,” reports Mormon 5.23-24. God not only has developed all his forces to their highest degree of maturity but also has attained a perfect equilibrium of them. The masses who turn to such a figure will receiver the inspiration to be received, and are functioning on a higher level as their psyche is ruled by reality. Because some holy being have been uncouth, unkempt, uncivilized, uneducated, and unmannerly, it is foolish to connect them with holiness. They were simply barbarians. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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One Seeks to Fulfill a Steady Purpose which Remains and is Not an Emotional Froth which Abates and Later Vanishes

September 10, 2019 2:09 am

Ah, what a spectacle! Amid dozens of little candle stubs and Earthen lamps full of burning fat, there stood a propped some twenty or more ikons, some very old and darkened in their gold frames, and some radiant, as though only yesterday they had come alive through the power of God. We now consider some dilemmas which arise from the relation of the unconscious to techniques and machines. No discussion of creativity and the unconscious in our society can possible avoid these difficult and important problems. We live in a World that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree. Irrational unconscious phenomena are always a threat to this mechanization. Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line. Mechanization requires uniformity, predictability, and orderliness; and the very fact that unconscious phenomena are original and irrational is already an inevitable threat to the bourgeois order and uniformity. This is one reason people in our modern Western civilization have been afraid of unconscious and irrational experience. For the potentialities that surge up in them from deeper mental wells simply do not fit the technology which has become so essential for our World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

What people today do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious World. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become a defense mechanisms—specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us uncertain in the impulses of the spirit. Western civilization since the Renaissance has centrally emphasized techniques and mechanics. Thus it is understandable that the creative impulses of ourselves and our forefathers, again since the Renaissance, should have been channeled into the making of technical things—creativity directed toward the advance and application of science. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Such channeling of creativity into technical pursuits is appropriate on one level but serves as a psychological defense on a deeper level. This means that technology will be clung to, believed in, and depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense against our fears of irrational phenomena. Thus the very success of technological creativity—and that its success is magnificent does not need to be heralded by me—is a threat to its own existence. For if we are not open to the unconscious, irrational, and transrational aspects of creativity, then our science and technology have helped to block us off from what I shall call creativity of the spirit. By this I mean creativity that has noting to do with technical use; I mean creativity in art, poetry, music, and other areas that exist for our delight and the deepening and enlarging of meaning in our lives rather than for making money or for increasing technical power. To the extent that we lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity. Scientists themselves, particularly the physicists, have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In modern physics it is very clear that the discoveries that later become utilized for our technological gains are generally made in the first place because a physicist lets his imagination go and discovers something simply for the joy of discovery. However, this always runs the risk of radically upsetting our previously nicely worked-out theories, as it did when Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, and Heisenberg introduced his principle of indeterminacy. My point here is more than the conventional distinction between pure and applied science. The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life. Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable. I am proposing that the creativity coming from the preconscious and unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later becomes the river of creativity in our science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

The new physicists and mathematicians, for fairly obvious reasons, have been furthest ahead in realizing this interrelation between unconscious, irrational illumination and scientific discovery. Let me now give an illustration of the problem we face. In the several times I have been on television, I have been struck by two different feelings. One was wonder at the fact that my words, spoken in the studio, could be delivered instantaneously into the living rooms of two million people. The other was that whenever I got an original idea, whenever in these programs I began to struggle with some unformed, new concept, whenever I had an original thought that might cross some frontier of the discussion, at that point I was cut off. I have no resentment against emcees who do this; they know their business, and they realize that if what goes on in the program does not fit in the World of listeners all the way from Georgia to Wyoming, the viewers will get up, go to the kitchen, get a can of beer, come back, and switch on a Western. When you have the potentialities for tremendous mass communication, you inevitably tend to communicate on the level of the two-million people who are listening. What you say must have some place in their World, must at least be partly known to them. Inevitably, then, originality, the breaking of frontiers, the radical newness of ideas and images are at best dubious and at worst totally unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Mass communication—wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued—presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in al the cities of the country. This very fact throws considerable weight on the side of regularity and uniformity and against originality and freer creativity. By the middle of the 19^th century: individualism had begun to be replaced by collective forms of economic and political life; harmony of interests by inharmonious struggle of classes and organized pressures; rational discussions undermined by expert decisions on complicated issues, by recognition of the interested bias of argument by vested positions; and by the discovery of the effectiveness of irrational appeal to the citizen. Moreover, certain structural changes of modern society, which we shall presently consider, had begun to cut off the public from the power of active decision. The transformation of public into mass is of particular concern to us, for it provides an important clue to the meaning of the power elite. If that elite is truly responsible to, or even exists in connection with, a community of publics, it carries a very different meaning than if such a public is being transformed into a society of masses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The United States of America today is not altogether a mass society, and it has never been altogether a community of publics. These phrases are names for extreme types; they point to certain features of reality, but they are themselves constructions; social reality is always some sort of mixture of the two. Yet we cannot readily understand just how much of which is mixed into our situation if we do not first understand, in terms of explicit dimensions, the clear-cut and extreme types: If we are to grasp the differences between public and mass, at least four dimensions must be attended to. There is first, the ratio of the givers of opinion to the receivers, which is the simplest way to state the social meaning of the formal media of mass communication. More than anything else, it is the shift in this ratio which is central to the problems of the public and of public opinion in latter-day phases of democracy. At one extreme on the scale of communication, two people talk personally with each other; at the opposite extreme, one spokes person talks impersonally through a network of communications to millions of listeners and viewers. In between these extremes there are assemblages and political rallies, parliamentary sessions, law-court debates, small discussion circles dominated by one being, open discussion circles with talk moving freely back and forth among fifty people, and so on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The second dimension to which we must pay attention is the possibility of answering back an opinion without internal or external reprisals being taken. Technical conditions of the means of communication, in imposing a lower ratio of speakers to listeners, may obviate the possibility of freely answering back. Informal rules, resting upon conventional sanction and upon the informal structure of opinion leadership, may govern who can speak, when, and for how long. Such rules may or may not be in congruence with formal rules and with institutional sanctions which govern the process of communication. In the extreme case, we may conceive of an absolute monopoly of communication to pacified media groups whose members cannot answer back even in private. At the opposite extreme, the condition may allow and the rules may uphold the wide and symmetrical formations of opinion. We must also consider the relation of the formation of opinion to its realization in social action, the ease with which opinion is effective in the shaping of decisions of powerful consequences. This opportunity for people to act out their opinions collectively is of course limited by their positions in the structure of power. This structure may be such as to limit decisively this capacity, or it may allow or invite such action. It may confine social action to local areas or it may enlarge the area of opportunity; it may make action intermittent or more or less continuous. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

There is, finally, the degree to which institutional authority, with its sanctions and controls, penetrates the public. Here the problem is the degree to which the public has genuine autonomy from instituted authority. Atone extreme, no agent of formal authority moves among the autonomous public. At the opposite extreme, the public is terrorized into uniformity by the infiltration of information and the universalization of suspicion. One thinks of the late Nazi street-and-block system, the eighteenth-century Japanese Kumi, the Soviet cell structure. In the extreme, the formal ebb and flow of influence by discussion which is thus killed off. By combining these several points, we can construct little models or diagrams of several types of societies. Since the problem of public opinion as we know it is set by the eclipse of the classic bourgeois public, we are here concerned with only two types: public and mass. In a public, as we may understand the term, virtually as many people express opinions as receive them. Public communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against—if necessary—the prevailing system of authority. And authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When these conditions prevail, we have the working model of a community of publics, and this model fits closely the several assumptions of classical democratic theory. At the opposite extreme, in a mass, far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media. The communications that prevail are so organized that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect. The realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organize and control the channels of such action. The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion. The public and the mass maybe most readily distinguished by their dominant modes of communication: in a community of publics, discussion is the ascendant means of communication, and the mass media, if they exist, simply enlarge and animate discussion, linking one primary public with the discussion of another. In a mass society, the dominant type of communication is the formal media, and the publics become mere media markets: all those exposed to the contents of given mass media. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

When we look upon the public from almost any angle of vision that we might answer, we realize that we have moved a considerable distance along the road to the mass society. At the end of that road there is totalitarianism, as in Nazi Germany or in Communist China. We are not yet at the end. In the Untied States of America today, media markets are not entirely ascendant over primary publics. However, surely we can see that many aspects of the public life of our times are more the features of a mass society than of a community. What is happening might again be stated in terms of the historical parallel between the economic market and the public of public opinion. In brief, there is a movement from widely scattered little powers to concentrated powers and the attempt at monopoly control from powerful centers, which being partially hidden, are centers of manipulation as well as of authority. The small shop serving the neighborhood is replaced by the anonymity of the national corporation: mass advertisement replaces the personal influence of opinion between merchant and customer. The political leader hooks up one’s speech to a national network and speaks, with appropriate personal touches, to a million people he never saw and never will see. Entire brackets of professions and industries are in the opinion business, impersonally manipulating the public for hire. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The craving for affection may be restricted to certain groups of persons, perhaps to one with which there are interests in common, such as a political or religious group; or it may be restricted to one of the genders. If the need for reassurance is restricted to the opposite gender the condition may superficially appear to be normal, and will usually be defended as normal by the person concerned. There are women, for example, who, if they do not have men around them, feel miserable and anxious; they will start an affair, break it off after short time, again feel miserable and anxious, start another affair, and so on. That this is no genuine longing for relationship with men is shown by the fact that the relationships are conflicting and unsatisfactory. Rather, these women choose indiscriminately any man; they want only to have one near them, and are not found of any of them. And as a rule they do not even find physical satisfaction. In reality, of course, the entire picture is more complicated; I am highlighting only that art which is played in it by anxiety and the need for affection. One may find similar pattern in men; they will have a compulsion to be liked by any woman and will feel uneasy in the company of other men. If the need for affection is concentrated on the same gender, this may be one of the determining factors in latent or manifest homosexuality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

If the way to the opposite gender is barred by too much anxiety, the need for affection may be directed toward the same gender. Needless to say, this anxiety need not be manifest, but may be concealed by a feeling of disgust or disinterest concerning the opposite gender. Since getting affection is of vital importance it follows that the neurotic will pay any price for it, mostly without realizing that one is doing so. The most common ways in which the price is paid are an attitude of compliance and an emotional dependence. The complying attitude may take the form of not daring to disagree with or to criticize the other person, of showing nothing but devotion, admiration and docility. If persons of this type do allow themselves to make critical or derogatory remarks they feel anxiety, even though their remarks may be harmless. The complying attitude can go so far that the neurotic will extinguish not only aggressive impulses but all tendencies toward self-assertion, will let oneself be abused and will make any sacrifice, no matter how detrimental this may be. One’s self-abnegation may appears as, for example, a wish to have bipolar disorder because the person whose affection one desires is interested in research in bipolar disorder, implying that having this illness might perhaps win the other’s interest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Closely akin to the attitude of compliance, and interwoven with it, is the emotional dependence which results from the neurotic’s need to cling to someone who holds out the promise of protection. This dependence not only may cause endless suffering but may even be wholly destructive. There are relationships, for example, in which a person becomes helplessly dependent on another, even through one is fully aware that the relationship is untenable. If one does not get a kind work or smile, one feels as if the World would go to pieces, one may even have an attack of anxiety at the time one expects a telephone call, and feel utterly desolate if the other is prevented from seeing one. However, one is unable to break away. In the primary public the competition of opinions goes on between people holding views in the service of their interests and their reasoning. However, in the mass society of media markets, competition, if any, goes on between the manipulators with their mass media on the one hand, and the people receiving their propaganda on the other. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that there should arise a conception of public opinion as a mere reaction—we cannot say response—to the content of the mass media. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

In this view, the public is merely the collectivity of individuals each rather passively exposed to the mass media and rather helplessly opened up to the suggestion and manipulations that flow from these media. The fact of manipulation from centralized points of control constitutes, as it were, an expropriation of the old multitude of little opinion producers and consumers operating in a free and balanced market. Usually the structure of an emotional dependence is more complicated. In relationships in which one person becomes dependent on the other there is invariably a great deal of resentment. The dependent person resents being enslaved; one resents having to comply, but continues to do so out of fear of losing support from and individual or the masses. Not knowing that it is one’s own anxiety which creates the situation, one will easily assume that one’s subjugation has been brought about by the other’s imposing on one. Resentment growing on such a basis has to be repressed, because the affection of the other is bitterly needed, and this repression in turn generates new anxiety, with a subsequent need for reassurance and hence a reinforced impulse to cling to the other. Thus in certain neurotic persons emotional dependence produces a very realistic and even justified fear that their life is being ruined. When the fear is very great they may seek to protect themselves against this dependence by not attaching themselves to anyone. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The thirst for perfection is certainly present within us. This thirst is a pointer to its eventual slaking. However, there is no necessary implication that this will be attained whilst we are in the flesh and on a level of existence where everything is doomed to decay and death. The perfection we seek and the immortality we hope for are more likely to be mental rather than physical achievements. For all mystics are at least agreed that there is such a level of untainted, purely spiritual being. The fundamental task of beings is first to free themselves of animalist and egotist tyrannies, and second, to evolve into awareness of one’s spiritual self. The goal is to free oneself from the meshes and fetters, to being all the forces of one’s being under mastery. The aim is to emancipate oneself from Earthly bondage, to redeem oneself from animal enslavement. One’s quest can come to an end only when the unveiled Truth is seen, not in momentary glimpses, but for the rest of one’s lifetime without a break. We have to bring this awareness of the Overself as a permanent and perpetual feature into active life. It is perpetual abidance in the divine that is to be sought. “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. Every tree that bringeth not fort good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them,” reports 3 Nephi 14.17-20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

It is Not Wrong to Aspire Toward Happiness but, on the Contrary, Our Human Duty!

September 8, 2019 11:21 pm

But I lived the lie. I lived it out of anger. This is what I am trying to tell you. I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love. Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I did not know. We can trace the transformation of the small and more intimate public of early democratic experience into mass society as we now know it, with far fewer people expressing opinions than receiving them, and with far fewer opportunities for meaningful activity. The elite who control the media of communication are increasingly able to manipulate tastes and opinions, since those at the receiving end cannot answer back. At the top, therefore, power is ever more concentrated, wile at the bottom, in the mass, the individual is powerless to influence events and institutions. Is this an exaggerated picture? No. A large proportion of the electorate feels politically powerless because it believes that the community is controlled by a small group of powerful and selfish individuals who use public office for personal gain. People respond to this situation in various ways, often feelings of apathy about politics, which in turn leads to withdrawal from political activity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Other citizens, equally alienated, express their anxieties by identifying themselves with a charismatic leader who they expect will save them. The motives and mechanisms of this process is called caesaristic identification—that is, powerful psychological attachment of masses to a leader—arises in time of crisis when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger becomes neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. Such movements often seize upon conspirational theory of history. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress through absolute oneness with a person, so they ascribe their distress to certain persons, who have brought this distress into the World through conspirators. We have seen numerous examples, notably the theory of Communist conspiracy, now such a potent force in American politics with the derangement of the democratic party. The result is not merely a break with the rules of the game (for instance, a dictatorship replacing a democracy) but, if the mass movement is to retain power, a perpetuation or institutionalization of the anxieties which helped to create it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Again, the cure is still another form of alienation. However, not only anxiety or fear motivates people to accept radical solutions and break with the past. In the standard image of power and decision, no force is held to be as important as The Great American Public. More than merely another check and balance, this public is thought to be the seat of all legitimate power. In official life as in popular folklore, it is held to be the very balance wheel of democratic power. In the end, all liberal theorists rest their notions of the power system upon the political role of this public; all official decisions, as well as private decisions of consequence, are justified as in the public’s welfare; all formal proclamations are in its name. Let us therefore consider the classic public of democratic theory in the generous spirit in which Rousseau once cried,” Opinion, Queen of the World, is not subject to the power of kings; they are themselves its first slaves.” The most important feature of the public of opinion, which the rise of the democratic middle class initiates, is the free ebb and flow of discussion. The possibilities of answering back, of organizing autonomous organs of public opinion, of realizing opinion in action, are held to be established by democratic institutions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The opinion that results from pubic discussion is understood to be a resolution that is then carried out by public action; it is, in one version, the general will of the people, which the legislative organ enacts into law, thus lending to it legal force. Congress, or Parliament, as an institution, crows all the scattered publics; it is the archetype for each of the little circles of face-to-face citizens discussing their public business. This eighteenth-century idea of the public of public opinion parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy. Here is the market composed of freely competing entrepreneurs; there is the public composed of discussion circles of opinion peers. As price is the result of anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals, so public opinion is the result of each being’s having thought things out for oneself and contributing one’s voice to the great chorus. To be sure, some might have more influence on the state of opinion than others, but no one group monopolizes the discussion, or by itself determines the opinions that prevail. Innumerable discussion circles are knit together by mobile people who carry opinions from one to another, and struggle for the power of larger command. The public is thus organized into associations and parties, each representing a set of viewpoints, each trying to acquire a place in the Congress, where the discussion continues. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Out of the little circles of people talking with one another, the larger forces of social movements and political parties develop; and the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted. Thus autonomy of these discussions is an important element in the idea of public opinion as a democratic legitimation. The opinions formed are actively realized within the prevailing institutions of power; all authoritative agents are made or broken by the prevailing opinions of these publics. And, in so far as the public is frustrated in realizing its demands, its members may go beyond criticism of specific policies; they may question the very legitimations of legal authority. That is one meaning of the Jefferson’s comment on the need for an occasional revolution. The public, so conceived, is the loom of classic, eighteenth-century democracy; discussion is at once the threads and the shuttle trying the discussion circles together. It lies at the root of the conception of authority by discussion, and it is based upon the hope that truth and justice will somehow come out of society as a great apparatus of free discussion. The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

One viewpoint wins out. Then the people act out this view, or their representatives are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do. Such are the images of the public of classic democracy which are still used as the working justifications of power in American society. However, now we must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works. The issues that now shape being’s fate are neither raised nor decided by the public at large. The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal, an assertion of a legitimation masquerading—as legitimations are now apt to do—as fact. For now the public of public opinion is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was. These doubts are asserted absolutely in the statement that the classic community of publics is being transformed into a society of masses. This transformation, in fact, is one of the keys to the social and psychological meaning of modern life in America. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed, with John Locke, that the individual conscience was the ultimate seat of judgment and hence the final court of appeal. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

However, this principle was challenged—as E. H. Carr has put it—When Rousseau “for the first time thought in terms of the sovereignty of the whole people, and faced the issue of mass democracy. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that among the individuals who composed it there was a natural and peaceful harmony of interests. However, this essentially conservative doctrine gave way to the Utilitarian doctrine that such a harmony of interests had first to be created by reform before it could work, and later to the Marxian doctrine of class struggle, which surely was then, and certainly is now, closer to reality than any assumed harmony of interest. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. However, this has been challenged not only by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and intricate issues, but by the discovery—as by Dr. Freud—of the irrationality of the being in the street, and by the discovery—as by Marx—of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that after determining what is true and right and just, the public would act accordingly or see that its representatives did so. In the long run, public opinion will not only be right, but public opinion will prevail. This assumption has been upset by the great gap now existing between the underlying population and those who make decisions in its name, decisions of enormous consequences which the public often does not even know are being made until well after the fact. Given these assumptions, it is not difficult to understand the articulate optimism of many nineteenth-century thinkers, for the theory of public is, in many way, a projection upon the community at large of the intellectual’s ideal of supremacy of intellect. The evolution of the intellect determines the main course of social evolution. If looking about them, nineteenth-century thinkers still saw irrationality and ignorance and apathy, all that was merely an intellectual lag, to which the spread of education would soon put an end. How much the cogency of the classic view of the public rested upon a restriction of this public to the carefully educated is revealed by the fact that by 1859 even John Stuart Mill was writing of “the tyranny of the majority,” and both Tocqueville and Burckhardt anticipated the view popularized in the recent past by such political moralists as Ortega y Gasset. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In a word, the transformation of public into mass—and all that this implies—has been at once one of the major trends of modern societies and one of the major factors in the collapse of that liberal optimism which determined so much of the intellectual mood of the nineteenth century. Why is it that on the path we seem to meet students and aspirants only, not real teachers or genuine adepts? Why is it that so few ever seem to realize their spiritual selves? The answer is that the way is long and the game is hard, that the animal self is too strong and the human ego too foolish, and that the struggle against our innate bestiality and ignorance is too long-drawn and to beset with failures. This is what observation tells us. It may be saddening but by being realistic we at least know what to expect, what is the nature of the path we are undertaking, and what a tremendous patience we must bring to it. One has come to a clear knowledge of what the Quest means and what it will demand of one. The Quest of the divine soul has become one’s pole star. It was natural for one to feel repelled at first by the idea of overcoming the ego but now one sees its desirability. This will not mean giving it up in practical life however; for while one is in the flesh the ideal is to find a proper balance between egoism and altruism because one needs both. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

However, because the individual’s egoism is apt to be too big already and one’s altruism too small, religious teachers have usually deliberately over-emphasized subduing the ego. That is the moral side. On the philosophical side it is simply a matter of finding the Overself and letting it rule the ego thenceforth. Thus the ego is not killed but put back in its lower place. However, first one has to become conscious of the Overself, one has to feel it as a living presence, and one has to do this throughout the day and night, awake or asleep. That is the goal. It is not really as hard as it sounds. For the divine self is always there within one, it is never absent from one, not even for a second. It is the unfailing witness of all one’s efforts and aspirations. When one has tried hard enough and long enough it will suddenly shed all its grace on one. It is not wrong to aspire toward happiness but, on the contrary, our human duty. Those who, in the name of Spirituality, would turn life into a gloomy affair are entitled to their opinion but they cannot justly be called philosophers. Every being will be forced to realize one’s own sacredness in the end: then only will one’s search for happiness find fulfilment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

I often wonder where some beings have gotten their notions about reality, and it dawned on me they get them from the bits and pieces of electric dreams that they watch on the giant screen that have been provided for them. Fictions of all kinds—what they World calls News, and all this has inundated them. The media has let loosed the flood. Anger is too painful for me. Anger is too pathetic. I cannot bear it. I cannot act upon it. Anger is weak. Anger is as weak as fear. Can any of us endure fear? Not at all. However, there is something inside of many people that is heated and strong. There is something brutal and hurt inside of some of us, and we refuse the cup of anger, choosing silence rather than angry words. The Quest follows a double line of development: mind-stilling plus mind-stimulating, each in its proper place. And the ultimate goal is to discover that there is but one reality, of which all are but a part, that the separateness of the personal ego is but superficial, and that Truth is evidenced by the consciousness of unity. The first fruit of such discover is necessarily the dedication of life to the service of all creatures, to incessant service for universal welfare. Hence, in this light, the being who has withdrawn into cave or forest is on a lower plane—good for one as a phase of one’s personal development but useless to those who must live truth, the truth of unity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

To forget self but to remember Overself—it is as simple as that, and also as hard as that. Not to find the Energy of the Spirit but the Spirit itself is the ultimate goal. Not its powers or effects or qualities or attributes but the actuality of pure being. The aspirant is not to stop short with any of these but to push on. One has to seek for the mysterious essence of oneself, which is something one touches at rare, blessed, and unforgettable moments. It allures because it is also the Perfect, ever sought but never found in the World outside. It is not the knowing of the Overself that one is to get so much a the knowing that is the Overself. One comes at last to full consciousness of one’s inner being, one’s soul—in the correct sense of a word that is not often understood and which is used by people without knowing what they really mean. If the distant goal of this quest is the discover of true being, this does not exclude and ought not to exclude the fullest growth of the human being, the widest realization of one’s best capacities, making patent what is latent. It is a prime purpose of the Quest to create a true individuality where, at present, there is only a pseudo one. For those who are at the mercy of their automatic responses of attraction or repulsion by environment, whose minds are molded by external influences and education suggestions, are not individual in any real sense. “Heal the sick; cast out the demons,” reports Matthew 10.8. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Members of the outgoing class! Friends! The first difficulty you will experience when Jesus sends you ahead of him and gives you the power of healing is that many people will tell you that they do not need to be healed. And if you come to them with the claim that you will cast out the demons that rule their lives they will laugh at you and assure you that you are possessed by a demon—just as they said to Jesus. Therefore, the first task of a minister to make beings aware of their predicament. Many of those who have gone out from our seminary to various congregations and communities have despaired over this task. And they have either given up the ministry altogether, or they minister only to those who consider themselves healthy. They have forgotten that their task is to heal those who are sick, which includes those who are not aware that they are sick. There is no easy way to make them aware of their predicament. Finally, they come into my house, looking about themselves as though they were among miracles when all that I possess are the simple furnishings of a rich man. They gaze hungrily at the bronze oil lamps that fill the marble-floored rooms with brilliant light, and the couches and chairs they hesitate to touch. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

I cannot tell you how often this has happened me over the centuries, that some wandering being, bereft of all human attachment, has come into my house to marvel at simple things. I always tell them to sit down, there is nothing here that cannot be cleaned or thrown away. I insist that my guest be comfortable. God, certainly, has His ways of doing so. He shakes the complacency of those who consider themselves healthy by hurling them, both externally and internally, into darkness and despair. He reveals to them what they are by splitting the foundations of their self-assurance. He reveals their blindness towards themselves. This we cannot achieve, not even for ourselves. However, we can be open to the moment when it happens to us. And if it happens, we can become tools of the power that may heal others. To try this is the first task of the minister, and perhaps the hardest of them all. However, you are not the only ones who are used as tools. Everyone is potentially a tool of healing for anyone else. And it often happens that healing power works outside the church and the ministry. The fact that Jesus gave the disciples responsibility for healing and casting out demons does not constitute a special prerogative on the part of the minister. Every Christian receives this charge, and each of us should take it seriously in our relation to one another. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Everyone should accept one’s priestly responsibility for everyone else. One may be most intensely occupied with one’s Worldly affairs, but one will remained fixed in the holy presence. The minister has no magic power to heal. Even his administration of the liturgy and sacraments does not give one this power. However, in one’s special vocation, one stands for the universal power given to the church to heal and to cast out demons. The illuminate stands n the centre of the World-movement, oneself unmoving and unmoved. The liberated person is liberated from all intellectual doctrines that are rigid and strict which may not be helpful, freed from perplexities, and questionings—whether they concern the present past or future, whether they relate to oneself personally or to the Universe abstractly. For all these can interest only a limited egoistic consciousness. At least one has not only a peace of mind—a philosophic attitude toward the events of one’s personal life—but also peace in the mind, a freedom from the struggle against baser impulses and ignoble tendencies. The momentous results of this inner change will naturally reflect themselves in one’s outer life as a general nonattachment to the World. And because one has become free even of intellectual possessions, one is able to enter with full sympathy into the views and ideas of every other person—although this does not prevent one’s deeper wisdom from calmly noting at the same time the defects and errors of those views and ideas. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

To oneself the practical value of this attainment is its conferment of freedom, but to humanity the practical value is one’s resulting dedication to service. The sense of strain which accompanies present-day living vanishes. The pace of being relaxed in thought and feeling, nerve and muscle, replaces it. One becomes a focus where persons, utterly incompatible and totally diverse otherwise, are able to meet. “For they saw and beheld with great sorrow that the people of the church began to be lifted up in the pride of their eyes, and to set their hearts upon riches and upon the vain things of the World, that they began to be scornful, one towards another, and they began to persecute those that did not believe according to their own will and pleasures,” reports Alma 4.8. The sense of a divine presence will be with one, the conviction of its supreme reality will grip one, and the feeling of an indestructible serenity will suffuse one. The Master necessarily lives in an inner World of one’s own, immeasurably remote from some of those environments in which one is plunged. Nevertheless, one possesses the power to recall oneself freely and instantly from one to the other, and in either direction. It is one sign of this attainment that one becomes less critical of other persons. Yet this does not mean tat one understands them less accurately. A fulfillment such as this must bring joy to the heart and peace to the mind. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

One may remain human in several ways—but not too human. Penetrated by the feeling of a divine presence as one daily is, one’s life becomes a truly inspired one. One’s first reliance will be on the soul. One’s last reliance will be on the soul. One’s life silently becomes a witness to the fact of the Overself’s continuous presents. The lotus, that lovely Asian flower, is much used as a symbol of the goal we have to gain. It grows in mud but is not even spotted by it. It rests on water but is never stained by it. Its colour is pure white in striking contrast to the dirty surroundings which are its home. So the disciple’s inner life must be undefiled, unstained, and pure even though one’s outer life is perforce carried on under the most materialistic surroundings or among the most sensual people. That which few beings value and few beings find is nevertheless the most worthwhile thing for which to search. What is it? It is what once found cannot be lost, once seen must be loved, and once felt awakens all that is best in a being. Inexplicable and incomprehensible though the fact must be to the human intellect, the One infinite Mind never loses its own character even though it is seemingly incarnated into the myriad forms of an evolving Universe, never loses itself in them. It is a wisdom expressed through the World-Idea, but not confined to it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Individual Personalities Mass Produced with Happiness Thrown in or Your Money Back!

September 6, 2019 10:19 pm

It is an old spell; it binds you to come to me, it binds the spirits who listen to me to drive you towards me. It binds them to fill your dreams and your waking hours with thoughts of me. As the spell builds in power it presses out all other considerations, and finally there is one obsession, that you come to me, and nothing else will do. I have commanded the spirits drench your soul, your mind, your hear with a heat for me, to inflict upon your nights and days a relentless and torturous longing for me; to invade your dreams with the images of me; to let there be nothing that you eat or drink that will solace you as you think of me, until you return to me, until you stand in my presence, until I can use every power at my command on you as we speak together. I will not for a moment let you be quiet; not for a moment will you be able to turn away. May you be as a slave to me, many you be the faithful servant of my designs, may you have no power to refuse what I have confided to you, I will make you strong when you are weak, give you words when you cannot speak. When heart aches weighs you down, I will be the one to show you how to live again, my great and faithful spirits. May you fulfill that destiny which I choose of my own accord. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The yearning for diversion whereof a little more than a little is by much too much, because no displaced craving can be satisfied by catering to it in its displaced form. Only when it becomes possible to experience the desire in its true form and to dispense with the internalized processes that balked and displaced it does actual gratification become possible. Diversion at most, through weariness and fatigue, can numb and distract anxiety. For instance, in many popular movies the tear ducts are massaged and thrills are produced by mechanized assaults on the center of sense. (However, in the 2001 film Romeo Must Die, starring Aaliyah and Jet Li, Aaliyah thought of sad memories to make herself cry when it was called for in the script.) We are diverted temporarily and in the end perhaps drained—but not gratified. Direct manipulation of sensations can produce increases and discharges of tension, as the touch of one’s own hand in personal pleasures of the flesh, but it is a substitute. It does not involve reality but counterfeits it, much like social media does. Sensations directly stimulated and discharged without being intensified and completed through feelings sifted and acknowledged by the intellect are debasing because the do not involve the whole individual in one’s relation to reality. When one becomes inured to bypassing reality and individuality in favor of meaningless excitement, ultimate gratification becomes impossible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Once fundamental impulses are thwarted beyond retrieving, once they are so deeply repressed that no awareness is left of their aims, once the desire for a meaningful life has been lost as well as the capacity to create it, only a void remains. Life fades into tedium when the barrier between impulses and aims so high that neither penetrates into consciousness and no sublimation whatever takes place. Diversion, however frantic, can overwhelm temporarily but not ultimately relieve the boredom which oozes from non-fulfillment. Though the bored person hungers for things to happen to one, the disheartening fact is that when they do one empties them of the very meaning one unconsciously yearns for by using them as distractions. In popular culture even the second coming would become just another barren thrill to be watched on television till Milton Berie comes on. No distraction can cure boredom, just as the company so unceasingly pursued cannot stave off loneliness. The bored person is lonely for oneself, not, as one thinks, for others. One misses the individuality, the capacity for experience from which one is debarred. No distraction can restore it. Hence one goes unrelieved and insatiable. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The popular demand for inside stories, for vicarious sharing of the private life—even someone else’s—of those who are dimly aware of having none whatever, or a least no life that holds their interest. The attempts to allay boredom are assiduous as they are unavailing. Countless books pretend to teach by general rules and devices what cannot be learned by devices and rules. Individual personalities cannot be mass produced (with happiness thrown in or your money back). Nevertheless, the messages of much popular culture is “you, too, can be happy if you only buy this BMW 4 series, and a Cresleigh Home, then purchase a new dress from Draper James, and bake a Betty Crocker Butterscotch Pudding Layer Cake, and try that TRESemme Smooth and Silky hair tonic; you will be thrilled, you will have adventure, romance, popularity—you will no longer be lonely and left out if you follow this formula. And success, happiness or at least freedom from anxiety is also the burden of popular religion, as unchristian in these its aims as it is in its means. From Dale Carnegie to Norman Vincent Peale to Harry and Bonaro Overstreet only the vocabulary changes. The principle remains the same. The formula is well illustrated in the following. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Warm Smile is an Attribute of Charm
For this, train the upper lip by the method:

Stretch the upper lip down over the teeth. Say “Mo-o-o-o.”
Hold the lip between the teeth and smile.
Purse the lips, pull them downward and grin.
Let the lower jaw fall and try to touch your nose with your upper lip.

Months of daily practice are necessary to eliminate strain from the new way of smiling, but it, too, can become as natural as all beguiling smiles must be. One will be surrounded by an Overself-conscious atmosphere even in the midst of social functions. One’s inward repose will be no less evident there than in solitude. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Whatever the formula, nothing can be more tiresome than the tireless, cheerless pursuit of pleasures. When they are empty, days go slowly; one cannot tell one from the other. And yet the years go by fast. When time is endlessly killed, one lives in an endless present until time ends without ever having passed, leaving a person who never lived to exclaim, “I wasted time and now doth time waste me.” To the Christian, despair is a sin not because there is anything to be hoped for in this life, but because to despair is to lack faith in redemption from it—in the life everlasting. As for the pleasure of this life, they are not worth pursuing. Though they fade not of themselves yet to us they fade. We are hungry and we eat. Eat we not till that fades and we are as weary of our fulness as we were of our fasting. We are weary and we rest. Rest we not till that fades and we are as weary of our rest as ever we were of our weariness? Our bodies and minds themselves fade as do their pleasures. The insults of time are spared to none of us. Such is the human predicament. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Freud pointed to the additional burdens that civilization imposes on human beings. They, too, are inevitable, for civilizations, despite its cost, eases the total burden we bear. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The mass of beings lead lives of quiet desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games and amusements of humankind. Despair, we find, is no longer quiet. Popular culture tries to exorcise it with much clanging and banging. Perhaps it takes more noise to drone it out. Perhaps we are less willing to face it. However, whether wrapped in popular culture, we are less happy than our quieter ancestors, or the natives of Bali, must remain an open question despite all romanticizing. (Nor do we have a feasible alternative to popular culture. Besides, a proposal for the mass of beings would be unlikely to affect the substance of popular culture. And counsel to individuals must be individual.) There have been periods happier and others more desperate than ours. However, we do not know which. And even an assertion of today’s bliss with yesterday’s. The happiness felt in disparate groups, in disparate periods and places cannot be measured and compared. Our contention is simply that by distracting from the human predicament and blocking individuation and experience, popular culture impoverishes life without leading to contentment. However, whether the mass of beings felt better or worse without the mass production techniques of which popular culture is an ineluctable part, we shall never know. Of happiness and of despair, we have no measure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Mercedes had been a tomboy in her youth and had early developed a great ambition as shown in the phrase which she used, “Either Caesar or nothing.” In her late teens there becomes evident her perpetual and all-encompassing dilemmas which trapped her like vices; she vacillated from despair to joy, from anger to docility, but most of all from gorging food to starving herself. Mercedes had a long illness which we would term in our day severe anorexia nervosa. However, her doctor was not interested here in the technique of treatment but was concerned with trying to understand her. Mercedes fascinates him by seeming to be in love with death. In her teens Mercedes implores Amel to kids her to death. She writes, “Death is the greatest happiness in life, if not the only one. If he makes me wait much longer, the great friend, death, then I shall set out to seek him.” She writes time and again that she would like to die “as the bird dies which bursts its throat in supreme joy.” Her talent as a writer is shown in her extensive poetry, diaries, and prose about her fascinating with immortality and vampirism. Mercedes reminds me of Anne Rice. Her fascination with vampires and immortality made me wonder: Are there some persons who can fulfill their existence only by taking their own lives? #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

However, where the existence can exist only be relinquishing life, there the existence is a tragic existence. I know her and I know magic. Mercedes was able to use blood to cast spells. Do you not see, this woman not only believes in magic, she understands it. Perhaps a million mortal magicians have lived and died during the past millennia, but how many of them were the genuine article? She knows what she is doing! Your blood was in the weave of her own garment. She has cast a spell on you that I do not know how to break! To live in the face of death, however, means to die unto death, or to die one’s own death. Every passing away, every dying, whether self-chosen death or not, is still an autonomous act of life. This leads us to ask, “Is life worth living?” Some reply, “It depends on the liver.” In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know now what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find. With many beings the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whiteman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling:–“To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand! To be this incredible God I am! O amazement of things, even the least particle! O spirituality of things! I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting; I too throb to the brain and beauty of the Earth and of all the growths of the Earth. I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues—glory continues. I praise with electric voice, for I do not see one imperfection in the Universe, and I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell:–“How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the Sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy; I saw ‘Maman,’ and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere. It was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.” If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. However, we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

In what is called ‘circular insanity,’ phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call “the concoction of the humors.” In the words of the newspaper joke, “it depends on the liver.” Rousseau’s ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. Some beings seem launched upon the World even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,–the exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, James Thomason, in that pathetic book. The City of Dreadful Night, which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because beings are afraid to quote its words,–they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral at night. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The sermon is too long to quote, but ends thus:– “O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief; a few short years must bring us all relief: Can we not bear these years of laboring breath? However, if you would not this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are freed to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death. The organ-like vibrations of his voice thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away; the yearning of the tones which bade rejoice was sad and tender as a requiem lay: our shadowy congregation rested still, as brooding on that End it when you will. Our shadowy congregation rested still, as musing on that message we had heard, and brooding on the End it when you will, perchance awaiting yet some other word; when keen as lightning through a muffled sky sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry:–the man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth; we have no personal life beyond the grave; there is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth: Can I find here the comfort which I crave? In all eternity I had one chance, one few years term of gracious human life,–the splendors of the intellect’s advance, the sweetness of the home with babes and wife; the social pleasures with their genial wit; the fascination of the Worlds art; the glories of the Worlds of Nature lit by large imagination’s glowing heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

“The rapture of mere being, full of health; the careless childhood and the ardent youth; the strenuous manhood winning various wealthy, the reverend age serene with life’s long truth: all the subline prerogatives of Man; the storied memories of the times of old, the patient tracking of the World’s great plan through sequences and changes myriadfold. This chance was never offered me before; for me the infinite past is blank and dumb; this chance recurreth never, nevermore; blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth, a mockery, a delusion; and my breath of noble human life upon this Earth so racks me that I sigh for senseless death. My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, my noonday passes in a nightmare dream, I worse than lose the years which are my all: What can console me for the loss supreme? Speak not of comfort where no comfort is, speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? Our life’s a cheat, our death a black abyss: Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair. This vehement voice came from the northern aisle, rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close; and none gave answer for a certain while, for words must shrink from these most wordless woes; at last the pulpit speaker simply said, with humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,– #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

“My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus: This life holds nothing good for us, but it ends soon and nevermore can be; and we knew nothing of it ere our birth, and shall know nothing when consigned to Earth: I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.” When Louis committed suicide in the novel Merrick by Anne Rice by going into the Sun, when he was resurrected he said he saw “Nothing.” He bowed his head, but then he looked up helplessly. “Nothing. I saw nothing and I felt that there was nothing. I felt it-empty, colorless, timeless. Nothing. That I had ever lived in any shape seemed unreal.” His eyes were shut tight, and he brought up his hand to hide his face from us. He was weeping. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.” “It ends soon, and never more can be,” “Lo, you are free to end it when you will,”—these versus flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson’s pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the World is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain of delight. That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare,–and army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the British army, follows the Sun round the World and never terminates. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must ponder these things also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity,–nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case. “If suddenly,” says Mr. Ruskin, “in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,–would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts, the real relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-being,–by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate the merriment from the misery.” Our relation to the Overself is one of direct awareness of its presence—not as a separate being but as one’s own essence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Intimate communion and personal converse with the higher self remain delightful fact. The Beloved ever companions one and never deserts one. One can never again be lonely. There is a feeling of living in a self other than the ego, although that also is present but subdued and submissive. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that her full measure of mortal life had not been enjoyed. I wanted to tell her that destiny had marked her for great things, perhaps, and I had broken that destiny had with my careless selfishness, with an ego that could not be restrained. The awareness will be with one at all times, a part of all one’s actions and feelings. It will indeed be the essence of every experience and enable one to pass through it more happily. One has no fixed abode, no permanent address, for like the wind one comes and goes from nowhere to anywhere. Destiny or service may keep one’s body in one place for a time, or for a lifetime, but it will not keep one. For the person who has come to this understanding, who continually feels that IT IS, who is ever in remembrance of It, rituals, ceremonies, mantras, and prayers are not only unnecessary but are a waste of time. The mind emptied of all the activity of ordinary thoughts and filled with the beauty of this presence is a divinely sustained mind. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The owl, which sees clearly at midnight, is an old and good symbol of the sage whose mind is ever at rest in, and lighted by, the Infinite Mind. “And the did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their afflictions. And now the Lord was slow to hear their cry because of their iniquities; nevertheless the Lord did hear their cries, and began to soften the hearts of the Lamanites that they began to ease their burdens; yet the Lord did not see fit to deliver them out of bondage,” reports Mosiah 21.14-15. Because this Mind is common to all beings, it is an inevitable and inescapable consequence of awakening to its existence that the initiate rises above a merely personal outlook and maintains a sympathetic attitude towards all beings. At this level, one is beyond bothering to listen to the discordant sounds of competing sects and cults: one is uninterested in the claims made for different teachings. One has only one concern: direct communion with the God within one as a felt, grace-giving Presence. Henceforth one is able to return one’s consciousness and retract one’s attention from the ego—and this, not only at will, but throughout one’s lifetime. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Whilst there are Parts of Our Nature which Remain Still Undeveloped, We are Not Complete Beings!

September 2, 2019 1:34 am

I felt very sophisticated on account of this education. However, I had no warmth from it, not lasting warmth, and it seemed my loneliness was worse than guilt, worse than the feeling of being damned. Indeed it seemed to replace that old feeling. I feared it, being utterly along. As I sat there looking up at the tiny margin of black Heaven, at the few stars that drifted over the roofs of the houses, I sensed how utterly terrible it would be to lose both my Master and my guilt simultaneously, to be cast out where nothing bothered to love me or damn me, to be lost and tumbling through the World with only those humans for companions, those boys and girls, the English lord with his dagger, even my beloved Bianca. Anxiety is generated by a repressed hostility and it in turn again generates hostility, in other words, anxiety and hostility are inextricably interwoven, one is able to recognize the self-deception in the neurotic’s thinking and the reasons for one’s failures. Without knowing it the neurotic person is in the dilemma of being incapable of loving and yet being in great need of love from others. We stumble here over one of those questions that seem so simple and are nevertheless so difficult to answer: what is love, or what do we mean by it in our culture? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

One may sometimes hear an offhand definition of love as the capacity to give and take affection. Although this contains some truth, it is much too sweeping to be helpful in clarifying the difficulties with which we are concerned. Most of us can be affectionate at times, but it is a quality that may go with a thorough incapacity for love. The important consideration is the attitude from which affection radiates: is it an expression of a basic beneficial attitude toward others, or is it, for example, born of a fear that one will lose the other, or of a wish to get the other person under one’s thumb? In other words, we cannot take any manifest attitudes as criteria. Although it is very difficult to say what is love, we can say definitely what is not love, or what elements are alien to it. One may be thoroughly fond of a person, and yet at times between such circumscribed reactions of wrath or withdrawal and the attitude of a neurotic, who is constantly on guard against others, feels that any interest they take in third persons is a neglect of oneself, and interprets any demand as an imposition or any criticism as a humiliation. This is not love. So, too, it is not incompatible with love to offer constructive criticism of certain qualities or attitudes, in order, if possible, to help correct them; but it is not love to make, as the neurotic often does, an intolerant demand for perfection, a demand which implies a hostile “woe unto you if you are not perfect!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

We also consider it incompatible with our idea of love when we find a person using another only as a means for some purpose, that is, only or mainly because one fulfills certain needs. This is clearly the situation when the other person is wanted only for gratification of pleasures of the flesh, or in marriage, only for prestige. However, here too this issue is very easily blurred, especially if the needs concerned are of a psychic nature. A person may deceive oneself into believing that one loves another even if, for example, the other is needed only for the blind admiration that one gives. In such cases, however, the other person is likely to be dropped suddenly or even may be turned against, as soon as one begins to be critical, thereby failing in the function of admiration, for which one was loved. In discussing the contrast between what is and what is not love we must be watchful, however, not to lean over backward. Though love is incompatible with use of the loved one for some gratification, this does not mean that love must be completely and exclusively altruistic and sacrificing. Nor does that feeling alone deserve the name of love which does not demand anything for the self. Person who express any such convictions betray their own unwillingness to give affection rather than a thoroughly worked out conviction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Of course we want something from the person we are fond of—we want gratification, loyalty, help; we may even want a sacrifice, if necessary. (Jesus Christ is the most renewed blood sacrifice.) And it is in general an indication of mental health to be able to express such wishes or even fight for them. The difference between love and the neurotic need for affection is possessed in the fact that in love the feeling of affection is primary, whereas in the cases of the neurotic the primary feeling is the need for reassurance, and the illusion of love is only secondary. Of course there are still all sorts of intermediate conditions. If a person needs another’s affection for the sake of reassurance against anxiety, the issue will usually be completely blurred in one’s conscious mind, because in general one does not know that one is fully of anxiety and that one therefore reaches out desperately for any kind of affection for the sake of reassurance. All that one feels is that here is a person who one likes or trusts, or with whom one feels infatuated. However, what one feels as spontaneous love may be nothing but a response of gratitude for some kindness shown one or a response of hope or affection aroused by some person or situation. The person who explicitly or implicitly arouses in one expectations of this kind will automatically be invested with importance, and one’s feeling will manifest itself in the illusion of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Such expectations may be aroused by the simple fact that one is treated kindly by a person who is powerful and influential, or by one who merely gives the impression of standing more securely on one’s feet. They may be aroused by erotic or advances in pleasures of the flesh, although these may have nothing to do with love. They may feed on existing ties of some sort, which implicitly contain a promise of help or emotional support: family, friends, physician. Many such relations are carried on under the camouflage of love, that is, under a subjective conviction of attachment, when actually the love is only the person’s clinging to others to satisfy one’s own needs. That this is no reliable feeling of genuine affection is revealed in the ready revulsion that appears when any wishes are not fulfilled. One of the factors essential to our idea of love—reliability and steadiness of feeling—is absent in these cases. A final characteristic of the incapacity for love has already been implied, but I wish to give it special emphasis: disregard of the other’s personality, peculiarities, limitations, needs, wishes, development. This disregard is in part a result of the anxiety which prompts the neurotic to cling to the other person. One who is drowning and clings to a swimmer does not usually consider the other’s willingness or capacity to carry one along. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The disregard is also partly an expression of the basic hostility toward people, the most common contents of which are contempt and envy. It may be covered up by desperate efforts to be considerate, or even sacrificing, but usually these efforts cannot prevent the emerging of certain unwonted reactions. A wife may be subjectively convinced, for example, of her deep devotion to her husband, and yet be resentful, complaining or depressed when the husband devoted his time to his work, his interests or his friends. An over-protective mother may be convinced that she does everything for the sake of the child’s needs for independent development. The neurotic person whose protective device is a drive for affection is hardly ever aware of one’s incapacity for love. Most such persons will mistake their need of others for a disposition toward love, whether for individuals or for humankind in general. There is a pressing reason for maintaining and defending such an illusion. Giving it up would mean uncovering the dilemma of feeling at once basically hostile toward people and nevertheless wanting their affection. One cannot despise a person, distrust one, wish to destroy one’s happiness or independence, and at the same time crave one’s affection, help or support. In order to achieve both ends, which in reality are incompatible, one has to keep the hostile disposition strictly removed from awareness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The illusion of love, in other words, while it is the result of an understandable confusion between genuine fondness and need, has the definite function of making the pursuit of affection possible. There is still another basic difficulty which the neurotic encounters in satisfying one’s hunger for affection. Though one may succeed, at least temporarily, in getting the affection one wants, one is unable really to accept it. One should expect one to welcome any affection offered to one, as eagerly as a thirsty person takes to water. In fact, that does happen, but only temporarily. Every physician knows the effect of kindness and consideration. All physical and psychic troubles may suddenly vanish, even though nothing is being done but giving the patient hospital care and having one thoroughly examined. A situation neurosis, even through it be a severe one, may disappear altogether when the person feels loved. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a famous example of this kind. Even in character neuroses such attention, whether it is love, interest or medical care, may be sufficient to release anxiety and thereby improve the condition. Any kind of affection may give one a superficial reassurance, or even a feeling of happiness, but deep down it either meets with disbelief or stirs up distrust and fear. One does not believe in it, because one is firmly convinced that no one can possibly love one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And this feeling of being unlovable is often a conscious conviction, unshakable by any factual experiences to the contrary. It can, indeed, be taken so much for granted that it never consciously bothers the person, but even when it is inarticulate it is just as unshakable a conviction as if it had always been conscious. Also, it can be concealed by a “do not care” attitude, usually dictated by pride, and then it is likely to create difficulty in digging it out. The conviction of being unlovable is closely akin to the incapacity for love; it is, in fact, a conscious reflection of that incapacity. A person who can be genuinely found of others will have no doubts that other can be fond of one. If the anxiety is really deep, any affection offered meets with distrust, and it will immediately be assumed that it is offered from ulterior motives. In psychoanalysis, for example, such patients feel that the analyst wants to help them only for the sake of one’s own ambition, or that one makes appreciative or encouraging remarks only for therapeutical reasons. One patient of mine considered it a beneficial humiliation that I offered to see her during the weekend, at a time when she was emotionally upset. Affection shown demonstratively is easily felt as a taunt. If an attractive young lady openly shows affection toward a neurotic man he may take it as teasing, or even as a deliberate provocation, since it is beyond his imagination that the girl might be truly fond of him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Affection ordered to such a person not only may meet with distrust but may arouse absolute anxiety. It is as if giving in to an affection meant being caught in a spider’s web, or as if believing in an affection meant being taken off one’s guard while living among cannibals. A neurotic person may have a feeling of terror when one approaches the realization that some genuine fondness is being offered to one. Furthermore, evidence of affection may arouse a fear of dependency. Emotional dependency, as we shall see shortly, is a real danger for anyone who cannot live without the affection of others, and anything faintly resembling it may evoke a desperate struggle against it. Such a person must at all cost avoid any kind of absolute emotional response of one’s own, because such a response immediately conjures up the danger of dependency. In order to avoid this one must blindfold oneself against the awareness that others are kind or helpful, somehow managing to discard every evidence of affection and insisting, in one’s own feelings, that the others are unkind, uninterested or even malevolent. The situation created in this way is similar to that of a person who is starving for food yet does not dare to take any for fear that it might be poisoned. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

In short, then, for a person who is driven by one’s basic anxiety and consequently, as a means of protection, reaches out for affection, the chances of getting this so much desired affection are anything but favorable. The very situation that creates the need interferes with its gratification. Unconscious ideas of the patient are more often than not the conscious theories of therapist. In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing. However, now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religious differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says somethings are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things. First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the Universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. Perfection is eternal, and that is a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The second affirmation of religion is that if we believe her first affirmation to be true, even now we are better off. Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the saving remnant’ alone). So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issues by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that was if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we absolutely chose to disbelieve. It is as if a being should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,–that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his take as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach scepticism to us as a duty until sufficient evidence for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in the presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist’s command to imitate one’s kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side,–that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the World religiously might be prophetic and right. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the Universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The Universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the Universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,–so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing that Universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what kinds of truth might materially be. I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. However, sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is lived enough to temp our will. I suspect, however, this if this is so, it is because you have got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The freedom to believe what we will you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, “Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true.” I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to one who has them to consider. When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete beings, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true—till doomsdays, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough,–this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in no waiting for its releasing word. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of ideal fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may wait if we will,–I hope you do not think that I am denying that,–but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the others, nor should we brandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have the spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things. What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the World? These are questions with which all mist deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them. In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If a being chooses to turn one’s back altogether on God and the future, no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that one is mistake. If a being thinks otherwise and acts as one thinks, I do not see that anyone can prove that one is mistaken. Each must act as one thinks best; and if one is wrong, so much the worse for one. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? Be strong and of good courage. Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. One has chosen a path to which one has been led both by instinct and by experience. As one tries to follow it, one will meet with all kinds of difficulties but one should not turn back. Because the interrelation of outward karma to inner character is so close, one should understand that these difficulties are linked up with one’s inner state, and that one begins to solve them by removing the imperfection of that inner state. One must understand that, although this goal is not easy to obtain, one must refuse to give up hope. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The path is right by itself, and in allying oneself with it, one is allying oneself with what is, after all, the greatest force in the World. One will know that this is the day of one’s spiritual rebirth, that struggle is to be replaced henceforth by serenity, that self-reproach is to yield to self-assurance, and that life in appearance is transformed into life in reality. At last one has emerged from confusion and floundering and bewilderment. At last one is able to experience the blessed satisfaction, the joyous serenity of an integrated attitude wholly based on the highest truth. The capacities which have been incubating slowly and explosively during all the years of one’s quest will erupt suddenly into consciousness at the same moment that the higher self takes possession of one. What was formerly an occasional glimpse will not become a permanent sight. The intermittent intuition of a guardian presence will now become the constantly established experience of it. The divine presence has now become to one an immediate and intimate one. Its reality and vitality are no longer matters for argument or dispute, but matters of settled experience. I am a being; and beings are created after the image of God, and I am called by his Holy Spirit to teach these things unto this people, that they may be brought to a knowledge of that which is just and true; and a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God,” reports Alma 18.34-35. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

These Little Treasures—Your Family, Your Heritage, Your Cresleigh Homes Matter to Us Because they Matter to You!

August 29, 2019 12:46 am

God willed it. God willed that all edifices should crumble, all texts be stolen or burnt, all eyewitnesses to mystery be destroyed. Think on it. Think. Time has plowed under all those words written in the hand of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul. Where is there one parchment scroll left which bears the signature of Aristotle? And Plato, would that we have one scrap he threw into the fire when feverishly working? It is the way of God, the way of His creation. Even what is writ in stone is washed away by time, and cities lie beneath the fire and ash of roaring mountains. I meant to say the Earth eats all. Modern beings have long since abandoned the ritual renewal theory of nature, and reality for us is simply refusing to acknowledge that evil and death are constantly with us. With medical science we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our consciousness. We are shocked by the vulgarity of symbols of death and the devil and pleasures of the flesh in primitive ruins. However, if your theory is to control by representation and imitation, then you have to include all sides of life, not only the side that makes you comfortable or that seems purest. There are two words which sum up very nicely what the primitive was up to with their social representation of nature: “microcosmization” and “macrocosmization.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Although microcosmization and macrocosmization sound technically forbidding, they express quite simple complementary maneuvers. In macrocomization beings simply takes oneself or parts of oneself and blows them up to cosmic importance. Thus the popular ancient pastime of entrail reading or liver reading: it was thought that the fate of the individual, or a whole army or a country, could be discerned in the liver, which was conceived as a small-scale cosmos. The ancient Hindus, among others, looked at every part of a being as having a correspondence in the macrocosm: the head corresponded to the Sky, the Eye to the Sun, the breath to the Wind, the legs to the Earth, and so on. With the Universe reflected in one’s very body, the Hindu thus thought one’s life has the order of the cosmos. Microcosmization of the Heavens is merely a reverse, complementary movement. Beings humanizes the cosmos by projecting all imaginable Earthly things onto the Heavens, in this way again intertwining one’s own destiny with the immortal stars. So, for example, animals were projected onto the sky, star formations were given animal shapes, and the zodiac was conceived. By being’s transferring animals to Heaven all human concerns took on a timelessness and a superhuman validity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The immortal stars came to preside over human destiny, and the fragile and ephemeral animal called human blew oneself up to superhuman size by making oneself the center of things. Campsites and buildings were all laid out according to some kind of astronomical plan which intertwined human space with the immortal spheres. The place where the tribe lived was conceived as the navel of the Universe where all creative powers poured forth. By means of micro- and macrocosmization beings humanized the Heavens and spiritualized the Earth and so melted sky and Earth together in an inextricable unity. By opposing culture to nature in these ways, beings allotted to oneself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled one to transcend one’s animal condition and assume a special status in nature. No longer was one an animal who died and vanished from the Earth; one was a creator of life who could also give eternal life to oneself by means of communal rituals of cosmic regeneration. The central problem of primitive beings was overcoming death. They were trying to become immortal beings, but the stars are immortal because they live longer, much longer than humans, yet they are not eternal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Eternal beings, such as God and his Angels and eternal places like Heaven never cease. Whereas immortality can come to an end, but things that are eternal cannot be destroyed. And so we have come full circle in our overview of the primitive World. We started with the statement that primitive beings used the dual organization to affirm one’s organismic self-feeling, and one of their principal means was the setting up of society in the form of organized rivalry. Now we can conclude that one in fact set up the whole cosmos in a way that allows one to expand symbolically and to enjoy the highest organismic creature all the way up to the stars. The Egyptians hoped that when they died they would ascend to Heaven and become stars and thus enjoy eternal significance in the scheme of things. This is already a comedown from what primitive social groupings enjoyed: the daily living of divine significance, the constant meddling into the realm of cosmic power. Primitive society was organized for contests and games, but these were not games as we now think of them. They were games as children play them: they actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they wanted them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Ritual contest between moieties were a play of life against death, forces of light against forces of darkness. One side tried to thwart the ritual activities of the other and defeat it. However, of course the aide of life always contrived to win because by this victory primitive beings kept nature going in the grooves one needed and wanted. If death and disease were overtaking a people, then a ritually enacted reversal of death by a triumph of the life faction would, hopefully, set things right again. At the center of the primitive technics of nature stand the act of sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual; in a way we might see it as the atomic physics of the primitive World view. The sacrificer goes through the motions of performing in miniature the kind of arrangement of nature that one wants. One may use water, clay, and fire to represent the sea, Earth, and Sun, and one proceeds to set up the creation of the World. If one does things exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning of time, then one gets control over the Earth and creation. One can put vigor into animals, like into females, and even arrange the order of society into castes, and in the Hindu ritual. In the Hindu ritual and in coronation rituals, this is the point at which the contest came in. In order to control nature, beings must drive away evil—sickness and death. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

And so one must overcome demons and hostile forces. If one makes a slip in the ritual, it gives power to the demons. That is why Mormons say no premarital pleasures of the flesh, no pornography, no cursing, no drinking alcohol, no smoking, no using drugs, no nightclubs, no sinning. The ritual triumph is thus the winning of a contest with evil. When kings were to be crowned they had to prove their merit by winning out against the forces of evil; dice and chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the kind really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness. People in the New World did not understand this kind of technics and so many ridiculed it. Archaic beings believed that they could put vigor into the World by means of a ceremony, that they could create an island, an abundance of creatures, keep the Sun on its course, and so forth. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to many in the New World because they look only at the surface of it and do not see the logic behind it, the forces that were really at work according to the primitive’s understanding of them. The key idea underlying the whole thing is that as the sacrifice manipulates the altar and the victim, one becomes identified with them—not with them as things, but with the essences behind them, their invisible connection to the World of the gods and spirits, to the very insides of nature. And this too is logical. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The primitive beings had a conceptualization of the insides of nature just as we do in our atomic theory. One saw that things were animated by invisible forces, that the Sun’s heat worked at a distance and pervaded the things of the Earth, that seeds germinated out of the invisible as did children, and so forth. All one wanted to do, with the technique of sacrifice, was to take possession of these invisible forces and use them for the benefit of the community. Even though North Korea currently may be building a submarine capable of launching nuclear missiles, primitive beings had no need for missile launchers and atomic reactors; sacrificial altars mounds served one’s purposes well. In a word, the act of sacrifice established a footing in the invisible dimension of reality; this permitted the sacrificer to build a divine body, a mystical, essential self that had superhuman powers. And perhaps this was possible of our ancestors, some thought Veronica’s Veil could not have been created by human hands. People believed in Faustian Body Switching. Perhaps this idea of primitive beings having superhuman powers is why Victorian houses were so creative and ornate, they were thought to have spiritual powers and represent a spiritual nexus. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

However, if in modern times we think this is so foreign to our own traditional ways of thinking, we should look closely at the Christian communion. “We have our beliefs and our traditions. It is common to be bad, to be greedy, to be corrupt and self-seeking. It is a rare thing to love. We love. Again, I had enjoyed our sense of purpose, our commitment—that we were the inviolate Talamasca, that we cared for the outcast, that we harbored the sorcerer and the seer, that we had saved witches from the stake and reached out even to the wandering spirits, yes, even to the shades whom others fear. We had done it for well over a thousand years. But these little treasures—your family, your heritage, they matter to us because they matter to you. And they will always be yours,” reports David Talbot in the novel Merrick by Anne Rice. By performing the prescribed rites the communicant unites oneself with Christ—the sacrifice—who is God, and in this way the worshiper accrues to oneself a mystical body or soul which has immortal life. Everything depends on the prescribed ritual, which puts one in possession of the power of eternity by union with the sacrifice. And in this universal Mind wherein one now dwells, one can find no mortal to be called one’s enemy, no being to be hated or despised. One is friendly to all beings, not as a deliberately cultivated attitude but as a natural compulsion one may not resist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

When this consciousness of the Overself is attained and maintained, one’s mind becomes perfectly equable and one’s moral character perfectly unblemished. The tremendous tension of effort which makes the quest, with all the evanescent elations and despairs which it involves, comes at last to a welcome end. One’s submission to the divine will is henceforth spontaneous and innate; it is no longer the end product of a painful struggle. One is no longer able to will for oneself for the simple reason that some other entity has begun to will for one. Egoism in the human sense, sensualism in the animal sense, have both been eliminated from one’s heart. Selflessness of purpose is said to follow attainment of this high spiritual status. On this point there is some misrepresentation so that beginners get half-false, half-true notions. It does not mean that, as against other beings, an enlightened person must surrender one’s possessions, one’s position, or one’s service to them. One has one’s own rights still and does not automatically have to abandon them. A being may attain this union with the Overself and yet produce no great work of art, no inspired piece of literature as a result. This is because the union does not bestow technical gifts. It bestows inspiration but not the aesthetic talent which produces a painting a painting or the intellectual talent which produces a book. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Henceforth one is to work knowingly and lovingly with the power behind one’s life. Henceforth one functions as the human instrument of a superhuman power. One result then comes, that what one does by instinct and what one does by choice are henceforth one and the same. These finer qualities will no longer appear only in momentary impulses. They will possess one’s whole character. One of the foremost features of enlightenment is the clarity it gives to the mind, the lucidity of understanding and luminosity which surrounds all problems. One who understands the Truth at long last, does so only because one becomes the Truth. All that one knows will be intensely lived, for one knows it with one’s whole being. One has come to the end of this quest. One’s discovery of truth has released the power of truth and conferred the peace of truth. The pieces of life’s mosaic are at last fitted neatly into place. One has attained complete understanding. The intellectual faculties will not be extinguished by this radiant exaltation, but their work will henceforth be passively receptive of intuitive direction. Freed from obsession with the past as well as anticipation of the future, one will regard each day as unique and live through it as if one were here for the first time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Changes in the functioning of a being’s mind could bring about such complete changes in one’s sense of time that one could veritably find oneself imbued with the sense of eternity. This continuous flux of time which to us seems to go on forever, to them is but an illusion produced by the succession of our thoughts. For them, there is only the Eternal Now, never-ending. The realized being does not look back constantly for memories of the past and does not consider them worth recapitulating, for they belong to the ego and they are blotted out with the blotting out of the ego’s tyranny. The only exception would be where one has to draw upon them to instruct others to help them profit intellectually, spiritually and emotionally by one’s experiences. Only what the mind gives one now is alive and real for one. One is not afraid to be outside the current of one’s time. This is because inwardly one is inside the Timeless. In recent years there has been a growing awareness on the part of some psychiatrists and psychologist that serious gaps exist in our way of understanding human beings. These gaps may well seem most compelling to psychotherapist, confronted as they are in clinic and consulting room with the sheer reality of persons in crisis whose anxiety will not be quieted by theoretical formulas. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

However, the lacunae likewise present seemingly unsurmountable difficulties in scientific research. Thus many psychiatrists and psychologist in Europe and others in this country have been asking themselves disquieting questions, and others are aware of gnawing doubts which arise from the same half-suppressed and unasked questions. Can we be sure, one such question goes, that we are seeing the patient as one really is, knowing one in one’s own reality: or are we seeing merely a projection of our own theories about one? Every psychotherapist, to be sure, has one’s knowledge of patterns and mechanisms of behavior and has at one’s fingertips the system of concepts developed by one’s particular school. If we are to observe scientifically, such conceptual system is entirely necessary. However, the crucial question is always the bridge between the system and the patient—how can we be certain that our system, admirable and beautifully wrought as it may be in principle, has anything whatever to do with this specific Mr. Lestat de Lioncourt, a living, immediate reality sitting opposite us in the consulting room? May not just this particular person require another system, another quite different frame of reference? And does not this patient, or any person for that matter, evade our investigations, slip through our scientific fingers like sea foam, precisely to the extent that we rely on the logical consistency of our own system? #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Another such gnawing question is: How can we know whether we are seeing the patient in one’s real World, the World in which one lives and moves and has one’s being, and which is for one unique, concrete, and different from our general theories of culture? In all probability we have never participated in one’s World and do not know it directly. Yet, if we are to have any chance of knowing the patient, we must know it and to some extent must be able to exist in it. Such questions were the motivations of psychiatrists and psychologists in Europe, who later comprised the Daseinsanalyse, or existential-analytic, movement. The “existential research orientation in psychiatry, writes Ludwig Binswanger, its chief spokesman, “arose from dissatisfaction with the prevailing efforts t gain scientific understanding in psychiatry. Psychology and psychotherapy as sciences are admittedly concerned with beings, but not at all primarily with mentally ill beings, but with beings as such. The new understanding of beings, which we owe to Heidegger’s analysis of existence, has its basis in the new conception that beings are no longer understood in terms of some theory—but it a mechanistic, a biologic or a psychological one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If you are looking for truth, it is not enough to look only at your own country’s, your own religion’s statement of it, nor just this century’s. One need also to look elsewhere, to heed the wiser voices of other centuries and to feel free to move from the Old World to the New World or into B.C. as well as A.D. However, above all these things you must look into the mystery of your own consciousness. Uncover its layer after layer until you meet the Overself. All this is included in the Quest. Nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus ask his followers to enter into a church but he does ask them, by implication, to enter within themselves. To the extent to that they stop looking outside themselves for the help and support and guidance they correctly feel they need, they will start looking inside and doing the needful inner work to come into conscious awareness of the power waiting there, the divine Overself. They themselves are inlets to it, never disconnected from it. Why did Jesus warn beings not to look for the Christ-self in the deserts or the mountain caves? It was for the same reasons that he constantly told them to look for in within themselves, and that he counselled them to be in the World but not of it. Do not expect to find more truth and meaning in the World outside than you can find inside yourself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Although the Infinite Spirit exists everywhere and anywhere, the paradox is that It cannot be found in that way before It has first been found in one’s own heart. Yet it is also true that to find It in its fullness in the self inside, we have to understand the nature of the World outside. One must start by believing that concealed somewhere within one’s mind there is the intuition of truth. The only being you need for this great work is yourself. Stop looking outside and look within, for there is not only the material to work upon but also the God within to guide you. We must find in our own inner resources the way to the blessed life. The people of the World drinks and dances; the mystics thinks and trances. Many beings cannot find the higher truth because they insist on looking for it where it is not. They will not look within, hence they get someone else’s idea of the truth. The other person may be correct but since this is to be known only by being it, the discovery must be made inside themselves. One cannot know anyone else so well as oneself. When we can know only oneself so deeply and truly, why then try to know so many people so superficially? The goal can be reached by using the resources in one’s own soul. One should create from within oneself and by one’s own efforts the strength, the wisdom, and the inspiration one need. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The student must remember that success does not only come to one, it also comes from one. The plan of the road to achievement and the driving power to propel one along it must be found within oneself. Usually, it is by one’s own efforts alone—but not excluding the possibility of Grace, however—that one develops the needed objectivity with which to correctly study oneself and cultivate awareness. The truth will be given us: we shall not be left to starve for it. However, it will be given according to our capacity to receive it. There can be no doubt that in our culture the ways one protects one’s self against anxiety may play a decisive part in the lives of many persons. There are those whose foremost striving is to be loved or approved of, and who go to any length to have this wish gratified; those whose behavior is characterized by a tendency to comply, to give in and take no step of self-assertion; those whose striving is dominated by the wish for success or power or possession; and those whose tendency is to shut themselves off from people and to be independent of them. The question may be raised, however, whether I am right in declaring that these strivings represent a protection against some basic anxiety Are they not an expression of drives within the normal range of given human possibilities? #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

The mistake in arguing this way is putting the question in the alternative form. In reality the two points of view are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. The wish for love, the tendency to comply, the striving for influence or success, and the tendency to withdraw are present in all of us in various combinations, without being in the least indicative of a neurosis. Moreover, one or another of these tendencies may be a predominate attitude in certain cultures, a fact which would suggest again the possibility of their being normal potentialities in humankind. Attitudes of affection, of mothering care and compliance with the wishes of others are predominant in the Arapesh culture, as described by Margaret Mead; striving for prestige in a rather brutal form is a recognized pattern among the Kwakiutl, as Ruth Benedict has pointed out; the tendency to withdraw from the World is a dominant trend in the Buddhist religion. My concept is intended not to deny the normal character of these drives, but to maintain that all of them may be put to the service of affording reassurance against some anxiety, and furthermore, that by acquiring this protective function they change their qualities, becoming something entirely different. I can explain this difference best by an analogy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

We may climb a tree because we wish to test our strength and skill and see the view from the top, or we may climb it because we are pursued by a wild animal. In both cases we climb the true, but the motives for our climbing are different. In the first case we do it for the sake of pleasure, in the other case we are driven by fear and have to do it out of a need for safety. In the first case we are free to climb or not, in the other we are compelled to climb by a stringent necessity. In the first case we can look for the tree which is best suited to our purpose, in the other case we have no choice but must take the first tree within reach, and it need not necessarily be a tree; it may be a flag pole, or a house if only it serve the purpose of protection. The difference in driving forces also results in a difference in feeling and behavior. If we are impelled by a direct wish for satisfaction or any kind of our attitude will have a quality of spontaneity and discrimination. If we are driven by anxiety, however, our feeling and acting will be compulsory and indiscriminate. There are intermediate stages, to be sure. In instinctual drives, like hunger and pleasures of the flesh, which are greatly determined by physiological tensions resulting from privation, the physical tension may be piled up to such an extent that satisfaction is sought with a degree of compulsion and indiscriminateness which is otherwise characteristic of drives determined by anxiety. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Some people, even medical doctors assumes that observations about themselves and acquaintances are applicable to all beings. However, analogies drawn from the behavior of others or animals to another individual, scientifically speaking, such analogies prove nothing; they are suggestive and pleasing to other beings, not factual. They sometimes go together with a high degree of anthropomorphizing that some professionals indulge in. Precisely because the give the pleasant illusion to a person that one understands what another is feeling they become very popular. Who would not like to possess King Solomon’s ring? Analogous behavior can be observed in human beings. In the good old days when there was still a Hapsburg monarchy and there were still domestic servants, I used to observe the following, regularly predictable behavior in my widowed aunt. She never kept a maid longer than eight to ten months. She was always delighted with a new servant, praised her to the skies, and swore that she had at last found the right one. In the course of the next few months her judgment cooled, she found faults, then bigger ones, and toward the end of the stated period she discovered hateful qualities in the poor girl, who was finally discharged without a reference after a violent quarrel. After this explosion the antiquated lady was once more prepared to find a perfect Angel in her nest employee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

It is not my intention to poke fun at my long-deceased and devoted aunt. I was able, or rather obliged, to observe exactly the same phenomenon in serious, self-controlled beings, myself included, once when I was a prisoner of war. So-called polar disease, also known as expedition choler, attacks small groups of men who are completely dependent on one another and are thus prevented from quarreling with strangers or people outside their own circle of friends. From this it will be clear that the damming up of aggression will be more dangerous, the better the members of the group know, understand, and like each other. In such a situations, as I know from personal experience, all aggression and intra-specific fight behavior undergo an extreme lowering of their threshold values. Subjectively this is expression by the fact that one reacts to small mannerisms of one’s best friends—such as the way in which they clear their throats or sneeze—in a way that would normally be adequate only if one had been hit by a drunkard. However, the personal experiences with my aunt, fellow prisoners-of-war, and myself do not necessarily say anything about the universality of such reactions. There are more complex psychological interpretations one might five for my aunt’s behavior, instead of the hydraulic one which claims that her aggression potential rose every eight to ten months to such a degree that it has to explode. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

From a psychoanalytic standpoint, one would assume that my aunt was very narcissistic, exploitative woman; she demanded that a servant should be completely devoted to her, have no interests of her own, and gladly accept the role of a creature who is happy to serve her. She approached each new servant with the phantasy that she is the one who will fulfill her expectations. After a short honeymoon during which my aunt’s phantasy is till sufficiently effective to blind her to the fact that the servant is not right—and perhaps also helped by the fact that the servant in the beginning makes every effort to please her new employer—my aunt wakes up to the recognition that the servant is not willing to live up to the role for which she has been cast. Such a process of awakening lasts, of course, some times until it is final. At this point my aunt experiences intense disappointment and rage, as nay narcissistic exploitative person does when frustrated. Not being away that the cause for this rage is possessed in her impossible demands as if she Those Who Must Be Kept (in total peace and quiet), she rationalizes her disappointment by accusing the servant. Since she cannot give up her desires, she fires the servant and hopes that a new one will be right. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The same mechanism repeats itself until my aunt expresses what type of servant she truly wants or cannot get anymore servants. Such a development is by no means found only in the relations of employers and servants. Often the history of marriage conflicts is identical; however, since it is easier to fire a servant than to divorce, the outcome is often that of a lifelong battle in which each partner tries to punish the other for ever-accumulating wrongs. The problem that confronts us here is that of a specific human character, namely the narcissistic-exploitative character, and not that of an accumulated instinctive energy. Ideally, we learn the wisdom of life best, easiest, and most from teachers, from instruction by those who know the Way in its beginning and end. Actually, we have to learn it by ourselves, by our own experiences, by self-expression, all necessary and valuable, suffering as well as joy. Only when all of the mind—unconsciously evolved through the mineral, plant, animal, and lower human kingdoms—enters on the quest, does it consciously enter upon the development of its own consciousness. “And may the Lord bless you, and keep your garments spotless, that ye may at last be brought to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the holy prophets who have been ever since the World began, having your garments spotless even as their garments are spotless, in the kingdom of Heaven to go no more out,” reports Alma 7.25. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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In the Great Boarding-House of Nature, the Cakes and the Butter and the Syrup Seldom Come Out so Even and Leave the Plates so Clean!

August 28, 2019 1:39 am

Well, what human souls see of this is a fragment. I saw the whole. I roamed extensively and fearlessly and regardless of Time, or out of it, though Time always continues to pass, of course, and I went where I chose. There were many, many mansions, to use the Scriptural words. Souls believing in like faiths had come together in desperation and sought to reinforce each other’s beliefs and still each other’s fears. However, the light of Earth was too dim to warm anyone here! And the Light of Heaven simply did not penetrate at all. The first thing I did was listen: I listened to the song of any soul who would sing to me, that is, speak, in my language; I caught up any coherent declaration or question or supposition that struck my ears. What did these souls know? What had become of them? Good beings would have us to believe failure to act in the right way, a failure to do the good one should have done is a sin. If this were sin, a less aggressive and less ugly terms, such as human weakness, could be applied. However, that is just what sin is not. And those of us who have experienced demonic powers within and around ourselves find such a description ludicrous. So we turn to Paul, and perhaps to Anne Rice’s Lestat to the conversation between God, the Memnoch Jesus and Lestat in Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

From the legends and myths, we learn what sin is. And perhaps we may learn in through Picasso’s picture of that small Basque village, Guernica, which was destroyed in an unimaginably horrible way by the demonic powers of tyranny and oppression. And perhaps we learn it through the disrupting sounds in music that does not bring us restful emotions, but the feeling of being torn and split. Perhaps we learn the meaning of sin from the images of evil and guilt that fill our theatres, or through the revelations of unconscious motives so abundant in our novels. It is noteworthy that today, in order to know the meaning of sin, we have to look outside our churches and their average preaching to the artists and writers and ask them. However, perhaps there is still another place where we can learn what sin is, and that is our own heart. Paul seldom speaks of sins, but he often spears of Sin—Sin in the singular with a capital “S,” Sin as a power that controls World and mind, persons and nations. Have you ever thought of Sin in this image? It is the Biblical image. However, how many Christians or non-Christians have seen it? Most of us remember that at home, in school and at church, we were taught that there were many things that one would like to do that one should not. And if one did them, one committed a sin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

We had lists of prohibitions and catalogues of commands; if we did not follow the, we committed sins. Naturally, we did commit one or more sins every day, although we tried to diminish their number seriously and with good will. This was, and perhaps still is, our image of sin—a poor, petty, distorted image, and the reason for the disrepute into which the word has fallen. The first step to an understanding of the Christian message that is called “good news” is to dispel the image of sin that implies a catalogue of sins. Those who are bound to this image are also those who find it most difficult to receive the message of acceptance of the unacceptable, the good news of Christianity. Their half-sinfulness and half-righteousness makes them insensitive to a message that states the presence of total sinfulness and total righteousness in the same being at the same moment. They never find the courage to make a total judgement against themselves, and therefore, they can never find the courage to believe in a total acceptance of themselves. Those, however, who have experienced in their hearts that sin is more than the trespassing of a list of rues know that all sins are manifestations of Sin, of the power of estrangement and inner conflict. Sin dwells in us, it controls us, and makes us do what we do not want to do. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Sin produces a split in us that makes us lose identity with ourselves. Paul writes of this split twice: “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” Those who have suffered this split know how unexpected and terrifying it can be. Thoughts entered our mind, words poured from our mouth, something was enacted by us suddenly and without warning. And if we look at what happened, we feel—“It could not have been I who acted like this. I cannot find myself in it. Something came upon me, something I hardly noticed. However, there it was and here am I. It is I who did it, but a strange I. It is not my real, my innermost self. It is as though I were possessed by a power scarcely knew. However, now I know that it not only can reach me, but that it dwells in me.” Is this something we really know? Or do we, after a moment of shock, repress such knowledge? Do we still rely on our comparatively well ordered life, avoiding situations of moral danger, determined by the rules of family, school and society? For those who are satisfied with such a life, the words of Paul are written in vain. They refuse to face their human predicament. However, something further may happen to them: God Himself may throw them into more sin in order to make them aware of what they really are. This is a bold way of speaking, but it is the way people of the profoundest religious experiences have spoken. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

By God throwing them into more sin, they have felt the awakening hand of God. And awakened, they have seen themselves in the mirror from which they had always turned away. No longer able to hide from themselves, they have asked the question, from the depth of their self-rejection, to which the Christian message is the answer—the power of acceptance that can overcome the despair of self-rejection. In this sense, more sin can be the divine way of making us aware of ourselves. Then maybe people will feel love, maybe they will see love, feel the Love of Men and Women and for one another and for their Children, and understand the willingness to sacrifice for one another, and to grieve for those who are dead, and to seek for their souls in the hereafter, and to think of our Lord, of a hereafter where they might be reconciled with those souls again. It is out of this love and the family, it is out of this rare and unprecedented bloom—so Creative of our Lord, that is seems in His Image of his Creations—that the souls of these beings remain alive after death! What else in Nature can do this? All gives back to the Earth what it has taken. God’s Wisdom is Manifested throughout; and all those that suffer and die beneath the canopy of God’s Heavens are mercifully bathed in brutal ignorance of the scheme which ultimately involved their own deaths. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Then, we ask with Paul—what is it within us that makes a dwelling place for this power? He answers that is it our members in which sin hides. He also calls this place “flesh,” and sometimes he speaks of “our body of death.” However, there are also forces within us that resist the power—our innermost self, our mind, our spirit. With these words, Paul wrestles with the deep mystery of human nature just as we do today. And it is no easier to understand him than our present scholarly language about beings. However, one this is certain: Paul, and with him, the whole Bible, never made our body responsible for our estrangement from God, from our World and from our own self. Body, flesh, members—these are not the only sinful parts of us, while the innermost self, mind and spirit, comprises the other, sinless part. Our whole being, every cell of our body, and every movement of our mind is both flesh and spirit, subjected to the power of sin and resisting its power. The fact that we accuse ourselves shows that we cannot acknowledge our estrangement from out true nature. The fact that we are ashamed shows that we still know what we ought to be. And in their hearts, loving one another as they do, mate with mate, and family with family, they have imagined Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Beings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kind will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! There is no part of beings that is bad in itself, as there is no part o beings that is good in itself. Any Christian teaching that has forgotten this has fallen short of the height of Christian insight. And here all Christian churches must share the grave guilt of destroying human beings by casting them into despair over their own guilt where there should be no guilt. In pulpits, schools and families, Christians have called the natural strivings of the living, growing and self-propagating body sinful. They concentrate in an inordinate and purely pagan way on the pleases of the flesh differentiation of all life and its possible distortions. Certainly, these distortions are as real as the distortions of our spiritual life—as, for example, pride and indifference. However, to see the power of sin in the power of the pleasures of the flesh of life as such is itself a distortion. Such preaching completely misses the image of sin as Paul depicts it. What is worse, it produces distorted feelings of guilt in countless personalities, that drive them from doubt to anxiety, from anxiety to despair, from despair to escape into mental disease, and thence the desire to destroy themselves altogether. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

And still other consequences of this preaching about sin become apparent. Paul points to the perversions of desires for pleasures of the flesh as an extreme expression of sin’s control of humankind. Have we as Christians ever asked ourselves whether or not, in our defamation of the natural as sin, or at least as a reason for shame, we have perhaps contributed most potently to this state of affairs? For all this results from that petty image of sin, that contradicts reality as much as it contradicts the Biblical understanding of a being’s predicament. It is dangerous to preach about sin, because it may induce us to brood over our sinfulness. Perhaps one should not preach about it at all. I myself have hesitated for many years. However, sometimes it must be risked in order to remove the distortions which increase sin, if, by the persistence of wrong thoughts, wrong ways of living are inevitable. I believer it possible to conquer the dangers implied in the concentration of sin, if we look at it indirectly, in the light of that which enables us to resist it—reunion overcoming estrangement. Sin is our act of turning away from participation in the divine Ground from which we come and to which we go. Sin is the turning towards ourselves, and making ourselves the center of our World and of ourselves. Sin is the drive in everyone, even those who exercise the most self-restraint, to draw as much as possible of the World into oneself #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

However, if we have found a certain level of life above ourselves, we can be fully aware that we should not try to draw too much of the World into ourselves. After one has lost oneself, whoever has found oneself knows how deep one’s loss of self was. If we look at our estrangement from the point of reunion, we are no longer in danger of brooding over our estrangement. We can speak of Sin, because its power over us is broken. It is certainly not broken by ourselves. The attempt to break the power of sin by the power of good will has been described by Paul as the attempt to fulfill the law, the law in our mind, in our innermost self that is the law of God. The result of this attempt is failure, guilt and despair. The law, with its commands and prohibitions, despite its function in revealing and restricting evil, provokes resistance against itself. In a language both poetic and profoundly psychological, Paul says that the sin that dwells in our members is asleep until the moment in which it is awakened by the “thou shalt not.” Sin uses the commandments in order to become alive. Prohibition awakens sleeping desire. It arouses the power and consciousness of sin, but cannot break its power. Only if we accept with our whole being the message that it is broken, is it also broke in us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This picture of sin is a picture full of ugliness, suffering and shame, and at the same time, drama and passion. It is the picture of us as the battleground of powers greater than we. It does not divide beings into categories of black and white, or good and evil. It does not appear as the threatening finger of an authority urging us—do not sin! However, it is the vision of something infinitely important, that happens on this small planet in, our bodies and minds. It raises humankind to a level in the Universe where decisive things happen in every moment, decisive for the ultimate meaning of all existence. In each of us such decisions occur, in us, and through us. This is our burden. This is our despair. This is our greatness. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did not exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare with worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for beings. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction brings beings all sorts of other goods which a being’s heart in turn declares. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a World of moral reality, your head will assuredly never makes you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head’s play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some beings (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete and gullibility on one’s. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of one, one clings to it that one is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which all their with and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with one’s whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one being and another. Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases previous what makes your liking come. However, if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutist say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some being that they must love one! one will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here beings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the being in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? One’s faith acts on the powers above one as a claim, and creates its own verification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to one’s own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individual brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if one makes a movement of resistance, one will be shot before any one else backs one up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives! #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Social betterment is a good thing but it is not a substitute for self-betterment. Love of one’s neighbour is an excellent virtue but it cannot displace the best of all virtues, love of the divine soul. The being who is discontented with the World as one finds it and sets out to improve it, must begin with oneself. There is authority for this statement in the life-giving ideas of Jesus as well as in the light-giving Plato. One has enough to do with the discovery and correction of one’s own deficiencies or weaknesses, not to meddle in criticism of other people’s. One can best use one’s critical faculties by turning them on oneself rather than on others. Progress in self-evolvement on the Quest must be due to the individual’s own efforts. It can be encouraged or fostered only in proportion to the same individual’s wishes and needs. Other people, who are not interested in an inner search, are, at present, fulfilling their own karmic need for a particular variety of experience; it is neither advisable nor feasible to urge them to follow this path. It is a worthwhile cause, this, and does not require us to interfere with others, to propagandize them or to reform them. Rather does it as us to do these things to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Few know where really to look for the truth. Most go for it to other beings, to books, or to churches. However, the few who know the proper direction turn around and look in that place where the truth is not only a living dynamic thing but is their own. And this is deep, deep within themselves. It is logical to assert if every individual in a group is made better, the group of which one is a part will be made better. And what is human society but such a group? The best way to help it is to start with the individual who is under one’s actual control—oneself—and better one. Do that, and it will then be possible to apply oneself to the task of bettering the other members of society, not only more easily but with less failure. The Holy Land, flowing with milk and honey, is within us but the wilderness that we have to cross before reaching it, is within us too. The great sources of wisdom and truth, of virtue and serenity, are still within ourselves as they have ever been. Mysticism is simply the art of turning inwards in order to find them. Will, thought, and feeling are withdrawn from their habitual extroverted activities and directed inwards in this subtle search. One understands then what it means to do nothing of oneself, for one feels clearly that the higher power is doing though one whatever has to be done, is doing it rightly, while one oneself is merely watching what is happening. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The experience of enlightenment brings a tremendous feeling of well-being. It is in one’s attitude toward oneself particularly that we see the immense advance one has made beyond ordinary beings. Just as the Illumined State does not prevent one from receiving physical impressions from the World around one, so it does not prevent one from receiving psychic impressions from the people around one. However, one does not cling to any of these impressions, nor does one let one’s emotions get entwined with them. For one there is no split between the spiritual and secular, nothing done that is not done in holy meditation. The serenity of one’s life is a hidden one. It does not depend on fortune’s halting course. The feeling nature of one who attains enlightenment opens itself to purely impersonal reactions. It is a state of tranquil feeling, not of emotional feeling. Both opposites find their place in existence for the unenlightened, the masses, the narrow-horizoned. The tension between them contributes toward development, the conciliation of extremes broadens views. With enlightenment comes equilibrium, harmony, balance, the larger outlook, piercing insight. “And behold, the people did rejoice and glorify God, and the whole face of the land was filled with rejoicing,” reports Helaman 11.18. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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