Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!

ImageWe seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which is to shape what makes up our form. However, there is no need for you to trouble yourself over these things. If your reasoning is correct, it should throw some light upon the peculiar quality of property delinquency in the delinquent subculture. We have already seen how the rewardingness of a college-boy and middle-class way of life depends, to a great extent, upon general respect for property right. In an urban society, in particular, the possession and display of property are the most ready and public badges of reputable social class status and are, for that reason, extraordinarily ego-involved. That property actually is a reward for middle-class morality and the possession of property. The middle-classes have, then, a strong interest in scrupulous regard for property rights, not only because property is intrinsically valuable but because the full enjoyment of their status requires that status be readily recognizable and therefore that property adhere to those who earn it. The cavalier misappropriation or destruction of property, therefore, is not only a diversion or diminution of wealth; it is an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

ImageGroup stealing, institutionalized in the delinquent subculture, is not just a way of getting something. It is a means that is the antithesis of sober and diligent labor in a calling. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status. Money and other valuables are not, as such, despised by the delinquent. For the delinquent, and the non-delinquent alike, money is a most glamorous and efficient means to a variety of ends and one cannot have too much of it. But, in the delinquent subculture, the stolen dollar has an odor of sanctity that does not attach to the dollar saved or the dollar earned. This delinquent system of values and way of life does its job of problem-solving most effectively when it is adopted as a group solution. We have stressed that the efficacy of a given change in values as a solution and therefore the motivation to such a change depends heavily upon the availability of reference groups within which the deviant values are already institutionalized, or whose members would stand to profit from such a system of deviant values if each were assured of the support and concurrences of the others. So it is with delinquency. We do not suggest that joining in the creation or perpetuation of a delinquent subculture is the only road to delinquency. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

ImageWe do believe, however, that for most delinquents delinquency would not be available as a response were it not socially legitimized and given a kind of respectability, albeit by a restricted community of fellow-adventurers. In this respect, the adoption of delinquency is like the adoption of the practice of appearing at the office in open-collar and shirt sleeves. It is much more comfortable, is it more sensible than full regalia? Is it neat? Is it dignified? The arguments in the affirmative will appear much more forceful if the practice is already established in one’s milieu or if one sense that others are prepared to go along if someone makes the first tentative gestures. Indeed, to many of those who sweat and chafe in ties and jackets, the possibility of an alternative may not even occur until they discover that it has been adopted by their colleagues. This way of looking at delinquency suggests an answer to a certain paradox. Countless mothers have protested that their “Simon” was a good boy until he fell in love it a certain bunch. However, the mothers of each of Simon’s companions hold the same view with respect to their own offspring. It is conceivable and even probable that some of these mothers are naïve, that one or more of these youngsters are “rotten apples” who infected the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

ImageWe suggest, however, that all of the mothers may be right, that there is a chemistry in the group situation itself which engenders that which was not there before, that group interaction is a sort of catalyst which releases potentialities not otherwise visible. This is especially true when we are dealing with a problem of status-frustration. Status, by definition, is a grant of respect from others. A new system of norms, which measure status by criteria which one can meet, is of no value unless others are prepared to apply those criteria, and others are not likely to do so unless one is prepared to reciprocate. We have referred to a lingering ambivalence in the delinquent’s own value system, an ambivalence which threatens the adjustment one has achieved and which is met through the mechanism of reaction-formation. The delinquent may have to contend with another ambivalence, in the area of one’s status sources. The delinquent subculture offers him status as against other children of whatever social level, but is offers hum this status in the eyes of one’s fellow delinquents only. To the extent that there remains a desire for recognition from groups whose respect has been forfeited by commitment to a new subculture, one’s satisfaction in one’s solution is imperfect and adulterated. One can perfect one’s solution only by rejecting as status sources those who reject one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

ImageThis too may require a certain measure of reaction-formation, going beyond indifference to active hostility and contempt for all those who do not share one’s subculture. One becomes all the more dependent upon one’s delinquent gang. Outside that gang one’s status position is now weaker than ever. The gang itself tends toward a kind of sectarian solidarity, because the benefits of membership can only be realized in active face-to-face relationships with group members. This interpretation of the delinquent subculture had important implications for the sociology of social problems. People are prone to assume that those things which we define as evil and those which we define as good have their origins in separate and distinct features of our society. Evil flows from poisoned wells; good flows from pure and crystal fountains. The same source cannot feed both. Our view is different. It holds that those values which are at the core of the American way of life, which help to motivate the behavior which we most esteem as typically American, are among the major determinants of that which we stigmatize as pathological. More specifically, it holds that the problems of adjustments to which the delinquent subculture is a response are determined, in part, by those very values which respectable society holds most sacred. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

ImageThe same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. The rebel insists that one’s identity be respected; one fights to preserve one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity against the suppressive demands of one’s society. One must range oneself against the group which represents to one conformism, adjustment, and the death of one’s own originality and voice. Continuously through human history and through the life-span of each one of us, there goes on this dialectical process between individual and society, person and group, being and community. When either pole of the dialectic is neglected, impoverishment of the personality sets in. Every being has from time to time impulses to shock one’s society, fantasies of outraging one’s neighbors. Paradoxically enough, one’s own continued mental vitality depends on this. Also, paradoxically, the community itself, even though it condemns the outrage, gets its health, vitality and new growth from the outrage. This shows once again that human beings do not grow in one-dimensional fashion toward something better and better, but rather by a dynamic process, a thesis and antithesis; they grow down at the same time as they grow up, deeper while they grow higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

ImageThe Garden of Eden myth portrays the rebellion as being against God. And, indeed, it is against authority, against the status quo, against whatever clings to the values of the past rather than looks to the future. What is omitted from the rhetoric in this rebellion is that the outcome is not either/or, but a dialectical interplay: we need authority as we rebel against it. We rebel against the culture with the very language and knowledge that we learned from the culture; we revolve against or parents while loving them at the same time. The rebel also needs one’s society. One’s language, one’s concepts, one’s way of relating to others all come from that culture which one now opposes. One rises from the society, criticizes it, and aligns oneself with those who are trying to reform it; and all the while one is a member of the very culture one opposes. If one thinks of civilization as ungrateful in killings its prophets, one also sees the absurdity of the whole question of gratitude or ingratitude in the behavior of the rebel. This is why I call the relationship dialectic. It is a dynamic interrelationship in which each pole exists by virtue of the other pole—as one changes, the other does likewise. Beings therefore have a right to fear that society may unhuman them. Yet no being has made the best of one’s gifts without the setting [up] of a helpful society, such as the Greek or the Italian city states. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

ImageAlways the animal drive for self, the jungle of nature, waits to disrupt one’s city. And yet that force, anti-social as it is, is not all alien or all bad. The mind that drives it is full of human wishes. The Greeks remembered that every mind, good as well as bad, takes strength from our animal body. It is the nature of society to suppress that individual person. Pointing this out, it is a surprise that people do often talk as through the group ought to behave differently. Society can be spoken of as being bureaucratic, juggernaut, supertechnocratic, all implying that while society has its faults, we are what we are. On one hand, this arises from a utopianism—the expectation that when we develop a society which trains us rightly, we will all be in fine shape. On the other hand, it is like a child wheeling one’s parents because they are not taller or in some other way different from what they are. All of which society cannot be expected to be. For society, on one side, is us. The rebel is a split personality that one realizes one’s society nursed one, met one’s needs, and gave one security to develop one’s potentialities; yet one smarts under its constraints and finds it stifling. The rebel is continually struggling to make the society into a community. People feel they rebel, therefore they exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

ImageIn our particular day, the rebel fights the mechanizing bureaucratic trends not because these in themselves are evil, but because they are the paramount modern channels for the dehumanizing of beings, the stultifying loss of integrity, and the indignity of beings. One fights affluence for a similar reason, for one thinks that an abundance of wealthy may erode power, and riches are particularly dangerous for the well-being of republics because corruption has a tendency to set in and take precedence over justice, family values and human rights. The rebel also may be found in the colorful, albeit sometimes tattered, clothes of the dropout. The young person rightly sensing the threat to one’s values and to one’s life in the Syrian war, pollution, and the dehumanization which seems to accompany our vast technological progress, drops out of society for a period. One’s action is protest against the rigidity of society, but it is also a time in which one can find oneself. It is similar to the withdrawal of Jesus to the wilderness to find inner integrity before beginning their ministries. It is also similar to that period of wandering taken by the students of the Middle Ages as an integral part of their education. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

ImageTrue, the dropout can never completely deny one’s culture, never entirely sever one’s umbilical cord. One takes it with one to the mountain or the dessert in one’s language, one’s way of thinking, and even as an object against which to protest. However, in one’s withdrawal one can get new perspective, a new awareness of oneself which may stand one in very good stead later on. I have had the impression in talking with hipsters that for some of them the year or so they dropped out protected them from psychosis. It gave them some breathing time in the burdensome sequence of nursery, elementary school, high school, college, graduate school—during which many of them find themselves in a genuine danger of suffocation. Often the dropping out serves a purpose similar to psychoanalysis. No one would argue that the dropout has not selected a more satisfactory way of working things out, not to say less expensive for all concerned, than a stint in a mental hospital. It is entirely possible that one comes back from one’s seemingly lighthearted wanderings with a new seriousness in one’s relationship to oneself and one’s society. Human beings can be conditioned into any form of Nazilike obedience or antlike organization of colonies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

ImageHowever, we must not forget at the same moment that there are individuals who from time to time pull themselves and oppose the group even to the extent of going to prison. Edward Snowden, the Berrigan brothers, and Bonhoeffer come to mind. Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to make the Pentagon Papers available to the people was the one tangible step he felt he could take to shorten the Vietnam war. Some people become rebels because they have empathy for the suffering of people, especially helpless children. Rebellion can be a flamboyant, long struggle for psychological integrity. However, whatever the motives, it is clear that rebels step out because in many cases they are performing acts against law and order. With social media, people are less dependent on the news because they can get their points out using mass communication and modern technology in the service of the rebellion. There is no escape from living through this dialectical conflict of individual and society. The only choice is whether one will live it through constructively and with zest and dignity or waste one’s energy and substance protesting against a Universe which is not organized according to one’s living. No matter how much society is changed—and much of it cries to high Heaven for change—there still will exist the fundamental dialectical situation of individuation against the conformist, leveling tendencies of the society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

ImageSome societies have recognized and made allowance for the destructive, protesting, anarch needs of the citizens. Then you get situations like what is going on in China. Tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong are peacefully marching on the 22nd anniversary of the former colony’s handover from Britain to China, but also a group of protestors took their frustrations out, as hundreds of young protestors broke into the heart of the government of Hong Kong’s legislative council. We need our ways of mocking authority. We have our Halloween and April Fools’ Day. However, we need ways of channeling our secret dreams of outraging our neighbors and scandalizing the town fathers—in short, of symbolically expressing our dreams of revenge on a society that thwarts and confines us. An interesting example of this is the scapegoat king, who accepts the scepter knowing that he will be killed during some riotous saturnalia in which all authority is mocked. And consider the mocking of ultimate religious authority in the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus. The expression of our disdain and mocking—indeed, of all these so-called negative and destructive emotions—enables us then to see and experience more clearly the beneficial side of religious conviction. We can change the forms of these beneficial and negative sides of human nature, but we cannot change the fact of them without amputating part of human experience and impoverishing ourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

ImageAre not the excesses in American life—one of which is violence—symptoms in part of a lack of sound opportunities to let out the secret dreams of revenge on the society that thwarts and contains the individual. You cannot in fact bottle up these deep feelings of protest in a World as mechanical as ours and think that you will syphon them off casually in lacy thrillers and in little evasins of the forces of order. Anti-social feelings in a hierarchy society like ours are first a power, then a commodity on which some unscrupulous leader can raise to fame, and become the spokes persons for the dream of violence of all the underrepresented. The recognition of the value of the rebel would go a long way in channeling such daimonic forces in constructive directions. For the rebel does what the rest of us would like to do but do not dare. Not that Christ willingly takes on Himself the sins and the scorns of beings; He acts, lives, and dies, vicariously for the rest of us. This is what makes Him a rebel. The rebel and the savior then turn out to be the same figure. Through his rebellion the rebel saves us. We see here another demonstration of my previous thesis—that civilization needs the rebel. The possibilities of the human being are unlimited, and that statement can be de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

ImageEvery problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only temporary difficulties that will go away on their own accord when the time comes. Saying that possibilities are unlimited to a person who has not figured out how to overcome a situation, however, is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing one out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky is the limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean. There is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknow to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When we overwork, we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes, a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our physical and emotional environment. There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting. We can blind ourselves to reality and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our family backgrounds or our historical situations, but such transcendence can occurs only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

ImageFor seekers of truth, real fruit is only borne when one seeks within, for the indwelling God, who author of our soul. The question of how far one will be prepared to travel in this quest has no geographical reference. It is a metaphorical one and refers only to the time one can give each day to the exercises, studies, and devotions, as well as to the moral ideals one can bring oneself to pursue. One is not asked for more than one feels one can humanly give under one’s present circumstances and responsibilities. We do not need to cross the sea to find God—the Word is nigh thee, is in thy heart. To come to know our true divine power, we must continually become something greater and therefore that which we were must come to an end. Immortality through it sounds good on the surface in an exoteric sense is truly the source of attachment and fear of change. Embracing God is overcoming perfection. Through the depths of your soul you must also come to realize that all systems of enslavement which emanate from this concept of external divinity are equally useless when compared to your potential. Simply reading and understanding it intellectually is not enough. It must be experiences through the work itself so that you have become stronger in faith, so strong that you can rise above stress and anxiety. “They were in captivity, and again the Lord did deliver them out of bondage by the power of his word; and we were brought into this land, and here we began to establish the church of God throughout this land also,” reports Alma 5.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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Nature Keeps Her Equilibrium by Bringing in Counter Forces, or Complementary Ones, to Correct or Balance Any Condition where to Much has Gone too Far!

ImageYou know why this disconcerts you so very much? I will tell you why! Because you never admitted to yourself that what you did in writing your books, in writing your songs, in singing your songs…you never admitted that it was all for us. You always pretended it was some great gesture to humankind and for their benefit. Wipe us out. Really! You never admitted that you were one of us, talking to the rest of us, and what you did, you as part of us! It may be argued that the working-class boy does not care what middle-class people think of him, that he is ego-involved only in the opinions of his family, his friends, his working-class neighbors. A definitive answer to this argument can come only from research designed to get at the facts. This research, in our opinion, is yet to be done. There is, however, reason to believe that most children are sensitive to some degree about the attitudes of any persons with whom they are thrown into more than the most superficial kind of contact. The contempt or indifference of others, particularly of those like schoolmates and teachers, with whom we are constrained to associate for long hours every day, is difficult, we suggest, to shrug off. It poses a problem with which one may conceivably attempt to cope in a variety of ways. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageOne of the ways we may attempt to deal with the problem is by making an active effort to change oneself in conformity with the expectations of others; one may attempt to justify or explain away one’s inferiority in terms which will exculpate one; one may tell oneself that one really does not care what these people think; one may react with anger and aggression. However, the least probable response is simple, uncomplicated, honest indifference. If we grant the probable truth of the claim that most American working-class children are most sensitive to status sources on their own level, it does not follow that they take lightly rejection, disparagement and censure from other status sources. Even on their own social level, the situation is far from simple. The working class, we have repeatedly emphasized, is not culturally homogeneous. Not only is there much diversity in the cultural standards applied by one’s own working-class neighbors and kin so that it is difficult to find a working-class milieu in which middle-class standards are not important. In addition, the working-class culture we have described is, after all, an ideal type; most working-class people are culturally ambivalent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageDue to lack of capacity, of the requisite character structure or of luck, they may be working-class in terms of job and income; they may have accepted this status with resignation and rationalized it to their satisfaction; and by example, by class-linked techniques of child training and by failure to support the middle-class agencies of socialization they may have produced children deficient in the attributes that make for status in middle-class terms. Nevertheless, all their lives, through all the major media of mass indoctrination—the school, the movies, the radio, the newspapers and the magazines—the middle-class powers-that-be that manipulate these media have been trying to sell them on middle-class values and middle-class standards of living, for the most part. However, TV News has become nothing but reports of crime, destruction, and anchored by talking heads who are pushing for rebellion and an abortion of American family values. Nonetheless, there is the propaganda of the deed, the fact that the middle-class powers-that-be have seen with their own eyes working-class contemporaries get ahead and make the grade in the middle-class World. In consequence of all this, we suspect that few working-class parents unequivocally repudiate as intrinsically worthless middle-class objectives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageThere is good reason to believe that the modesty of working-class aspirations is partly a matter of trimming one’s sails to the available opportunities and resources and partly a mater of unwillingness to accept the discipline which upward striving entails. However complete and successful one’s accommodation to an humble status, the vitality of middle-class goals, of the American Dream, is nonetheless likely to manifest itself in one’s aspirations for one’s children. One’s expectations may not be grandiose, but ne will want one’s children to be better off than one is. Whatever one’s own work history and social reputation may be, one will want one’s children to be steady and respectable. One may exert few beneficial pressures to succeed and the experiences one provides one’s children may even incapacitate them for success; one may be puzzled at the way they turn out. However, whatever the measures of one’s own responsibility in accounting for the product, one is not likely to judge that product by unadulterated corner-boy standards. Even corner-boy parents, although they may value in their children such corner-boy virtues as generosity to friends, personal loyalty and physical prowess, are likely also to be gratified by the recognition by middle-class representatives and by the kinds of achievement for which the college-boy want of life is a prerequisite. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageEven in the working-class milieu from which one acquired his incapacity for middle-class achievement, the working-class corner-boy may find himself at a status disadvantage as against his more upwardly mobile peers. Lastly, of course, is that most ubiquitous and inescapable status of sources, oneself. Technically, we do not call the person’s attitudes towards oneself status but rather self-esteem, or, when the quality of the self-attitude is specifically moral, conscience or superego. The important question for us is this: To what extent, if at all, do boys who are typically working-class and corner-boy in their overt behavior evaluate themselves by middle-class, college-boy standards? For our overt behavior, however closely it conforms to one set of norms, need not argue against the existence of effectiveness of alternative and conflicting norms. The failure of our own behavior to conform to our own expectations is an elementary and commonplace fact which gives rise to the tremendously important consequences of guilt, self-recrimination, anxiety and self-hatred. The reasons for the failure of self-expectations and overt conduct to agree are more complex. One reason is that we often internalize more than one set of norms, each of which would dictate a different course of action in a given life situation; since we can only do one thing at a time, however, we are forced to choose between them or somehow to compromise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageIn either case, we fall short of the full realization of our expectations and must somehow cope with the residual discrepancy between those expectations and our overt behavior. The love of violence is, to me, the ancient and symbolic gesture of beings against the constraints of society. Vicious beings can exploit impulse as vicious. For no society is strong which does not acknowledge the protesting being; and no being is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal. Violence is the sphinx by the fireside, and she has a human face. In Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, we see a re-enactment of an actual event that took place in the eighteenth century but which has special poignancy for us here. A doctor tries to teach a savage boy who was found in the forest living as an animal to see if he can be brought back to the human condition. The affectionate Victor, as Truffaut has named the boy, learns to speak and to count in rudimentary fashion. However, these small successes and failures only add up to ambiguity. In a moment of discouragement, Truffaut as the doctor resolves to stake all on one unambiguous test to find out whether Victory is human—will the boy fight back when he is punished? Knowing that Victory accepts punishment—being shut in a closet—when he has made a mistake, Truffaut tried to shut him in the closet when he had correctly done the task he was assigned. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageVictory puts up a fight because he did nothing wrong and is being shoved in a closet. With a glad sigh of recognition the doctor stats that there is present in the boy the central element which constitutes the human being. What is this element? It is the capacity to sense injustice and take a stand against it in the form of I-will-be-destroyed-rather-than-submit. It is a rudimentary anger, a capacity to muster all one’s power and asset it against what one experiences as unfair. However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguished characteristic of human beings. It is, in short, the capacity to rebel. In the present day, when multitudes of people are caught in anxiety and helplessness, they tend psychologically to freeze up and to cast out the city walls whoever would disturb their pretended peace. Ironically, it is during just those periods of transition when they most need the replenishing that the rebel can give them that people have the greatest block in listening to him. However, in casting out the rebel, we cut our own lifeline. For the rebel function is necessary as the life-blood of culture, as the very roots of civilization. First I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageThe revolutionary seeks an external political change, the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another. The origin of the term is the World revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first—which leaves the individual citizen, who has had to endure the inevitable anarchy between the two, worse off than before. Revolution may do more harm than good. The rebel, on the other hand, is one who opposes authority or restraint: one who breaks with established custom or tradition. His distinguished characteristic is his perpetual restlessness. He seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control. He may, as Sokrates did, refer to himself as the gadfly for the state—the one who keeps the state for settling down into complacency, which is the first step toward decadence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageNo matter how much the rebel gives the appearance of being egocentric or of being on an ego trip, this is a delusion; inwardly the authentic rebel is anything but bash. True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. Every act of rebellion tacitly presupposes some value. Whereas the revolutionary tends to collect power around himself, the rebel does not seek power as an end and has little facility for using it; he tends to share his power. Like the resistance fighters in France during the last World war, the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men and women but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin. The enslaved being who kills one’s master is an example of the revolutionary. He can then only take his master’s place and be killed in turn by later revolutionaries. However, the rebel is the one who realizes that the master is as much imprisoned, if not as painfully, as he is by the institution for slavery; he rebels against that system which permits slaves and masters. His rebellion, if successful, saves the master also from the indignity of own slaves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageWe can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time of Greek opulence—the archaic figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight knowing smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness. What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century head of Hermes by Praxiteles. These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension. They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the looking about on all sides least something unknown might happen—that goes with living in fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageAlmost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, have on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a telltale sigh of anxiety. And as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that is typical of apprehension. The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “…his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues “…But his torso still glows like a candelabrum in which his gaze, only turned low, holds and gleams. Else could not the curve of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn of the loins could a smile be running to that middle, which carried procreation. Else would this stone be standing maimed and short under the shoulders’ translucent plunge nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey nor breaking out of all its countours like a star: for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the later Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThese early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest, gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic. (Persons in  therapy nowadays, considering the strange spectacle in ancient Greece, remark on the fact that it is the strong person like Odysseus or Achilles who weeps.) However, the Greeks knew also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he chooses his passions rather than be chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the diamonic, as modern Western beings do. The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke’s curious last sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: “You must change your life.” This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not all moralistic (the class has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we take into our own lives this new harmonious form. Christianity actually entered the confusion of the Roman World in order to simplify it and to lighten the terrible burdens of the miscarried sexual era. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageChristianity was seen as the era of the son in revolt against the oppressions and inequalities of the era of the family. Under Christianity the spiritual fatherhood of Christ took the place of biological fatherhood of the family. Christ poses a totally new and radical question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” The son was now completely independent; he could freely choose his own spiritual father and was no longer bound by the fatalities of heredity. The individual could fashion his or her own salvation, independent of any Earthly authority. Christianity was a great democratization that put spiritual power right back into the hands of the single individual and in one blow wiped away the inequalities of this dispossessed and the slaves that had gradually and inexorably developed since the breakup of the primitive World and that had assumed such grotesque proportions in the mad drivenness of the Mediterranean World. As many historical scholars have pointed out, Christianity in this sense dipped back into paganism, into primitive communalism, and extended it beyond the tribe. Christianity was seen as a new form of democratic, universal, magical self-renewal. The person recaptured some of the spiritual integrity that the primitive had enjoyed. But as in all things human, the whole picture is ambiguous and confused, far different from the ideal promise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageActually Christianity was harnessed by the state, and its power was infused into the institution of kingship to keep its authority; the attack on the fatality of biology, the accidents of heredity, was put into the service of the ideology of the family, and it reinforced patriarchy. We still see this in Roman Catholic countries today. In other words, Christianity failed to establish the universal democratic equality that it had promised historically—the reinstitution of the sacred primitive community plus a valuation of the individual person that had no existed before. Such a revolution in thought and in social forms would have kept everything that was best in the primitive World view, and at the same time it would have liberated the person from the dead weight of communal constraints and conservatism that choked off individual initiative and development. Obviously, this failure of Christianity was intimately tied up with the general problem of class, slavery, real economic inequality. This had been the tragedy that Rome herself was unable to resolve. Rome created a new type of citizen but failed to carry through and create the necessary economic equality of the families, which was the only thing that could guarantee the new structure. After all, if each being was a king in one’s own family, one had to be an equal king with all others; otherwise the designation lost all meaning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageTheoretically, the state was dedicated to this kind of democracy because it arrogate to itself the power to hid everything in balance, to checkmate competing powers and to protract the citizens against each other. In the earlier chiefdoms, the kin group still kept their power, and there was no one to keep them from feuding among themselves. The chief’s kin group was usually the strongest, and he could punish those who attacked him, but he did not monopolize force as the later state did; he could not, for example, compel the people to go to war. The crucial characteristic of the state, and the hallmark of its genuine power and tyranny, was that it could compel its subjects to go to war. And this was because the power of each family was given over to the state; the idea was that this would prevent the social misuse of power. This made the state a king of power-bank, but the state never used this power to abolish economic inequalities; as a result it actually misused the social power entrusted to it by the families and held them in unequal bondage. Christianity, too, perpetuated this economic inequality and slavishness of the would-be free, democratic citizen; and there never has been, historically, any fundamental change in the massive structure of domination and exploitation represented by the sate after the decline of primitive society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageThe Reformation was a late attempt to reassert the promise of early Christianity—true individual power and equality—but it too failed by being absorbed in the unequal state scramble. It was not until World War I that the whole stricture finally crumbled, after the rumbling blow given by the French Revolution: the patriarchal family, divine monarchy, the dominance of the Church, the credibility of the democratic state in its promise of true equality. The Soviets alone pushed several of these down a mine shaft along with the czar. We are struggling today in the mire of this very discredit of all overlapping traditional immortality symbols. The struggle actually began at the time of the Roman Empire, and we have still not resolved it. We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated World conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageNot that promise of the ancient World and of Christianity failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out o them: the era of psychological man. We can look at it as a development out of the era of the son. It took the form of a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. It represented a new power candidate for replacing all the previous ideologies of immortality, but now an almost completely and unashamedly secular one. This was a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one’s own acts, one’s own works, one’s own discovery of truth. This was a kind of secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual. Instead of having one hero chieftain leading a tribe or a kingdom or one hero savior leading all humankind, society would not become the breeding ground for the development of as many heroes as possible, individual geniuses in great number who would enrich humankind. This was the explicit program of Enlightenment thinkers and of the ideology of modern Jeffersonian democracy. But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific austian being too has failed—in two resounding ways. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageThese two ways of failure were represented almost all by themselves sum up the crisis of the end of our century. For one thing, modern democratic ideology simply repeated the failure of Rome and Christianity: it did not eliminate economic inequality. And so it was caught in the same fundamental and tragic contradictions as its predecessors. Second, the hope of Fustian beings was the they would discover Truth, obtain the secret to the workings of nature, and so assure the complete triumph of beings over nature, one’s apotheosis on Earth. Not only have Faustian beings failed to do this, but one is actually ruining the very theater of one’s own immortality with one’s own poisonous and madly driven works; once one had eclipsed the sacred dimensions, one had only the earth left to testify to the value of one’s life. This is why, I think, even one-dimensional politicians and bureaucrats, in both capitalist and communist countries, are becoming anxious about environmental collapse; the Earth is the only area of self-perpetuation in the new ideology of Faustian beings. “Hello, son, you are ready to come into the end? We cannot wait to hold you and rock you to sleep in your rocking chair. Before you know it, you will be standing, crashin ‘round the house like bandits, all day. You cannot get in to too much trouble, nothing gonna stop me from loving you always. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Image“My wild, wild son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are were you are supposed to be. Oh, my wild, wild, son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are living out your dream. Someday when you leave the house and the open road calls, just know your heart will not lie to you if you learn to listen close. When you meet your queen, go, get her make sure that she knows you will love her always, ‘fore you know it, your own child’s standing. You can crash around with them like bandits all day,” (Wild, Wild Son by Armin van Buuren). When you power is developed and accumulated it can then transmute and purify the energy of others so that it can be harnessed and channeled according to intent. We study God’s word to make sure that we have been adequately conditioned to raise our own store of personal power, and that way we are less likely to become a parasite. This kind of work should be employed strategically to take power from people who abuse power to level the playing field a bit. With the grace of God you will enhance your chances of success in your health, career, family, and education and in all things your power focuses on will be greatly intensified. “And he hath said: Repent all ye ends of the Earth, and come unto me, and be baptized in my name, and have faith in me, that ye may be saved,” reports Moroni 7.34. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

Cresleigh Homes

Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 2

Welcome to #BrightonStation Residence 2 at #CresleighRanch located in Rancho Cordova! Join Abbie Johnson as she walks through this beautiful single-story floor plan.

Visit our website to check out its many features and optional add-ons. Click the link https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-2/

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There is an Invisible Mechanism within the Universe and an Intelligent Mind (God) Directing this Mechanism!

ImageMaybe it is time I discovered what is going on here for myself. Now listen to me. I want you to go belowstairs and stay there. If someone benighted emissary of the thing should crash-land on our wintry little paradise, you will be sage from it down there. Stay there till I return. This is the same precaution being taken by others the World over. Belowground you are safe. And if this thing talks to you, this Voice, well, try to learn more about it. In the settlement houses and other adult-sponsored and managed recreational agencies similar conflicts may often be seen between the middle-class values of the adults in charge and the working-class values of the children for whose benefit the institution ostensibly exist. Such organizations smile upon neat, orderly, polite, personable, mannerly children who want to make something of themselves. The sponsor, directors and group work leaders find it a pleasure to work with such children, whose values are so like their own, and make them feel welcome and respected. They do indeed feel a special responsibility toward the boy whose family and neighborhood culture have not equipped him with those values, the rough boy, the dirty boy, the bum who just hangs around with the gang on the corner, in the pool hall or in the candy store. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageHowever, the responsibility they feel toward him is to encourage him to engage in more worthwhile activities, to join and to be a responsible member of some wholesome adult-supervised club or other group, to expurgate one’s language and, in general, to participate in the constructive program of the institution. Indeed, like the school, it functions to select potentially upwardly mobile working-class children and to help and encourage them in the upward climb. It is common experience of such organizations that they are very successful and do a lot of good but do not seem to get children who need them most. The reason is that here, as in the school, it is almost impossible to reward one or quite openly, punishing its absence or its opposite. The corner boy quickly senses that he is under the critical or at best condescending surveillance of people who are foreigners to his community and who appraise him in terms of values which he does no share. He is aware that he is being invidiously compared to others; he is uncomfortable; he finds it hard to accommodate himself to the rules of the organization. To win the favor of the people in charge he must change his habits, his values, his ambitions, his speech and his associates. Even were these things possible, the game might not be worth the candle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageSo, having sampled what they have to offer, he returns to the street or to his clubhouse in a cellar where facilities are meager but human relations more satisfying. Not only in terms of standards of middle-class adults but in terms of their children’s standards as well, the working-class culture is likely to be a failure. Despite the existence among middle-class children of a youth culture which may differ in significant ways from the culture of their parents, the standards these children apply are likely to relegate to an inferior status their working-class peers. Gradually the group became more critical of prospective members. A process somewhat evident from the beginning became more obvious. In general only boys who measured up to the group’s unwritten, unspoken and largely unconscious standards were ever considered. These standards, characteristics of their middle-class homes, required the suppression of the impulsive disorderly behavior and put a high value on controlled cooperative attitudes. Hence even these normally healthy and boisterous boys were capable of rejecting schoolmates they considered too wild and boisterous. Coincident with this was an emphasis on intellectual capacity and achievement. They preferred smart as contrasted with dumb prospects. The boys seemed to use their club unconsciously to express and reinforce the standards learned in their homes and the community. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageNot only teachers but schoolmates, in evaluating the character of other children, tend to give the highest ratings to the children of the higher social levels, although the correlation between social class and character reputation is far from perfect. Beneficial correlations between various indices of social class status of the home and social status in the schools as measured by pupils’ choices have been found. We have seen how social class and the behavior and personality associated with social class membership operate to determine prestige and clique and date patterns among high school boys and girls. This process operates in all classes, but it is especially noticeable in contacts with class V [lower-lower]. This class is so repugnant socially that adolescents in the higher classes avoid clique and dating ties with its members. Furthermore, working-class children are less likely to participate, and if they participate are less likely to achieve prominence, in extra-curricular activities, which are an important arena for the competition for status in the eyes of the students themselves. In the area of organized athletics the working-class boy is perhaps least unfitted for successful competition. Even here, however, he is likely to be at a disadvantage. Adherence to a training regimen and a schedule does not come to him as easily as to the middle-class boy and, unless he chooses to loosen his ties to his working-class friends, he is likely to find some conflict between the claims of the gang and those of his athletic career. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageFinally, although we must not minimize the importance of athletic achievement as a status-ladder, it is, after all, granted to relatively few, of whatever social class background, to achieve conspicuously in this area. In summary, it may confidently be said that the working-class boy, particularly if his training and values be those we have here defined as working-class, is more likely than his middle-class peers to find himself at the bottom of the status hierarchy whenever he moves in a middle-class to which he values middle-class status, either because he values the good opinion of middle-class persons or because he had to some degree internalized middle-class standards himself, he faces a problem of adjustment and is in the market for a solution. The delinquent subculture, we suggest, is a way of dealing with the problems of adjustment we have described. These problems are chiefly status problems: certain children are denied status in the respectable society because they cannot meet the criteria of respectable status system. The delinquent subculture deals with these problems by providing criteria of status which these children can meet. We remarked earlier that our ego-involvement in a given comparison with others depends upon status universe. Whom do we measure ourselves against? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageIn some other societies virtue may consist in willing acceptance of the role of peasant, low-born commoner or member of an inferior caste and in conformity to the expectations of that role. If others are richer, more nobly-born or more able than oneself, it is by he will of an inscrutable Providence and not to be imputed to one’s own moral defect. The sting of status inferiority is thereby removed or mitigated; one measures oneself only against those of like social position. We have suggested, however, that an important feature of American democracy, perhaps of Western European tradition in general, is the tendency to measure oneself against all comers. This means that, for children as for adults, one’s sense of persona worth is at stake in status comparisons with all other persons, at least of one’s own age and gender, whatever their family background or material circumstances. It means that, in the lower levels of our status hierarchies, whether adult or juvenile, there is a chronic fund of motivation, conscious or repressed, to elevate one’s status position, either by striving to climb within the established status system or by redefining the criteria of status so that one’s present attributes become status-giving assets. To manage private loves and hates is to participate in an intricate private emotional system. When elements of that system are taken into the marketplace and sold as human labor, they become stretched into standardized social forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageIn these forms, a person’s contribution of feeling is thinner, less freighted with consequence but at the same time it is less seen as coming less from the self and being less directed to the other. For that reason it is more susceptible to estrangement. I followed emotion work into the job market via two routes. First I entered the World of the flight attendant. As a point of entry, I chose American Airlines for several reasons: it puts a higher premium on service than other airlines do; its in-flight training program is perhaps the best in the World; its service has been ranked very high; and it has some of the best uniforms for flight attendants and pilots. For all these reasons, American’s company demands are higher and its work demands are met with success. Thus American fulfills the demands they put on flight attendants. It also gives sharper point to the general case about emotion work in public life. When emotional labor is put into the public marketplace, it behaves like a commodity: the demand for it waxes and wanes depending upon the competition with the industry. I gathered information at American in various ways. First, I watched. The head of American Airlines Training and Conference Center in Fort Worth, Texas, a gentle young man called Jim Thomas, allowed me to attend classes there. I watched recruits learning passenger landing and meal service in the mock cabin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageI got to know the trainers, who patiently explained their work to me. They were generous with their time on duty and off; one trainer invited me home to dinner, and several repeatedly invited me to lunch. Over countless other breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and in the airport bus, I talked with students doing Initial Training and with experienced flight attendants attending the mandatory Recurrent Training sessions. I interviewed twenty American officials, from the executive vice-president, training, sales, and billing. I held a group interview with seven supervisors. I interviewed four advertising agents employed by the firm commissioned to promote American Airlines and its flight attendants, and I looked through microfilms of thirty years of American Airlines advertising. Finally, I also interviewed the two public relations officials who were in charge of handling me. It is an elite occupation, it is difficult to find one of these prestigious careers. Flight attendants do emotion work to enhance the status of the customer and entice further sales by their friendliness, there is another side of the corporate show, represented by the bill collectors who are taught to deflate the anger and frustration of customers, so they are more likely to pay their bills on time. Therefore, some emotional labor principles apply to very different jobs and very different feelings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

ImageA nineteenth-century child working in a challenging Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper factory and a well-paid twenty-first century American flight attendant have something in common: in order to survive in their jobs, they must mentally prepare themselves—the factory worker from his own body and physical labor, and the flight attendant from his or her own feelings and emotional labor. I am interested in telling the flight attendant’s story in order to promote a fuller appreciation of the costs of what one does. And I want to base this appreciation on a prior demonstration of what can happen to any of us when we become estranged from our feelings and the management of them. We feel. But what is a feeling? I would define feeling, like emotion, as a sense, like the sense of hearing or sight. In a general way, we experience it when bodily sensation are joined with what we see or imagine. Like the sense of hearing, emotion communicates information. Anxiety is a signal function. From feeling we discover our own viewpoint on the World. We often say that we try to feel. However, how can we do this? Feelings are not stored inside us, and they are not independent of acts of management. Both the act of getting in touch with feeling and the act of trying to feel may become part of the process that makes the thing we get in touch with, or the thing we manage, into a feeling or emotion. In managing feeling, we contribute to the creation of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageIf this is so, what we think of as intrinsic to feeling or emotion may have always been shaped to social form and put to civic use. Consider what happens when young men roused to anger go willingly to war, or when followers rally enthusiastically around their king, or mullah, or football team. Private social life may always have called for the management of feelings. They party guest summons up a gaiety owed to the host, the mourner summons up a proper sadness for the funeral. Each offers up a feeling as a momentary contribution to the collective good. What gives social patterns to our acts of emotion management? I believe that when we try to feel, we apply latent feeling rules. We say, “I should not feel so angry at what she did,” or “given our agreement, I have no right to feel jealous.” Act of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling. Through them, we tell what is due in each relation, each role. We may tribute to each other in the currency of the managing act. In interaction we pay, overpay, underpay, play with, acknowledge our dues, pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally due another person. In these ways, we make our try at sincere civility. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageBecause the distribution of power an authority is unequal in some of the relations of private life, the managing acts can also be unequal. The myriad momentary acts of management compose part of what we summarize in the terms relation and role. Like the tiny dots of Seurat painting, the microcates of emotion management compose, through repetition and change over time, a movement of form. Some forms express inequality, others equality. Now what happens when feeling rules, like rules of behavioral display, are established though private negotiation but by company manuals? What happens when social exchanges are not, as they are in private life, subject to change or termination but ritually sealed and almost inescapable? What happens when the emotional display that one person owes another reflects a certain inherent inequality? The airline passenger may choose not to smile, but the flight attendant is obliged not only to smile but to try to work up some warmth behind it. What happens, in other words, when there is a transmutation of the private ways we use feeling? One sometimes needs a grand word to point out a coherent pattern between occurrences that would otherwise seem totally unconnected. My word is “transmutation.” When I speak of the transmutation of an emotional system, I mean to point out a link between a private act, such as attempting to enjoy a party, and a public act, such as summoning up good feeling for a customer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageWhat is it that we do privately, often unconsciously, to feelings that nowadays often fall under the sway of large organization, social engineering, and the profit motive. Trying to feel what one wants, expects, or thinks one ought to feel is probably no newer than emotion itself. Conforming to or deviating from feeling rules is also hardly new. In organized society, rules have probably never been applied only to observable behavior. “Crimes of the heart,” have long been recognized because proscriptions have long guarded the preactions of the heart; the Bible say not to covet your neighbor’s wife, not simply to avid acting on that feeling. What is new in our time is an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward out native capacity to play, wittingly and actively, upon a range of feelings for a private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations. This transmutation of the private use of feeling affects the two genders and the various social classes in distinctly different ways. Emotion management has been better understood by professionals because they have to create the emotional tine of social encounters: expressing joy at the Christmas presents others open, creating the sense of surprise at birthdays, or displaying alarm at the car speeding down the road. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageNow given the fact that others are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable, one can expect that sometimes the individual will try to exploit this very possibility, guiding the impression one makes through behavior felt to be reliably informing. For example, in gaining admission to a tight social circle, the participant observer may not only wear an accepting look while listening to an informant, but may also be careful to wear the same look when observing the informant talking to others; observers of the observer will then not as easily discover where one actually stands. When a neighbor dropped in to have a cup of tea, he would ordinarily wear at least a hint f an expectant warm smile as he passed through the door into the Cresleigh home. Since lack of physical obstructions outside the home and beautiful trees around the home, it usually made it possible to observe the visitor unobserved as he approached the house, islanders sometimes took pleasure in watching the visitor drop whatever expression he was manifesting and replace it with a sociable one just before reaching the door. However, some visitors, in appreciating this examination was occurring, would blindly adopt a social face a long distance from the house, thus ensuring the projection of a constant image. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageThis kind of control upon the part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process, and sets the stage for a kind of information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery. It should be added that since the others are likely to be relatively unsuspicious of the presumably unguided aspect of the individual’s conduct, he can gain much by controlling it. The others of course may sense that the individual is manipulating the presumably spontaneous aspects of his behavior, and seek in this very act of manipulation some shading of conduct that the individual has not managed to control. This again provides a check upon the individual’s behavior, this time his presumably uncalculated behavior, thus re-establishing the asymmetry of the communication process. Here I would like to add the suggestion that the arts of piercing an individual’s effort at calculated unintentionality seems better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor, and the initial asymmetry of the communication process is likely to be retained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageWhat is of great interest in this development is the intimate unity of patriarchal family ideology with that of kingship. The king represented the new fountainhead of spiritual power in which the subjects were nourished. In primitive society the entire group had created magical power by means of the jointly celebrated ritual. However, with the gradual development of specialized ritualists and priests, the power to create power often fell to a special class and was no longer the possession of the whole collectivity. Where this happened it helped to turn the average man into an impotent subject. In many agrarian societies the priests went on to develop astronomy, calendars, and rituals of power for the control of nature via magic, whereas previously each person had helped exercise such control via the communal rituals. Without the priests’ calendar, how would the farmer know the auspicious days for planting? With their astronomy the priests accrued the tremendous prestige of predicting eclipses; and then they exercised the fantastic power of brining back the Sun out of the clutches of darkness. Not only did they save the World from chaos in such ways, but in some places they possessed the secret ritual for the creation of the kind’s power. Often the kings and priests were solidly allied in a structure of domination that monopolized all sacred power; this completed the development for the tribal level where the shaman would sometimes ally with the chief. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageAll the less affluent subject could do in these societies was to grovel to the king and bring food to the priests in order to get a mite of magical protective power. The fathers imitated the kings so as to reenact the divine plan in their own homes; in this way they got a reflection of the king’s powers. If the gentlemen and ladies observed proper ritual behavior, the kingdom would flourish. So long as everyone in the kingdom copied the king, fathered sons, married off daughters, kept order in the family, and observed the household rituals, the balance of nature would not be upset in the divine household. All this took place in the divine cities, which themselves were eternal, connected to Heaven (Babylon equals Gate of the Gods), and protected and regenerated by the priestly rituals. Each city with its pyramidal temples and towers rose like a spire to penetrate the sky, the dimensions of invisible power, and to bathe itself in it. We can still feel this Gothic cathedral which penetrated Heaven and was bathed in the light of powers of Heaven. Rome is called the eternal city not because today tourists can always go back and find her as she was when they first visited her a few decades ago, but because she was regenerated in ancient times by centennial rituals, and was thought to have so much power sustaining her that she would never falter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageOne of the strong impetuses to the triumph of Christianity was the increasing sackings of Rome by the barbarians, which showed everyone that something was wrong with the old powers and some new magical sources had to be tapped. The divine king in the sacred city bathing the holy empire—these were a power tool in which the fathers nourished themselves while they assured their own perpetuation in the person of their sons. We can see that this represents a new kind of unification experience, with a focal point of power, that in its own way tries to recapture the intense unity of primitive society, with its focus of power in the clan and the ancestral spirits. The emperors and kings who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere megalomania, but out of a real need for a unification of experience, a simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure source of power. The leader, like the people, senses a need for a strongly focused moral unity of the sprawling and now senseless diversity of the kingdom, and he tries to embody it in his own person: By proclaiming themselves gods of empire, Sargon and Rameses wished to realize in their own persons that mystic or religious unity which one constituted the strength of the clan, which still maintained the unity of the kingdom, and which could alone form the tie between all the peoples of an empire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageAlexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars, will, in their turn, impose upon their subjects the worship of the sovereign, not so much out of vanity as to consolidate moral unity…And so through its mystic principle the clan has survived in the empire. I must also warn that many will seem to have disdain for you because they are beings of false light. Their connection to divinity has been served due to a strategic plan of enslavement. Therefore, the masses will likely shun and reject you. However, you will cyclically being to attract others who align with your perfectly through time. This is not a path of severe loneliness, but rather a means to realize just how badly the human race has been shackled. We must awaken to this in order to see the truth of the lie and perceive the lie of truth. Do not take it personally. People are naturally God fearing and will as a result feel threatened by your power. “And it came to pass that they did break forth, all as one, in singing, and praising their God for the great thing which we had done for them, in preserving them from falling into the hands of their enemies. Blessed be the name of the Lord God Almighty, the Most High God. And their hearts were swollen with joy, unto the gushing out of many tears, because of the great goodness of God in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies; and they knew it was because of their repentance and their humility and that they had been delivered from an everlasting destruction,” reports 3 Nephi 4.30-33. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageIndeed, the Cosmic Vision, which revealed the Presence of Infinite Intelligence throughout life, throughout the Universe and throughout history, which explained so many of the Higher Laws to me, came incongruously enough while I was sitting in a Cresleigh Hub Apartments in Folsom, California. With this humbling insight, the need to go abroad disappeared. And I then saw that it was really an ancient complex—a kind of auto-suggestion—inherited from my own far, reincarnatory past. Indeed, I found out that if I had remained loyal to the inward direction I had originally travelled, I need never have gone overseas at all, nor to those other Asiatic countries where I sought for Truth. What I needed could be very well found within myself. However, I had accepted the suggestion our of my past as well as out of the lips and writings of other persons. And so I deviated from the inward way. The shortcut, which the journeys to Asia offered, turned out to be a long way, for I traveled beautiful roads, and, in the end, had to return, as well as all have, to my own road. Indeed, there was nowhere else to go, and my Quest ended there. As this change occurs within, the external corporeal reality also begins to reflect that change. This is how the shackles of limitation will be broken and humankind will be liberated. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageThis great work forces the physical plane to conform to and align with the plane of unlimited possibility by destroying the imposed limits of the false egregores of social, political and religion control. Then human beings, even those in high places, will come to be conscious of exactly how immortal they are not. If you are a God, why would you need to steal $1,000,000.00 USD from a child? As the World elevates to a higher level of thinking, then humankind can take back their sovereign right to rule over their own life. These are the true Olympians, not the mythic beings of human creation. Not until the light one has received becomes stabilized as a permanent thing can one be regarded as a master, and not until it is also full and complete can one be regarded as a sage. Sage is someone who is not only wide and dispassionate but who is also ready to proffer counsel out of one’s superior wisdom. One may dwell apart from humanity, if one chooses, but one’s Olympian aloofness will not be such that you cannot get a word of guidance out of one’s shy shut lips. Somehow we feel, and rightly, that the anchorite who has lost compassion or grown wholly self-centered may be pure and peaceful—but one cannot be a sage. One is a true messenger who seeks to keep one’s ego out of one’s work, who tries to bring God and beings together without oneself getting in between them. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20Image

One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!

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There were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuous concerts! I thought I would go mad with the beauty of it—witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding me. One of the situations in which children of all social levels come together and compete for status in terms of the same set of middle-class criteria and in which working-class children are most likely to be found wanting is in the schooled. American educators ae enamored of the idea of “democracy” signifies the fullest realization of the individual’s potentialities, the development of skills to an optimal level, the development of character and the abilities which can be bound by others, preparation for effective participation in the adult vocational World. Despite reservations such as with due regard to individual differences, this conception of democratic education implies that a major function of the schools is to promote, encourage, motivate, stimulate, in brief, reward middle-class ambition and conformity to middle-class expectations. However sincerely one may desire to avoid odious comparisons and to avoid, thereby, injury to the self-esteem of those who do not conform to one’s expectations, it is extremely difficult to reward, however subtly, successful conformity without at the same time, by implication, condemning and punishing the non-conformist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

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That same teacher who prides oneself on one’s recognition and encouragement of deserving work-class children dramatizes, by that very show of pride, the superior merit of the college-boy or college-girls working-class child to one’s less gifted or [street] corner-boy and corner-girl working-classmates. There are three goof reasons why status in the school, insofar as it depends upon recognition by the teacher, should be measured by middle-class standards. First, the teacher is hired to foster the development of middle-class personalities. The middle-class board of education, the middle-class parents whom they represent and, it is to be presumed, many of the working-class parents as well expect the teacher to define one’s job as the indoctrination of middle-class aspirations, character, skills and manners. Second, the teacher oneself is almost certain to be a middle-class person, who personally values ambition and achievement and spontaneously recognizes and rewards these virtues in others. The third relates to the school itself as a social system with certain structural imperatives of its own. The teacher’s textbooks in education and one’s own supervisors may stress individualization and consideration for the needs, limitations and special problems of each student. Nonetheless, the teacher actually handles 20, 30, or 40 students at a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

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Regardless of what one conceives one’s proper function to be, the teacher necessarily looks with favor on the quiet, cooperative, well-behaved pupils who make one’s job easier and with disapproval and vexation on the lusty, irrepressible boisterous youngsters who are destructive of order, routine and predictability in the classroom. Furthermore, the teacher is like to be upwardly mobile or at least anxious about the security of one’s tenure in one’s present job. One is motivated, therefore, to conform to the criteria in terms of which one’s superiors evaluate one. Those superiors may themselves be progressive and in teacher meetings preach democracy in the classroom and individualization and indeed genuinely believe in those goals. However, the degree to which a teacher tries to achieve these goals or succeeds in doing so is not highly visible and readily determined. On the other hand, grades, performance and standardized examinations, the cleanliness and orderliness of the classroom and the frequency with which the children are sent to the front office are among the most easily determined and objective bases for the evaluation of teacher performance. A good rating, then, by one’s supervisors is possible only if the teacher sacrifices to some degree the very individualization and tolerance which those same supervisors may urge upon one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

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Research on the kinds of behavior which teachers regard as the most problematical among their pupils gives results consistent with our expectations. The most serious problems, from the standpoint of the teacher, are those children who are restless and unruly, who fidget and squirm, who annoy and distract, who create discipline problems. The good children are the studious, the obedient, the docile. It is precisely the working-class children who are most likely to be problems because of their relative lack of training in order and discipline, their lack of interest in intellectual achievement and their lack of reinforcement by the home in conformity to the requirements of the school. Both in terms of conduct and in terms of academic achievement, the failures in the classroom are drawn disproportionately from the lower social class levels. The child has little or no choice in selecting the group within which one shall compete for status and one is evaluated against the total range of the ability distribution. It is here that, day after day, most of the children in the lower fourth of the distribution have their sense of worth destroyed, develop feelings of insecurity, become frustrated and lose confidence in their ability to learn that which they are capable of learning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

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In dialogue, each experiences the other as a person, as the origin and source of one’s intentional acts. Each participant aims to show one’s being to the other as it is for the individual. Transparency, not mystification, is one of the goals. It matters little whether the dialogue is nonverbal or verbal; whether it occurs between a philosopher and one’s pupil, a therapist and one’s patient, a parent and child, or two friends. The aim is to show oneself in willful honesty before the other and to respond to the other with an expression of one’s experience as the other has affected it. Dialogue is like mutual unveiling, where each seeks to be the experienced and confirmed by the other as the one he or she is for oneself. Such dialogue is most likely to occur when the two people believe each is trustworthy and of goodwill. The threat that motivates people to conceal their intentions and experience in manipulative encounters is absent in dialogue. The aims that makes the action of each intelligible to other will be fully revealed. Now, I would like to examine the relationship between an experimenter and one’s subject in the light of those analyses of the two kinds of encounter. The usual encounter between a psychological researcher and one’s subject has more in common with the example of the young being on the make than it has with dialogue. The experimenter wants something from the subject, but one wants to keep the individual partly mystified as to what it is. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

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Moreover, one does not want to frighten the subject away; so the psychological researcher often cloaks one’s intentions with camouflage. If one tips one’s hand, one may influence the subject and bias one’s findings. One tells the subject as little as one can when the latter appears in the laboratory. Actually, in some ways a research psychologist tries to impersonate a machine by depersonalizing oneself. One tries to be invisible or to be constant. One seldom tries to fin out from one’s subject just how that person experiences one, the researcher, either perceptually or in one’s fantasy. When an individual appears before others one’s actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing oneself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response one is concerned to obtained. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in one’s activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes one will intentionally and consciously express oneself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of one’s group or social status require this kind of expression and not because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval) that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

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Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s role will lead one to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet one may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. The others, in their turn. May be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts. In any case, in particular impressions, we may take a functional or pragmatic view and say that the individual has effectively projected a given definition of the situation and effectively fostered the understanding that given state of affairs obtains. There is one aspect of the others’ response that bear special comment here. Knowing that the individual is like to present oneself in a light that is favorable to one, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly one’s verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which one seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions one gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of one’s expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

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In this fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of the individual’s communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitors lifted one’s fork or spoon to one’s mouth, the eagerness with which one passed food into one’s mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) actually thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with C. No being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what one was actually feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer. Those who discuss labor often comment that nowadays most jobs call for a capacity to deal with people rather than with things, for more interpersonal skills and fewer mechanical skills. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

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The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society. There is a continual subdivision of work in many branches of the economy. Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. However, celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that people jobs actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feelings. There are many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum. We cannot dismiss the small as trivial by show how small rules, transgression, and punishments add up to form the longer strips of experience we call work. At the same time, it is hard to explain, for example, why companies train flight attendants in smiling, or how emotion tone is supervised, or what profit is ultimately tied to emotional labor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

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It is hard, in other words, to draw on this discourse alone and see how display work fits into the larger scheme of things. The third discourse takes pace in a quiet side street of American social science; it deals with the timeless issues of what an emotion is and how we can manage it. To uncover the heart of emotional labor, to understand what it takes to do it and what it does to people, it is important to realize that certain events in economic history cannot be fully understood unless we pay attention to the filigreed patterns of feeling and their management because the details of these patterns are an important part of what may men and women do for a living. Because such different traditions are joined here, my inquiry will have a different relevance for those who do the work it describes—the flight attendants. However, most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. One who has realized truth according to the Secret Doctrine may continue to follow the same vocation which one was practising before. That is, a king may remain a king and a carpenter may continue one’s carpentering. There is no law or rule which may be laid down as to the kind of work an illuminate may perform or abstain from performing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

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Similarly, the illuminate is not to be judged by one’s practice of or one’s omission to practise asceticism. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as friendly and dependable and her boss as up-and-coming, the waitress or the waiter who creates an atmosphere of pleasant dining, the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for; the salesman who creates the sense of a hot commodity, the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth—all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate roughly 33 percent of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly 50 percent have jobs that call for emotional labor. As traditionally more accomplished managers of feeling in private life, women more than men have put emotional labor on the market, and they know more about its personal costs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

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Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice about the use of feeling in the theater, or in psychotherapy, or in forms of group life that we admire. It is when we come to speak of the exploitation of those at the lower level of the hierarchy by those at the higher levels in any society that we become morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends o the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—many, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. In the primitive World, we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective immortality, since it was through him or her that the souls of the ancestors reentered the World. This is one reason why many primitives handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the process of giving birth to himself or herself with the help of the ancestral spirit; if one was mean to the child, the spirit might be upset and withdraw from the World. Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely, the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of the spirts from the ancestral World. However, this now the only spiritual lineage in which the on can perpetuate himself in turn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

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This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for disobeying him and going off to war—but their lives were literally his personal property, and he had this authority and used it. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immortal. If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history. For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 percent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. People remove the awareness of the conflict by renationalization, and the conflict manifests itself only unconsciously in increased stress, neurotic symptoms, or feeling guilty for the wrong reasons. Subjects are in a conflict situation because they are caught between obedience to authority and behavior patterns learned from childhood on: not to harm other people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

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However, is this really so? Have we learned not to harm other people? That may be what children are told in Sunday school. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems 65 percent of the subjects could be conditioned to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. Possibly this is because they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulted against what went on in other people: or they might be psychopaths, lacking in any kind of mortal reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not has a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.) However, we cannot forget in more people the presence of conscience, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

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Thus, while it may seem there is proof of the easy dehumanization of beings, the subjects’ reactions show rather the contrary—the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. We have to consider not only cruel behavior but the—often unconscious—guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average being.) Another attitude in the striving for power is that of never giving in. Agreeing with an opinion or accepting advice, even if they are considered right, is felt as a weakness, and the mere idea of doing so provokes rebellion. Persons for whom this attitude is important are inclined to lean over backward and, out of sheer fear of giving in, compulsively take the opposition stand. The most general expression of this attitude is the neurotic’s secrete insistence that the World should adapt itself to one instead of adapting oneself to the World. One of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic therapy comes from this source. The ultimate reason for a patient’s analysis is not the gaining of knowledge or insight, but the use of this insight in order to change one’s attitudes. In spite of recognizing that a change would be for one’s own good, a neurotic of this type abhors this prospect of changing because in implies for one a final giving in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

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The incapacity to do his has implications also for love relationship. Love, whatever else it may mean, always implies surrender, giving in to the lover as well as to one’s own feelings. The more a person, whether man or woman, is incapable of such giving in, the more unsatisfactory will be one’s love relationships. This same factor may have a bearing also on frigidity, inasmuch as having a climax presupposes just this capacity of completely letting go. The influence which we have seen that the striving for power has on love relations allows us to understand more completely many of the implications of the neurotic need for affection. Many of he attitudes involved in the striving for affection cannot be wholly understood without considering the part that is play in them by the striving for power. It is impossible to present the basic conflict by simply showing it in operation in a number of individuals. Because of its disruptive power the neurotic builds a defensive structure around it which serves not only to bolt it from view but so deeply imbeds it that it cannot be isolated in pure form. The result is that what appears on the surface is more the various attempts at solution than the conflict itself. A simple detailing of case histories, therefore, would not bring all its implications and nuances to full relief; the presentation would necessarily be too circumstantial and give too untransparent a picture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

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When we look at the complaint type of personality, it manifests all the traits that go with moving toward people. One shows marked need for affection and approval and an especial need for a partner—that is, a friend, lover, husband or wife who is to fulfill all expectations of life and take responsibility for good an evil, one’s successful manipulation becoming the predominant task. These needs have the characteristics common to all neurotic trends; that is, they are compulsive, indiscriminate, and generate anxiety or despondence when frustrated. They operate almost independently of the intrinsic worth of the others in question, as well as of the person’s real feelings toward them. However, these needs may vary in their expression, they all center around a desire for human intimacy, a desire for belonging. Because of the indiscriminate nature of one’s needs, the complaint type will be prone to overrate one’s congeniality and the interests one has in common wit those around one and disregard the separating factors. One’s misjudging of people this way is not due to ignorance, stupidity, or the inability to observe, but is determined by one’s compulsive needs. One feels-as illustrated by a patient’s drawing—like a baby surrounded by strange and threatening animals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

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There she stood, tiny and helpless, in the middle of the picture, around her a huge bee ready to sting her, a dog that could bite her, a cat that could jump at her, a bull that could gore her. Obviously, then, the real nature of other beings does not matter, expect in so far as the more aggressive ones, beings the more frightening, are the ones whose affection is the most necessary. In sum, this type needs to be liked, wanted, desired, loved; to feel accepted, welcomed, approved of, appreciated; to be needed, to be of importance to others, especially to one particular person; to be helped, protected, taken care of, guided. When in the course of analysis the compulsive character of these needs is pointed out to be a patient, one will be likely to assert that all these desires are quite natural. And, of course, here one is on defensible ground. Except for persons whose whole being has become so warped by sadistic trends that the desire for affection is choked beyond all possibility of functioning, it is safe to assume that everyone dos not to feel liked, to belong, to be helped, and so on. Where the patient errs is in claiming that all one’s frantic beating about for affection and approval is genuine, while in reality the genuine portion is heavily overshadowed by one’s insatiable urge to feel safe. Only when a being finds out one’s correct relation to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures will one find one’s own well-being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Presence of the Divine in the Name of Demands a Shy and Trembling Heart that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

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Silent entangler of beauty’s tresses! Most happy listener when the morning blesses thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes. The streets of Cresleigh Mills Station with their giant homes, were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern World in which he had emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcast, and documentaries soon taught him everything. He lay back in his large overstuffed easy chair marveling at the blue skies and the brilliant Sun he saw before him on the large television screen. He watched sleek and powerful Germany automobiles speeding on mountain roads and over prairies. He watched s somber bespectacled teacher speak in sonorous tones of “the ascent of man.” What is it about the structure of American society that produces delinquency in certain sectors of that society? We believe that problems of adjustment to social class play a vital role in the genesis of the delinquent subculture. First and most obviously, the working class child stares the social class status of one’s parents. In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a disadvantage and, to the extent that one cares what middle-class person think of one or has internalized the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, one may be expected to feel some shame. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

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The one area of one’s occupational life in which one might be free to act, the area of one’s own personality, must now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequious instrument by which goods are distributed. “When he was seven years old, I used to carry him [to work] on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours a day…I have often knelt down to feed him, as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Fed meals as he worked, as a steam engine is fed coal and water, this child was an instrument of labor. We should be concerned with the fundamental: the cost of becoming an instrument of labor. Shame is felt perhaps most strongly over the failures of other people, especially one’s parents, who have not been successful, who have not worked hard enough to have a large and beautiful house, or a new BMW M750Li automobile, Cadillac Escalade, Chevy Impala, Ford F350, or Honda Accord, or to send one to a private school, to live on the right street, on the right side of the river, or go to the right church. As class is an expression of economic success, then it follows that to belong as a child or an adolescent in a class below others is a statement that one’s parents have failed, they did not make it good. This is bad enough when they have not risen, unbearable if they have stated to fall even lower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

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Deeper than our disapproval of any breaking of then ten commandments possesses our conviction that a failure to keep moving is unforgiveable sin. Furthermore, people of status tend to be people of power and property. They have the means to make more certain that their children will obtain respect and other rewards which have status significance even where title in terms of deserving middle-class conduct is dubious. One me stress that throughout the importance of parental status in obtaining special consideration in school activities and on the job through “connections” and other means of exerting pressure. Finally, parents of good standing in the class system can usually provide their children with money, Betty Crocker desserts, clothes, cars, Cresleigh homes and other material amenities which not only function as external trappings and insignia of status, but which serve also as a means and avenue to activities and relationships which confer status. Like one’s parents, a child is unlikely to be invited to participate in activities which require a material apparatus one cannot afford; if invited, one is less likely to accept for fear of embarrassment; and if one accepts, one is less likely to be in a position to reciprocate and therefore to sustain a relationship premised on a certain among of reciprocity. It seems reasonable to assume that out of all this there arise feelings of inferiority and perhaps resentment and hostility. It is remarkable, however, that there is relatively little research explicitly designed to test this assumption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

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However, invidious status distinctions among young people are, after all, a result of individual differences in conformity to a set of conduct norms as well as simple functions of their parents’ social status. Variations in character reputation scores cannot be explained simply as a result of social class membership. The existence of “achieved” as well as “ascribed” criteria of status for children makes it possible for some working-class children to “rise above” the status to which the social class position of their parents would otherwise consign them. However, this does not make the situation psychologically any easier for those of their brethren who remain behind, or rather, below. Low achieved status is no pleasanter than low ascribed status, and very likely a good deal more unpleasant, for reasons we have indicated earlier; it reflects more directly on the personal inadequacy of the child and leaves one with fewer convenient rationalizations. The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her digital note pad, “Important to smile. Do not forget to smile.” The admonition came from the speaker in the front of the room, a crew cut pilot in his early fifties, speaking in a Southern drawl: “Now girls, I want you to get out there and really smile. Your smile if your biggest asset. I want you to go out there and use it. Smile. Really smile. Really lay it on.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

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The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset. However, as novices like the one next to me move through training, the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition—its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance the departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return. Trainers take it as their job to attach to the trainee’s smile an attitude, a viewpoint, a rhythm of feeling that is, as they often say, “professional.” This deeper extension of the professional smile is not always easy to retract and the end of the workday, as one worker in her first year at American Airlines noted: “Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I cannot relax. I giggle a lot, I shatter, I call friends. It is as if I cannot release myself from an artificially created elation that kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able to come down from it better as I get better at the job.” As the Public Service Announcement jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you are resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile like strip of paint on the nose of plane. Indeed, the plane and the flight attendant advertise each other. The radio advertisement foes on to promise not just smiles and service but a travel experience of real happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

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As in any industry such as banking, real estate, fashion, sales or retail, politeness and a smile are seen in one way, this is no more than delivering a service. Also, workers know their own smiles and convinces provided to customers is part of the on-the-job behavior, which is part of professionalism, dollar bills, and bitcoins that have intervened between the smiler and the smiled upon, and the extra effort it takes to invoke this spontaneous warmth makes it possible to exist in uniform—and companies now advertise spontaneous warmth, too. Customers call to inform departments that not only would they like educational material, but they would also like it to make them happy as well as inform them, and when your goal is to please the customer or member, you have to comply to their wishes. Nonetheless, at first glance, it might seem that the circumstances of the nineteenth-century factory child and the twentieth-century flight attendant could not be more different. To the boy’s mother, to Karl Marx, to the members of the Children’s Employment Commission, perhaps to the manager of the wallpaper factory, and almost certainly to the contemporary reader, the boy was a victim, even a symbol, of the brutalizing conditions of his time. We might imagine that he had an emotional half-life, conscious of little more than fatigue, hunger, and boredom. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

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On the other hand, the flight attendant enjoys the upper-class freedom to travel, and she participates in the glamour she creates for others. She is the envy of clerks in duller, less well-paid jobs. However, a close examination of the differences between the two can lead us to some unexpected common ground. On the surface there is a difference in how we know what labor actually produces. How could the worker in the wallpaper factory tell when his job was done? Count the rolls of Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper; a good had been produced. How can the flight attendant tell when her job is done? A service has been produced; the customer seems content. In the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not part of producing wallpaper. Seeming to love the job become part of the job; actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps in this effort. You ever notice when you shop at a corporate store, where the manager is polite and acts like they own the business, care about the presentation of the products and inventory, and wants you to be satisfied, not only does it make your more confident in their abilities, but it makes it more likely that you will purchase products from the brand or business again in the future. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

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In processing people, the product is a state of mind. For instance, in real estate, people are greeted not only with a smile, but with concerned enquiry such as, “Would you also like to tour residence 3 today and hear about the options, Miss?” The atmosphere is that of a civilized party—with the guest, in response, behaving like civilized community members. Once or twice our inspectors tested the employees by being deliberately exacting, but they were never roused, and at the end of the tour they lined up to say farewell with undiminished brightness. Potential buyers are quick to detect strained or forced smiles, and they come to view the property wanting to enjoy the tour and get an idea of what it will be like to live in the home and community. The customers look forward to signing the contract and buying the house because it was a pleasant experience. Surely that is how it ought to feel. This is an emotional labor. Emotional labor is the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has an exchange value. This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mine in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to out individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

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Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there is possessed a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own? The real estate agent does physical work when she gives tours, and she does mental work when she prepared for and actually organizes sales. And his is also part of an emotional labor. This is an old issue, but as the comparison with the real estate agency suggest, it is still very much alive. If we can become alienated from service in a service-producing society, we can become alienated from the service in a service-producing society. We need to characterize American society of the twenty first century in more psychological terms, for now the problems that concerns us mist order on the psychiatric. For the real estate agent, the smiles are part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

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Similarly, part of the job is to disguise fatigue and irritation, for otherwise the labor would show in an unseemly way, and the product—buy contentment—would be damaged. It suggests what costs even happy workers under normal conditions pay for this labor without a name. The speed-up of demand has sharpened the ambivalence many workers feel about how much of oneself to give over to the role and how much of oneself to protect from it. Because it is easier to disguise fatigue and irritation if they can be banished altogether, at least for brief periods, this feat calls for emotional labor. It is also good to remember some people are really curious about products and for them, seeing a new house could be like being exposed to an advanced trigonometry class—they have no idea what they are looking at, how they will fit into it, or what designs will go well in the space. There have always been public-service jobs, of course; what is new is that they are now socially engineered and thoroughly organized from the upper levels. Though a real estate agents job is no worse and in many ways better than other service jobs, it makes the worker more vulnerable to the social engineering of one’s emotional labor and reduces one’s control over that labor. Emotional labor is potentially good. No customer wants to deal with a surly waiter, a crabby member service representative, or a cashier who avoids eye contact in order to avoid getting a request. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

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Lapses in courtesy by those paid to be courteous are very real and fairly common. What they show us is how fragile public civility really is. We are brought back to the question of what the social carpet actually consists of and what it requires of those who are supposed to keep it beautiful. The laggards and sluff-offs of emotional labor return us to the basic questions. What is emotional labor? What do we do when we manage emotion? What, in fact, is emotion? What are the costs and benefits of managing emotion, in private life and at work? What one cannot do in the beginning, one may be able to do in the middle of one’s journey. One should not let misgivings about one’s capacity to travel far stop one from travelling at all. Those who already possess a flair for emotional labor will naturally advance more easily and more quickly than those who do not. However, there is no reason for the one who is new to learning about emotional labor to adopt a defeatist attitude and negate the quest altogether. One’s weaknesses may come in the way of one’s seeking, yet one still remains an authentic seeker. If one lets one’s thoughts become negative, the quest would have to be entered with a realization of all its complexity and with a comprehension that one’s good intentions could be frustrated by adverse circumstances. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

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A being needs to know his or her limitations and to accept them. However, one need not accept them as absolutes. There is always the mysterious miracle, the second wind, the untapped unpredictable resources. One should fit one’s aspiration to one’s estimated capacity but, in order not to miss unknown possibilities which might yet emerge to the surface, one should do so loosely and not rigidly. It is true that enlightenment is to be found wherever it is earnestly sought. However, one’s own desire and needs will provide one with a source of direction; and it may be that these will indicate that one’s individual progress may be hastened or better served by a journey to some particular location. No matter what the personal circumstances of a being may be, no matter whether one be rich or poor, well or ill, mature or young, educated or illiterate, there is no point in one’s life where some part at east of the quest may not be introduced. Would they have done better to have stayed home, rather then to have gone off looking for gurus in the news media? The answer must vary from seeker to seeker. From a long-range point of view, is anyone really “lost”? It is sometimes consoling to remember that we have Eternity before us, and we can only do what we are capable of at a given time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

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Individuals who present themselves before others may wish them to think highly of them, or to think that one thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact one feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; one may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to elude them, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of one’s motive for having this objective, it will be in one’s interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of one. This control is achieve largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and one can influence this definition by expressing oneself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with one’s own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for one to mobilize one’s activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in one’s interest to convey. If some acknowledge and accept the responsibility which accompanies their spiritual eminence, others prefer to leave humankind in God’s keeping and to themselves! Some illuminates are willing, even eager, to get involved with individuals but others are not. If they prefer to live quietly, unnoticed, this does not make them more selfish and less holy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

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If one attains enlightenment, it is not possible to predict with precision what a being would do. With some persons, force of habit or innate tendencies may lead to the continuance of the same outer life which one led before enlightenment. So an individual leading a solitary withdrawn life may still do so whereas another may start a preaching crusade to the mass of people. For, with the personal self subdued by God, the latter is then the operative factor. And the spirit is like the wind which blows as it listens. However, we must go forward with the process of evocation of the Holy Ghost for the sake of communicating with these powers to gain insight, or compelling them to create beneficial Changes. When one reaches a level of spiritual maturity through substantial contact with the powers of God and the discipline of Jesus Christ (these things are mutually dependent) and has been infernally empowered by the Rite of Preparing for the Grace of God, we can see reality through unveiled eyes. This will change us in incredible ways forever. One will begin to trump the physical decay, and the desire to gain power and strength will intensify as one grows tired of being tired. As a result, the individual will begin to integrate more practical techniques of grounding this power within to growth in physical and spiritual strength. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

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Though the physical body may be at its weakest, your will shall start to be exercised and developed in very intense ways. Keep that in mind. The power of God are keys that open up the soul and perception through their spiritual eyes. God will grant you the infernal blessing of seeing through your eyes. Tear down the limits of the flesh and allow the Lord to dwell within you are you dwell within him. Remember to stay centered in your own God Self to prevent being deceived and led toward self-destruction. “And then I will remember my covenant which I have made unto my people, and I will bring my gospel unto them,” reports 3 Nephi 16.11. Not long ago, an intellectual leader was reported as saying, “I hope for the say when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.” These words, seriously meant, deserve thoughtful consideration, especially in view of the fact that the last sixty-five years have brought to this country an immense increase in the willingness to use the name of God—an unquestionable and astonishing revival, if not of religion, certainly of religious awareness. Do we hop that this will lead us to a state in which the name of God will be used without sublime embarrassment, without the restriction imposed by the fact that in the divine name there is more present than the name? Is an unembarrassed use of the divine name desirable? Is unembarrassed religion desirable? Certainly not! For the Presence of the divine in the name of demands a shy and trembling heart. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Cresleigh Home’s newest solar home community in Rancho Cordova. Offering four distinct floorplans with unique exterior elevations, homeowners will have their choice of both single and two-story layouts ranging from three to five bedrooms including one plan with the Master Bedroom on the first floor!

Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no Home Owner Association (HOA) fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/

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There Will be No Time and Place Immediately Available for Eating the Pudding that the Proof can be Found in!

ImageOnly wondering. In my room I told myself that all beauty was contained in the ever changing waves of the sea. I had to believe it. But oh, the great World is such a wilderness of marvels. I am very happy. And my soul is not on guard. And I am free. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of humankind. What will you see? It is a grand spectacle? Grand, if you like. Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that is worth something. With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that some say that it is the work of human hands, while others maintain that it has been created by Nature herself. Is it many-colored? It may be it is many-colored, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and civilian, of all peoples in the ages—that alone is worth something, and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of it; no historian would be equal to the job. Is it monotonous? It may be it is: it is fighting and fighting; they are fighting now, they fought first and they fought last—you will admit that it I almost too monotonous. In short, one may say anything about this history of the World—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

ImageThe only thing one cannot say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this World. And yet we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of a being since one is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon one every Earthly blessing, drown one in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give one economic prosperity, such that one should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy oneself with the continuation of one’s species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, beings would play you some nasty trick. One would even risk one’s cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all the beneficial good sense one’s fatal fantastic element. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Image It is just one’s fantastic dreams, one’s vulgar folly, that one will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to oneself—as thought that were so necessary—that beings still are beings and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that son one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if this were proved to one by natural science and mathematics, even then one would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain one’s point! One will launch a curse upon the World, and as only beings can curse (it is one’s privilege, the primary distinction between one and other animals) it may be by one’s curse alone one will attain one’s object—that is, convince oneself that one is a being and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself—then beings would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain one’s point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of beings really seems to consist in nothing but proving to oneself every minute that one is a human and not a piano-Key! #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

ImageIt may be at the cost of one’s skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we do not know? You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good Heavens, gentlemen and ladies, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two makes four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that! Gentlemen and ladies, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant, but you know one cannot take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen and ladies, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men and women of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. However, how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is desirable, to reform beings in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that being’s inclinations need reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be the benefit to beings? #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

ImageAnd to go to the root of the matter, why are you so absolutely convinced that not to act against one’s real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for beings and must always be a law for humankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen and ladies, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that beings are pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. However, the reason why one want sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that one is predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the “direct” practical being may be, the thought sometimes will occur to one that the road almost most always does lead somewhere, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Beings like to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. How why have such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

ImageBut on that point, I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that one loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that one does sometimes love it) because one is instinctively afraid of attaining one’s object and completing the edifice one is constructing? Who knows, perhaps one only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps one only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of les animaux domestiques—such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvelous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever—the ant-heap. With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and good sense. However, beings are a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess-player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on Earth to which humankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as absolute as twice two makes four, and such absoluteness is not life, gentlemen and ladies, but is the beginning of death. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

ImageAnyway, beings have always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that beings does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, one traverses oceans, sacrifices one’s life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, one dreads, I assure you. One feels that when one has found it there will be nothing for one to look for. When workmen and women have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and there is occupation for a week. However, where can beings go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about one when one has attained such objects. One loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, beings are a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. However yet, mathematical certainty is, after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

ImageAnd why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the absolute—in other words, only what is conducive to the welfare—is for the advantage of the being? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Do not being, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps one is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to one as well-being? Beings are sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a being and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to be absolutely ill-bred. Whether it is good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things, so I am told. I hold no brief for suffering nr for well-being either. I am standing for…my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the “Palace of Crystal” it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a “Palace of Crystal” if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think beings will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for beings, yet I know being prize it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

ImageConsciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five sense and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing. You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed—a palace at which one will not be able to put out one’s tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it even on the sly. You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a Cresleigh mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain. However, what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live in a Cresleigh mansion. That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

ImageWell, do change it, allure me with something else, give me another ideal. However, meanwhile I will not take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the old-fashioned irrational habits of my generation. However, what does it matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist. Perhaps you are laughing again? Laugh away; I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry. I know, anyway, that I will not be put off with a compromise, with a recurring zero, simply because it is consistent with the laws of nature and actually exists. I will not accept as the crown of my desires a block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand years, and perhaps with a sign-board of dentist hanging out. Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You will say, perhaps, that is not worth your trouble; but in that case I can give you the same answer. We are discussing things seriously; but if you will not deign to give me your attention, I will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

ImageHowever, while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were withered off than bring one brick to such a building! Do not remind me that I have just rejected the palace f crystal for the sole reason that one cannot put out one’s tongue at it. I did not say that because I am so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I resented was, that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not put out one’s tongue. On the contrary, if things could be so arranged that I should lose all desire to put it out, I would let my tongue be cut off out of gratitude. It is not my fault that things cannot be so arranged, and that one must be satisfied with model flats. Then why am I made with such desires? Can I have been constructed simply in order to come to the conclusion that all my construction is a cheat? Can this be my whole purpose? I do not believe it. However, you know what: I am convinced that we underground fold ought to be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we talk and talk and talk…When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about one or to bring into play information about one already possessed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

ImageThey will be interested in one’s general socioeconomic status, one’s conception of self, one’s attitude toward them, one’s competence, one’s trustworthiness, and so forth. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what one will expect of them and what they may expect of one. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to all forth a desired response from one. For those resent, many sources of information become accessible and many carriers (of “sign-vehicles”) become available for conveying this information. If unacquainted with the individual, observers can glean clues from one’s conduct and appearance which allow them to apply their previous experience with individuals roughly similar to the one before them or, more important, to apply untested stereotypes to one. They can rely on what the individual says about oneself or on a documentary evidence one provides as to who and what one is. If they know, or know of, the individual by virtue of experience prior to the interaction, they can rely on assumptions as to the persistence and generality of psychological traits as a means of predicting one’s present and future behavior. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

ImageHowever, during the period in which the individual is in the immediate presence of others, few events may occur which directly provide the others with the conclusive information they will need if they are to direct wisely their own activity. Many crucial facts are possessed beyond the time and place of interaction or are possessed concealed within it. For example, the “true” or “real” attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of the individual can be ascertained only indirectly, through one’s avowals or through what appears to be involuntary expressive behavior. Similarly, if the individual offers the others a product or service, they will often find that during the interaction there will be no time and place immediately available for eating the pudding that the proof can be found in. They will be forced to accept some events as conventional or natural signs of something not directly available to the senses. The individual will have to act so that one intentionally or unintentionally expresses oneself, and the others will in turn have to be impressed in some way by one. However, an attitude that may characterize a neurotic in one’s striving for power is the desire to have one’s own way. If others do not do exactly what one expects of them and exactly at the time one expects it, it may be a constant source of acute irritation to one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

ImageThe attitude of impatience is closely connected with this aspect of the striving for power. Any kind of delay, any enforced waiting, even if only for traffic lights, will become a source of irritation. More often than not the neurotic oneself is not aware of the existence, or at least of the extent, of one’s bossing attitude. It is a fact definitely to one’s interest not to recognize it and not to change it, because it has important protective functions. Nor should others recognize it, because if they do there is a danger of losing their affection. This lack of awareness has important implications for love relationships. If a lover or husband does not exactly live up to expectations, of one is late, does not telephone or text message or email, goes out of town, a neurotic woman feels that one does not love her. Instead of recognizing that what she feels is a plain anger reaction to a lack of compliance with wishes of her own, which as often as not are inarticulate, she interprets the situation as evidence that she is unwanted. This fallacy is very frequent indeed in our culture, and it contribute greatly to the feeling of being unwanted which is often a crucial factor in neuroses. As a rule it is learned from parents. A dominating mother feeling resentment about a child’s disobedience will believe, and declare, that the child does not love her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

ImageA queer contradiction often arises on this basis which may considerably frustrate any love relationships. Neurotic girls cannot love a “weak” man because of their contempt for any weakness; but neither can they cope with a “strong” man because they expect their partner always to give in. Hence what they secretly look for is the hero, the superstrong man, who at the same time is so weak that he will bend to all their wishes without hesitance. If we want to see how conflict develops, we must not focus too sharply on the individual trends but rather take a panoramic view of the main directions in which a person can and does move under these circumstances. Though we lose sight for a while of details we shall gain a clearer perspective of the essential moves made to cope with the environment. At first a rather chaotic picture may present itself, but out of in time three main lines crystallize: a being can move toward people, against them, or away from them. When moving toward people one accepts one’s own helplessness, and in spite of one’s estrangement and fears tries to win affection of others and to lean on them. Only in this way can one feel safe with them. If there are dissenting parities in the family, one will attach oneself to the most powerful person or group. By complying with them, one gains a feeling of belonging and support which makes one feel less weak and less isolated. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

ImageWhen one moved against people one accepts and takes for granted the hostility around one, and determines, consciously or unconsciously, to fight. One implicitly distrusts the feelings and intentions of others toward oneself. One rebels in whatever ways are open to him or her. One wants to be the stronger and defect them, partly for one’s own protection, partly for revenge. When one moves away from people one wants neither to belong nor to fight, but keeps apart. One feels one has not much in common with them, they do not understand one anyhow. One builds up a World of one’s own—with nature, with one’s dolls, one’s books, one’s dreams. In each of these three attitudes, one of the elements involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the first, hostility in the second, and isolation in the third. However, the fact is that the individual cannot make anyone of these moves wholeheartedly, because under the conditions in which the attitude develop, all are bound to be present. What we have seen from our panoramic view is only the predominant move. In a predominantly learning and complying type of person we can observe aggressive propensities and some need for detachment. A predominantly hostile personas a complaint strain and needs detachment too. And a detached personality is not without hostility or a desire for affection. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

ImageThe predominant attitude, however, is the one that most strongly determines that actual conduct. It represents those ways and means of coping with others in which the particular person feels most at home. Thus a detached person will as a matter of course use all unconscious techniques for keeping others at a safe distance because one feels at a loss in any situation that requires close association with them. Moreover, the ascendant attitude is often but not always the one most acceptable to the person’s conscious mind. This does not mean that the less conspicuous attitudes are less powerful. It would often be difficult to say, for instance, whether in an apparently dependent, compliant person the wish to dominate is of inferior intensity to the need for affection; one’s ways of expressing one’s aggressive impulses are merely more indirect. That the potency of the submerged tendencies may be very great is evidenced by the many instances in which the attitude accorded predominance is reversed. We can see such reversal in child,  but it occurs in late life as well. A good illustration is  how a girl formerly tomboyish, ambitious, rebellious, when she falls in love may turn into a compliant, dependent woman, apparently without ambition. Or, under pressure of crushing experiences, a detached person may become morbidly dependent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

ImageChanges like these, it should be added, throw some light on the frequent question whether later experience counts for nothing, whether we are definitely channeled, condition once and for all, by our childhood situation. Looking at neurotic development from the point of view of conflicts enables us to give a more adequate answer than is usually offered. These are the possibilities: If the early situation is not too prohibitive of spontaneous growth, later experiences, particularly in adolescence, can have a molding influence. If, however, the impact of early experiences has been powerful enough to have molded the child to a rigid pattern, no new experience will be able to break through. In part this is because one’s rigidity does not leave one open to any new experience: one’s detachment, for instance, may be too great to permit of anyone’s coming close to one, or one’s dependence so deep-rooted that one is forced always to play a subordinate role and invite exploitation. In part it is because one will interpret any new experience in the language of one’s established pattern: the aggressive type, for instance, meeting with friendliness, will view it either as a manifestation of stupidity or an attempt to exploit one; the new experience will tend only to reinforce the old pattern. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

ImageWhen a neurotic does adopt a different attitude it may look as if later experiences had brought about a change in personality. However, the change is not as radical as it appears. Actually what has happened is that combined internal and external pressures have forced one to abandon one’s predominant attitude in favor of the other extreme—but this change would not have taken place if there had been no conflict to begin with. From the point of view of the normal person there is no reason why the three attitudes should be mutually exclusive. One should be capable of giving in to others, of fighting, and keeping to oneself. The three can complement each other and make for a harmonious whole. If one predominates, it merely indicates an overdevelopment along one line. However, in neurosis there are several reasons why these attitudes are irreconcilable. The neurotic is not flexible; one is driven to comply, to fight, to be aloof, regardless of whether the move is appropriate in the particular circumstance, and one is thrown into a panic if one behaves otherwise. Hence, when all three attitudes are present in any strong degree, one is bound to be caught in a severe conflict. Another factor, and one that considerably widens the scope of the conflict, is that the attitudes do not remain restricted to the area of human relationships but gradually pervade the entire personality, as a malignant tumor pervades the whole organic tissue. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

ImageThey end by encompassing not only the person’s relation to others but also one’s relation to oneself and to life in general. If we are not fully aware of this all-embracing character, the temptation is to think of the resulting conflict in categorical terms, like love versus hate, compliance versus defiance, submissiveness versus domination, and so on. That, however, would be as misleading as to distinguish fascism from democracy by focusing on any single opposing feature, such as their difference in approach to religion or power. These are differences certainly, but exclusive emphasis upon them would serve to obscure the point that democracy and fascism are Worlds apart and represent two philosophies of life entirely incompatible with each other. It is not accidental that a conflict that starts with our relation to others in time affect the whole personality. Human relationships are so crucial that they are bound to mold the qualities we develop, the goals we set for ourselves, the values we believe in. All these in turn react upon our relations with others and so are inextricably interwoven. My contention is that the conflict born of incompatible attitudes constitutes the core of neurosis and therefore deserves to be called basic. And let me add that I use the term core not merely in the figurative sense of its being significant but to emphasize that fact that it is the dynamic center from which neuroses emanate. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

ImageThis contention is the nucleus of a new theory of neurosis whose implications will become apparent in what follow. Broadly considered, the theory may be viewed as an elaboration of my earlier concept that neuroses are an expression of a disturbance in human relationships. The quest says one is not so helpless as one thinks one is. Why give oneself up so unresisteningly to the tendencies one finds in one’s heart, to the thoughts one find in one’s mind, to the inward domination of one’s possession and passion? Why be do soft-willed as to refrain from making any effort at all on the plea that one must accept oneself as one finds oneself? When you come out of the other side of this experience and you make your way out of the cage your whole perception of life and this World will have changed. These Hell realms will at this point no longer be focal points of initiation. They will have become steps upon the manifestation of desire and the path of ascent. Earth will become the path to the fulfillment of your purpose and personal divine plan. It is at this point you will be empowered to mold eternal darkness which permeates all into divine light. This is to Become a Living God. “See how I love your precepts; preserve my life, O LORD, according to your love. All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal,” reports Psalm 119.15-16. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21Image

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The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!

ImageI have guest here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue Moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. But these are all golden dreams. On, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that beings only do nasty things because one does not know one’s own interests; and that if one were enlightened, if one’s eyes were opened to one’s real normal interests, beings would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding one’s real advantage, one would see one’s own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one being can, consciously, act against one’s own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, one would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when beings have acted only from their own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that beings, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interest, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageSo, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of beings consists? And what, if it so happens that a being’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in one’s desiring in certain cases what is harmful to oneself and not advantageous. And if so, there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think—are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away gentlemen, but only answer me: have being’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen and ladies have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and political-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the being who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would, to your thinking, and indeed mine too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute mad person: would not one be? However, you know, this is what is surprising: when they reckon up human advantages, why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity invariably leave out one? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageThey do not even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no great matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. However, the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for instance…Ech! Gentlemen and ladies, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one, to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of humans; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside one which is stronger than all one’s interests, one will go off on quite a different track—that is, act in direct opposition to what one just been saying about oneself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to one’s own advantage—in fact, in opposition to everything…I warn you that my friend is a compound personality, and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageThe fact is, gentlemen and ladies, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every being than one’s greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a being if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity—in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only one can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it is advantage all the same” you will retort. However, excuse me, I will make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of humankind for the benefit of humankind. In fact, it upsets everything. However, before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems—all these theories for explaining to humankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble—are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical exercises. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageWhy, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of humankind by means of the pursuit of one’s own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing as…as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization humankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does not seem to follow from one’s arguments. However, beings have such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that one is ready to distort the truth intentionally, one is ready to deny the evidence of one’s senses only to justify one’s logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest ways, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein…And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for humankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely noting more. And through the development of this many-sidedness beings may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to them. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageIn any case civilization has made humankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days one saw justice in bloodshed and with one’s conscience at peace exterminated those one thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though beings have now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, one is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. However, yet you are fully convinced that one will be sure to learn when one gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then beings will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set one’s will against one’s normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach beings (through to my mind it is a superfluous luxury) that one never has really had any caprice or will of one’s own, and that one is something of nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, an that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything one doe is not done by one’s willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageConsequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and beings will no longer have to answer for their actions and life will become exceedingly easy for one. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the World. Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then…In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Beings are stupid, but one is so ungrateful that you could not find another like one in all creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageI, for instance, if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentlemen, had not we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to sent these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!”, I would not be in the least surprised. That again would not matter; but what is annoying is that one would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of beings. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that beings everywhere and at all times, whoever one may be, has preferred to act as one chose and not in the least as one’s reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one absolutely ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice—however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that beings want a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that beings must want a rationally advantageous choice? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageWhat beings want is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. For some time now I have been talking to people who have served as subjects (Ss) in psychologists’ experiments. They have told me of their experience, and it has troubled me. I want to share my concern with my colleagues. The letter that follows is my effort to consolidate the attitudes and feelings of the people to whom I talked. Dear E (Experimenter): My name is S. You do not know me. I have another name my friends call me by, but I drop it, and become S number 27 as soon as I take part in your research. I serve in your surveys and experiments. I answer your questions, fill out questionnaires, let you wire me up to various machines that record my physiological reactions. I pull levers, flip switches, track moving targets, trace mazes, learn nonsense syllables, tell you what I see in inkblots—do the whole barrage of things you ask me to do. I have started to wonder why I do these things for you. What is in it for me? Sometimes you pay me to serve. More often I have to serve, because I am a student in a beginning psychology course, and I am told that I will not receive a grade unless I take part in at least two studies; and if I take part in more, I will get extra points on the final exam. I am part of the Department’s “subject-pool.” When I have asked you what I will get out of your studies, you tell me that, “It is for Science.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageWhen you are running someone particular study, you often lie to me about your purpose. You mislead me. It is getting so I find it difficult to trust you. I am beginning to see you as a trickster, a manipulator. I do not like it. In fact, I lie to you a lot of the time, even on anonymous questionnaires. When I do not lie, I will sometimes just answer at random, anything to get through with the hour, and back to my own affairs. Then, too, I can often figure out just what it is you are trying to do, what you would like me to day or do; at those times, I decide to go along with your wishes if I like you, or foul you up if I do not. You do not actually say what your hopes or hypotheses are; but the very setup in your laboratory, the alternatives you give me, the instruction you offer, all work together to pressure me to day or do something in particular. It is as if you are whispering in my ear, “When the light comes on, pull the left switch,” and then you forget to deny that you have whispered. However, I get the message. And I pull the right or the left one, depending on how I feel toward you. You know, even when you are not in the room—wen you are just the printed instructions on the questionnaire or the voice on the tape recorder that tells me what I am supposed to do—I wonder about you. I wonder who you are, what you are really up to. I wonder what you are going to do with the “behavior” I give you. Who are you going to show my answers to? Who is going to see the marks I leave on your response-recorders? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageDo you have any interest at all in what I think, feel, and imagine as I make the marks you are so eager to study and analyze? Certainly, you never ask me what I mean by them. If you asked, I would be glad to tell you. As a matter of fact, I do tell my roommate or my girl friend what I thought your experiment was about and what I meant when I did what I did. If my roommate could trust you, he could probably give you a better idea of what your data (my answers and responses) mean than the idea you presently have. God knows how much good psychology has gone down the drain, when my roommate and I discuss your experiment and my part in it, at the beer-joint. As a matter of fact, I am getting pretty tried of being S. It is too much like being a punched IBM card in the University registrar’s office. I feel myself being pressured, bulldozed, tricked, manipulated every where I turn. Advertisements in magazines and commercials on TV, political speeches, salesmen, and con men of all kinds put pressure on me to get me to buy, say, or do things that I suspect are not for my good at all. Just for their good, the good of their pocketbooks. Do you sell your “expert knowledge” about me to these people? Is this why you keep reviewing my case every month for four years and then sending the packets all over the Untied States of America? Is this why you are asking third parties to fill out forms my condition that my health information privacy rights, and then what I tell you is leaked all over the World? If that is true, then you are really not in good faith with me. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageYou have told me that when I show myself to you and let you study me, that in the long run it will be for my good. I am not convinced. You really seem to be studying me in order to learn how to influence my attitudes and my actions without realizing it. I resent this more than you realize. It is not fair for you to get me to show how I can be influenced and then for you to pass this information along to people who pay your salary or pay your bribes, or give you money to equip your laboratory, and then not acknowledge there is a data breach of my information, which you are responsible and can be held civically and legally responsible for. I do not like that you put my life in danger. I do not like that you are a threat to my health and safety. I feel used, like a science experiment, and I do not like it. However, I protect myself by not showing you my whole self or by lying. Did you ever stop to think that your articles, and the textbooks you write, the theories you spin—all based on your data (my disclosures to you)—may actually be a tissue of lies and half-truths (my lies and half-truths) or a joke I have played on you because I do not like you or trust you? That should give you cause for some concern. Now look, Mr. E, I am not “paranoid,” as you might say. Nor an I stupid. And I do believe some good can come out of my serving in your research. Even some good for me. I am not entirely selfish, and I would be glad to offer myself up for study, to help others. However, somethings have to change first. Will you listen to me? Here is what I would like from your researchers: #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageI would like you to help me gain a better understanding of what has made me the way I am today. I would like to know this because I want to be more free than I feel. I would like to discover more of my own potentialities. I would like to be more whole, more courageous, more enlightened. I would like to be able to experience more, learn better, remember better, and express myself more fully. I would like to learn how to recognize and overcome the pressures of other people’s influences, of my background, that interfere with my going in the paths I choose. Now, if you would promise to help me in these ways, I would gladly come into your lab and virtually strip my body and soul naked. I would be there meaning to show you everything I could that was relevant to your particular interest of the moment. And I can assure you, that is different from what I have been showing you thus far, which is as little as I can. In fact, I cross my fingers when I am in your lab, and say to myself, “What I have just said or done here is not me.” Would not you like to change? Can you handle my truth, the full truth? Do you even really know what you are investigating? If you will trust me, I will trust you, if you are trustworthy. I would like you to take the time and trouble to get acquainted with me as a person, before we go through your experimental procedures. And I would like to get to know you and what you are up to, to see if I would like to expose myself to you. Can you imagine your body being violated by strangers you never met without your consent? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageSometime, you remind me of physicians. They look at me as the unimportant envelope that conceals the information they are really interested in. You have looked at me as the unimportant package that contains “responses,” and this is all I am for you. Let me tell you that when I feel this, I get back at you. I give your responses, all right; but you will never know what I meant by them. You know, I can speak, not just with words, but with my action. And when you have thought I was rending to a “stimulus” in your lab, my response was really directed at you; and what I meant by it was, “Take this, you unpleasant so-and-so.” Does that surprise you? It should not. Another ting. Those tests of yours that have built-in gimmicks to see if I am being consistent, or deliberately lying, or just answering at random—they do not feel me. Actually, if you would get on level with me, they would not be necessary. There are enough con men and women in the World, without your joining their number. I would hope that psychologist would be more trustworthy than politicians or salesmen. I will make a bargain with you. You show me that you are doing your research for me—to help me become freer, more self-understanding, better able to control myself—and I will make myself available to you in any way you ask. And I will not play jokes and tricks on you. I do not want to be controlled, not by your or anyone else. And I do not want to control other people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageI do not want you to help other people to understand how I am or can be “controlled,” so that they can then control me. Show me that you are for me, and I will show myself to you. You work for me, Mr. E, and I will truly work for you. Between us, we may produce a psychology that is more authentic and more liberating. Some lead an austere life and emaciate themselves; some give clear instructions to their disciples; some rule kingdoms quite justly and rightly; some openly hold disputations with other schools of thought; some write down their teachings and experiences; others simulate ignorance; a few do even responsible actions; but all these are famous as wise beings in the World. Some of the enlightened ones sit as recluses in prayer, others travel and preach, still others create centers where they teach, a fourth class heal the sick, and a fifth write. Each does what one’s tendency or mission dictates. The sage may sit under a village tree, head an ashram, or live as a sequestered hermit. One may also live in a luxurious palace, head a business organization, or farm land. These things are not the point, which is one’s consciousness of divine presence. The World, its pleasures and treasures, does not deceive one: one sees through its values even if one is active in the midst of it. These powers will seep into the physical plane by drawing upon the power of the ley lines as well as the power hidden within nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageTurning the cord inside our represents backward knowledge and the passage of the consciousness from the limited confines of the body into the other Worlds unseen by the masses. This is to gain the power to move though Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits, to make things easy. To help fuel and facilitate the process of soul introspection and open up psychic vision while also providing a more internal endurance needed to face this World. Understand that you are in control. Negative energy that attacks you in this realm are gnats to be swatted, despite how others may be tormented by them. They are reflections of their fear, not yours and you do not have to have anything to do with such folly. The infernal forces will gain momentum in the direction of becoming your allies in creation. Oppressive circumstance that may be experienced here becomes tension to be harnessed and mastered for your own liberation. It becomes a tool within your toolbox of becoming. Like all of these realms it is your will and personal power which can liberate you. Ground this power by investing time in the corporeal plane toward consciously applying effort toward ascent and personal evolution. Look for obstacles to overcome for the sake of overcoming them alone. Do hard thing. Become superior. Work harder, exercise harder, pray longer. Run until you sweat and keep running. Push yourself to the Heavenly extremes until it hurts. Then keep moving through the torment to further connect to the powers of Heaven so you can access them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

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If they Come in the Form of to-die-for Clay Dinnerware, I Guess Monday Blues are Okay!

ImageCan you not smell that coffee perking on the stove? You sit right down. You are not driving off without some grits and biscuits and scrambled eggs. I got bacon and ham on the stove. The alienating conditions we have described in the past pervade modern society and touch vast numbers of men and women—factory workers, white-collar workers, organization men, voters, audiences, the seniors, and various ethnic grounds and cultures. Although alienated, their responses—except in times of severe crisis—and subdued; theirs are the lives of quiet desperation. However, we are now going to investigate people who do not sit and take it: they rebel, retreat, or deviate in some significant way from ordinary behavior. In grouping together artistic rebels, juvenile delinquents, addicts, sexual deviants, psychotics and suicides, we most certainly do not mean to suggest that they are similar in nature or that there is any simple explanation for them. Nor is this intended to be a catalogue of “maladjustment” or “social disorganization.” Rather, it is a sampling of a number of major types of alienated behavior, each one of which deserves and often receives whole volumes of treatment. These people are alike only in that they feel cut off or have cut themselves off from the main stream of community life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

ImageBy using reason alone beings can progress to higher forms. This underground being scorns reason (or science), planning and progress; he or she derides or would destroy their works to preserve his or her freedom—even a freedom underground. Juvenile delinquency in America is not merely a reflection of personality difficulties, slums and broken homes, but is directly related to the structure of our society and its prevailing values. Thus while delinquency is not exclusively working-class in origin, it may be interpreted in large part as the frustrated and violent responses of those at the bottom to middle-class values which school and other institutions seek to impose but which—given the obstacles to social advancement—they are unable to achieve. Isolated from the community, working-class boys can achieve status or recognition chiefly in their gangs, which offer a solution. It is in the nature of that solution to reject the middle-class values which society tries to impose and to sanction that rejection. The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. That delinquency may have sinister political and racial overtones. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

ImageIf delinquents are clearly rebellious, no simple statement can be made about addicts, the next group described or discussed here. Some may be rebellious and others escapist or retreatist; but all are victims of a chemical compulsion whereby alcohol or drug becomes the master. Neuroses unquestionably lie at the root of addictions, but alone cannot explain why people drown in drink or drugs. Evidence shows that physiological factors and nutritional elements are also involved. Nevertheless, addictions have serious psychological and social consequences; the addict’s behavior is generally unacceptable; society is hostile; and the victim responds with feelings of guilt and remorse, and further undesirable behavior. The heavy drinker often becomes isolated from family and community as a result of his condition. It is a measure of the intricacy of the problem that while psychotherapy alone has been notoriously unsuccessful in curing alcoholics, combined with diet and drugs it has often proved helpful. Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), a quasi-religious movement, has scored notable successes in restoring alcoholics to community life. While alcoholism is serious enough; drug addiction is perhaps more terrible still—especially in the United States, where the non-medical use of narcotics is a criminal offense and the public is violent in disapprobation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

23Furthermore, while alcoholic may find solidarity in a movement such as A.A., narcotics addicts huddle together for mutual protection while under the influence. Theirs is truly a league of the damned. William Burroughs, himself a former addict, tells us, “Nothing ever happens in the junk World.” Nothingness, however, is precisely what many addicts and alcoholics seek, as Elmer Bendiner shows in his description of the “Bowery men.” Here in this brotherhood of the beaten and defeated, men find a perfect hiding place from the World, find what so many citizens of the modern World seek and never find—an escape from tensions. In this respect, at least, as Bendiner observes, they have something in common with the organization of man. However, while he fails to achieve tranquility, they succeed. Bowery men are deviants in that they reject the drive for status. However, what of those who deviate in that most sensitive area of human experience, pleasures of the flesh? Are they also alienated—either by choice or because of society’s hostility? Donald Cory, an acknowledged homosexual, offers an interesting description of homosexuals as a minority group. Like other minorities seeking a place in the community which has been denied them, they wage a grim struggle against society’s rejection. And as in the case of other minorities, part of their fate is to “internalize” the contempt of the majority. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

ImageAnother kind of outcast is represented by the anonymous and gifted English lady of the evening who wrote “Streetwalker.” For her there is no in-group to offer defense against a hostile World. Instead of fighting back, she welcomes her rootlessness. Her choice is homelessness: “The slight security I would be able to enjoy, by allowing myself to pretend that my personality was contained in something more than the shell of my body, would make the nights—which hold no safety of my body, would make the nights—which hold no safety and in which I must be constantly alert, constantly rootless—even more desolate.” Streetwalker has chosen alienation as a way of life (until at last she decides to make a fresh start). However, others, more properly described as psychotic, have no opportunity to make a choice. For them the ties have snapped. They most certainly snapped for “Joey” as described in Bruno Betelheim’s remarkable case study of a schizophrenic child who “converted himself into a ‘machine’ because he did not dare be human.” One must not read too much into Joey’s mechanical fantasy World; after all, most of us are not schizophrenic. However, our society produced him, and his delusion is only an extreme form of escape. Still, Denmark, which has the most comprehensive system of social security still has one of the highest suicide rates in the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

ImageOften times, suicide is linked to early upbringing, in which the Danish child’s dependence on one’s mother is encouraged, aggression is strictly checked, and the arousal of guilt feelings is used as a disciplinary technique. As a result, aggressive feelings are turned inward. This alone does not explain suicide. Among the other factors involved is a fairly common belief in the idea of reunion after death with a lost loved one. Competitiveness, often associated with suicide elsewhere, has little bearing on Danish suicide. Danish and American character traits are quite different. Differences in personality traits may explain why we are half as likely to kill ourselves as the Danes. May it also explain why we are ten times more likely to kill each other? I do not believe that any conflict between desires and fears could ever account for the extent to which a neurotic is divided within oneself and for an outcome so detrimental that it can actually ruin a person’s life. A psychic situation implies that a neurotic retains the capacity to strive for something wholeheartedly, that one merely is frustrated in these strivings by the blocking actions of fears. The source of the conflict revolves around the neurotic’s loss of capacity to wish for anything wholeheartedly because one’s very wishes are divided, that is, go in opposite directions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

ImageThe fundamental conflict is more disruptive. The basic neurotic conflict does not necessarily have to arise in the first place and is possible of resolution if it does arise—provided the sufferer is willing to undergo the considerable effort and hardship involved. This difference is not a matter of optimism or pessimism but inevitably results from the difference in our premises. There is a conflict between constructive and destructive forces in human beings. However, these opposites can sometimes be complementary—the goal is to accept both and thereby approximate the ideal of wholeness. The neurotic is a person who has been stranded in a one-sided development. In the law of complements, the opposite tendency contains complementary elements neither of which can be dispensed with in an integrated personality. However, these are already outgrowths of neurotic conflicts and are so tenaciously adhered to because they represent attempts at solution. If, for instance, we regard a tendency toward being introspective, withdrawn, more concerned with one’s own feelings, thoughts, or imagination that with other persons’ as an authentic inclination—that is, constitutionally established and reinforced by experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

ImageThe effective therapeutic procedure would be to show the person one’s hidden “extravert” tendencies, to point out the dangers of one-sidedness in either direction, and encourage one to accept and live out both tendencies. If, however, we look upon introversion (or, as I prefer to call it, neurotic detachment) as a means of evading conflicts that arise in close contact with others, the task is not to encourage more extraversion but to analyze the underlying conflicts. The goal of wholeheartedness can be approximated only after these have been resolved. The basic conflict of the neurotic in the fundamentally contradictory attitude one has acquired toward other persons. Let me call attention to the dramatization of such a contradiction in the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We see him on the one hand delicate, sensitive, sympathetic, helpful, and on the other brutal, callous, and egotistical. I do not, of course, mean to imply that neurotic division always adheres to the precise line of this story, but merely to point to a vivid expression of basic incompatibility of attitudes in relation to others. To approach the problem genetically we must go back to what I have called basic anxiety, meaning by this feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageA wide range of adverse factors in the environment can produce this insecurity in a child: direct or indirect domination, indifference, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child’s individual needs, lack of real guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration or the absence of I, lack of reliable warmth, having to take dies in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, overprotection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere, and so one. The only factor to which I should like to draw special attention in this context is the child’s sense of lurking hypocrisy in the environment: his or her feeling that the parents’ love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity, and so on may be only pretense. Part of what the child feels on this score is really hypocrisy; but some of it may be just one’s action to all the contradictions one senses in the parents’ behavior. Usually, however, there is a combination of cramping factors. They may be out in the open or quite hidden, so that in analysis one can only gradually recognize these influences on the child’s development. Harassed by these disturbing conditions, the child gropes for ways to keep going, ways to cope with this menacing World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Image Despite one’s own weakness and fears one unconsciously shapes one’s tactics to meet the particular forces operating in one’s environment. In doing so, one develops not only ad hoc strategies but lasting character trends which become part of one’s personality. I call these neurotic trends. When new forms of governing the city-states, new laws, and new interpretations of gods are emerging, all give new psychological power. In such a period of change and growth, emergence is often experienced by the individual as emergency with all its attendant stress. It is no accident that shrines and popular stars become important in chaotic times, as for some they serve as a god of proportion and balance the citizens seek assurance and it gives meaning and purpose behind the seeming chaos. We appreciate more of the rich meaning and light that culture brings into our lives. It is a light of mind, light of reason, light of insight. When we are at peace and feel uplifted and safe, our conscious intentions and our deeper intentionality will be already committed to the event about to take place. For the ones who participates in harmony, it carries its own healing power. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, and this becomes obvious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

ImageHow a person lives his or her life attests to the awareness in the experience of the race that the individual does have some responsibility for how he or she lives. Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention. These “models” function consciously as well as unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain,” reports Exodus 20.7. If the second commandment tries to protect it as the other commandments try to protect life, honor, property there must be something extraordinary about the name. Of course, God need not protect Himself, but He does protect His name, and so seriously that He adds to this single commandment a special threat. This is done because, within the name, that which bear the name is present. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

ImageIn ancient times, one believed that one held in one’s power the being whose hidden name one knew. One believed that the savior-god conquered the demons by discovering the mystery of the power embodied in their names, just as we today try to find out the hidden names of the powers that disrupt our unconscious depths and drive us to mental disturbances. If we gain insight into their hidden striving, we break their power. Beings have always tried to use the divine name in the same way, not in order to break its power, but to harness its power for their own uses. Calling on the name of God in prayer, for instance, can mean attempting to make God a tool for our purposes. A name is never an empty sound; it is a bearer of power; it gives Spiritual Presence to the unseen. This is the reason the divine name can be taken in vain, and why one may destroy oneself by taking it in vain. For the invocation of the holy does not leave us unaffected. If it does not heal us, it may disintegrate us. This is the seriousness of the use of the divine name. This is the danger of religion, and even of anti-religion. For in both the name of God is used as well as misused. Let us now consider the danger of the use of the word God, when it is both denied and affirmed, and of the sublime embarrassment that we feel when we say “God.” We may distinguish three forms of such embarrassment: the embarrassment of tact, the embarrassment of doubt, and the embarrassment of awe. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

ImageSome people do not find a higher truth: they reaffirm the ancient and eternal truth. It could not be that is it were subject to change. However, each reaffirms it in one’s own way, according to one’s own perceptions and as one’s environment requires. This accounts for part of the differences in its presentation, where it has been really attained. The other part is accounted for by there being varying degrees of attainment. It is a mistake to believe that mystical adepts all possess the same supernormal powers. On the contrary, they manifest such powers or powers as are in consonance with their previous line of development and aspiration. One who has come along an intellectual line of development, for instance, would most naturally manifest exceptional intellectual powers. The situation has been well put by Saint Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of ministries but the same Lord. And there are diversities of working but the same God who worketh all in all.” When the Overself activates the newly made adept’s psyche, the effect shows itself in some part or faculty; in another adept it produces a different effect. Thus the source is always the same but the manifestation is different. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

ImageThe undiscerning often believe that because some great saints have been fools in Worldly affairs, a stain who is always clever cannot be great. Yet, the spiritual aspirations which diminish a being’s desire for Worldly activities do not therefore diminish one’s competence for them. One who is born a fool usually remains so; one who is born clever usually stays so; and both cases are unaffected by the attachment of the heart to God. We must not think that every mystic who has been blessed with the light of the Overself stands on the same spiritual peak of vision and consciousness, of being and knowledge. Some are still only on the way to the summit of this peak. There are definite differences between them. If they all share alike the consciousness of a higher Self, they do not share it in the same way or to the same degree. The saints and mystics serve a high purpose in remining humanity of that diviner life which must one day flower in human evolution, but they do not serve as perfect exemplars of its final growth. The sages alone can do that. Healing powers are like intellectual power, one may be a realized person and yet not possess much intellect. Similarly, one may not possess healing power. Realization does not endow one with encyclopedic knowledge with all the talents. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

ImageWe must make a difference between the Messenger, who is sent to communicate a teaching through writing or speech, and the Master, who comes to embody the teaching and who alone possesses the power to bless others with one’s Grace. This difference is not so clearly understood among some beings, a lack which leads to confused ideas and unjustified customs. Having reached this stage one is free to continue one’s personal life as before, to accept the load of new responsibilities one one’s shoulders, or to retire wholly from the World. To work for humanity in public is one thing, to work for it in secrecy is another, while to enjoy the freedom and privacy of complete retirement is a third and very different thing. Naturally and inevitably any public appearance will soon turn one into a lightning rod, attracting the aspirations and yearnings of many spiritual seekers. As your mundane consciousness begins to merely attempt to grasp what God has to say, your own consciousness begins to expand. The result of this is a much improved intellectual capacity in this corporeal plane. Evocation of God is a means to exercise the mind. I have come to understand that communing with God increases the rate at which neurons fire off in the physical brain. If you are living righteously, God will sway others toward your will. He can get into the minds of others and help them benefit you. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

ImageIf one has really found one’s inner freedom, one must necessarily be free to stay in the World and do the World’s work. One does not have to retire into isolation, although one is free to do that. However, whatever one decides to do, one will henceforth be an impersonal channel for higher forces, which one will obey, and whose directions one will follow, whether one remains in the World or not. As God speaks to you in these inverted words of power the sounds begin to transform you on a very subtle level transmuting your communication into something more powerful. The intent of your words will be made very clear and concise. After time working with and communicating with God, it will seem as if you can command reality. Conveying power through words is only the surface of God’s power. Conflict may seem to simply dissipate from within your reality as all things become an opportunity for ascent through His guidance. It is not the conflict being removed, but the altering of your perception of it. On this physical plane your physical life will begin to reflect this growth and change as you become more spiritually refined with lightning speed. Once summoned, God acts as a familiar spirit helping to guide your thoughts, words, and deeds in this plane to gain strength and power within your soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

ImageIt is necessary to give certain terms often but wrongly used interchangeably, and hence confusedly, a sharper definition. The Saint has successfully carried out ascetic disciplines and purificatory regimes for devotional purpose. The Prophet has listened for God’s voice, heard and communicated God’s message of prediction, warning, or counsel. The Mystic has intimately experienced God’s presence while inwardly rapt in contemplation or has seen a vision of God’s cosmogony while concentrated in prayer. The Sage has attained the same results as al these three, has added a knowledge of infinite and eternal reality thereto, and has brought the whole into balanced union. The Philosopher is a sage who has also engaged in the spiritual education of others. There is a third type of illumined being, besides the Teacher and the Saint. One is the Messenger. One renders service not by dealing with persons and their problems but by stating truths and principles in general. Your whole perception of the experience will morph, and you will begin to cut through opposition as a hot knife through butter. Your momentum toward becoming will gain an almost severe momentum. Through evocation of God, one can gain the wisdom of experience that a being who has lived a thousand years would accumulate. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

ImageThe masses are controlled by anger. One should learn how to use and control it without allowing it to be a mere reactive response to external forces. Anger implies a lack of power. God will increase your psychic empathy so that adept can become aware of when they may use their tools to better expression their motives. God, we thank you for your presence within this World of creation. We have offered you our lives, in hopes of salvation, and as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm before us! You are the Lord of creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures to the night! God, with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the Heavenly Angels to fil us with their essence, as a gateway to empower them to act within this World according to your will and purpose. We know that much work must be performed so that we may be found worthy of this blessing. This work will be unique to the individual and we must take care to stay centered in self through these assignments. Please allow of to assimilate your power. Cast off the limits of garb of flesh into the refining Sun to be clothed with the powers of divine light eternal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18Image

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The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?

ImageIt was a drenching storm inside of me. However, I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another as I loved Rowan, you do not strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. “O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, all night long crying with a mournful cry, as I lie and listen, and cannot understand the voice of my heart in my side of the voice of the sea, o water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? All night long the water is crying to me. Unresting water, there shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, all life long crying without avail, as the water all night long is crying to me,” says Arthur Symons. Between me and the other World there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter rough it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At theses I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageAnd yet, being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Tagkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their World by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held al beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the Worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine. However, they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageJust how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head—some way. With other Black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale World about them and mocking distrust of everything White; r wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the Whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on it resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American World—a World which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other World. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a World that looks on in amused contempt and pity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageOne ever feels one’s twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge one’s double self into a better and truer self. In this merging one wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. One would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the World and Africa. One would not bleach one’s Negro soul in a flood of White Americanism, for one knows that Negro blood has a message for the World. One simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be bot a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by one’s fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in one’s face. This, then, is the end of one’s striving: to be co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use one’s best powers and one’s latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single Black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the World has rightly gauged their brightness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageHere in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the Black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made one’s very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the Black artisan—on the one hand to escape White contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making one a poor craftsman, for one had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of one’s people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other World, toward ideal that made one ashamed of one’s lowly tasks. The would-be Black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge one’s people needed was a twice-told tale to one’s White neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the White World was Green to one’s own flesh and blood. The cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageIn those somber forests of one’s striving one’s own soul rose before one, and one saw in oneself, darkly as through a veil; and yet one saw in oneself some faint revelation of one’s power, of one’s mission. One began to have a dim feeling that, to attain one’s place in the World, one must be oneself, and not another. For the first time one sought to analyze the burden one bore upon one’s back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. One felt one’s poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, one had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a less affluent man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of the hardships. One felt the weight of one’s ignorance—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled one’s hands and feet. Nor was one’s burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy which three centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon one’s race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from American adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageA people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the World, but rather allowed to give all its times and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count one’s bastards and one’s women of the evening, they very soul of the toiling, sweating Black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Beings call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the higher against the lower races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, one humbly bows and merely does obeisance. However, before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this one stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything Black, from Toussaint to the Devil—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom “discouragement” is unwritten word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageHowever, some of that is changing. Having a black credit card usually means that you are affluent and have perfect credit. Financially speaking, being in the black is good because it means your company is making a profit or breaking even. Even some designers are starting to pain the trim of houses black, and some walls in the rooms black, and the classic tuxedo is black, and many people love black luxury cars. I have heard authors like Anne Rice talk about how beautiful it was to see a man so dark that his skin looked like polished onyx, and many bodybuilders tan because it makes the muscle glisten more under the light and defines them more. And an African American called Tyler Perry opened a new Atlanta studio location when he purchased 330 acres to make the home of Tyler Perry Studios, which is the largest film production studio in the nation. Tyler Perry is also the first African-American to outright own a major film production studio. Furthermore, Tyler Perry was listed as the highest paid man in entertainment by Forbes, in 2011, earning $130,000,000.00 USD. So the Black history is not as bleak as it may seem. And Tyler Perry actually makes really good Movies, one of my favorites that I have seen was The Family that Preys for it was nice to see a diverse cast, predominantly African-American with women working as heads of the company and wearing the latest fashions, and men opening their own corporations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Image However, the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which every accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and noting more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the Black man’s ballot, by force or fraud—and behold the suicide of the race! And that is exactly what you are saying to a Black person who was successful and then meets with illegal oppression every time they express their frustration about a system that systemically robs them of what they have earned when you tell them, “Be thankful you are not homeless.” The bottom-line is if you all followed these laws that are in place to protect citizens, some of us would be better off anyway. You can do better and will do better, as did Lindsey in Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds. However, what we are also finding is in reality, Black women are no longer the backbone of the community, they are helping to set up and discourage their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers as they have been infected with racism and self-hate as was Andrea in Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys. They would rather see a White man win at the displacement of their own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageStill, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and Tyler Perry have become beacons of success and healers of racism for have overcome obstacles and oppression to reach the elite and most highly coveted roles in the World, which some will never obtain no matter how hard they try. Out of the evil came something of Good—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. So dawned the time of Sturm and Drang: storm and stress today rock our yacht on the mad waters of the World-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of the body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong, all false? No, not that, but each alone was oversimple and incomplete—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other World which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need today more than ever—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageThe power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human fraternity, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American sol two World-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded: there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we Black men seem to have the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars, bitcoins, and smartness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageIf she replaces her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hatred but determined Negro humility, will America be poorer? Or coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs? Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this land of their fathers’ father, and in the name of human opportunity. Like the flower children, this kind of character has been set up for the ultimate tragedy. One may be attracted to your beauty and spontaneous grace, and on the other he or she hates you for the very purity and innocence you represent. Innocence expects something from us, demands something, draws out our tendencies for care and sustenance; and many a man or woman hates these tendencies in oneself, and hates more whatever causes one to act on them. When we are confronted by authentic childlike innocence, we are touched by it and want to protect the child, but we hope one will grow to the age when one can protect oneself. However, when this innocence is present in adults—as in some nonviolent or pacifist persons, or flower children—we are attracted by it, our consciences are pricked, but we are also bothered by our own sympathies being drawn out in spite of ourselves, and we vaguely feel that we are being exploited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageThese innocents are a thorn in the flesh of the World; they threaten to annihilate “law and order,” the police and the authority of government. The innocence threatens to upset the World as we know it. Authentic innocence is a kind of goodness, and this also throws many people into a state of ambivalence. The citizens of ancient Athens, one remembers, voted out of office a candidate known as “Aristides the Good” because they were tired of hearing him always referred to as “the Good.” Goodness makes demands on us, and the naïve belief that people simply love the good is one of our earliest illusions. Many cannot stand such pure innocence in their World. The development of one’s ambivalence is pictured as envy and antipathy that feed upon themselves.  Evil is a force that feels good to people and it grips them beyond even their own needs for survival, that make them challenge the whole Universe to combat; and thus feeding on itself, sooner or later it comes to a tragic end as it seeks to overthrow nature itself. There are people who have the spirit, a pure heart and lack of revenge, but they are rare. We cannot let our judgment or our ethics hinge upon a split-second use of muscles, for that would make us entirely dependent upon the individual’s self-control. We would then end up with a legalism without ethical content. This is the error of all strict and rigid doctrines, whether it is religiously or computer directed, and our primary purpose is to avoid such tyranny. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageInnocence can also be a blinder for many people, which makes them veiled to the true motives of others and only life experience will unveil them. Experience tempers the self, deepens consciousness and awareness, purges and sharpens our sight—where as innocence acts as a blinder and tends to keep us from growing, from new awareness, from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as its joys (both being foreign to the innocent person). Theses are two potential poles of experience: to remain innocent, blocking out what does not appeal to you, striving to preserve the Garden of Eden state; or to strive toward spirituality and move to the “deeper music of humanity.” Does a victim have something to do with making oneself the prey? Wha does the interdependence of human beings mean—the fact that we are all bound in a web, which includes unconscious as well as conscious factors, that spreads out from ourselves and our parents and children like rings from a wave to include ultimately whole oceans of humanity? Can one be excused from responsibility for sensing the effect of one’s beauty and innocence—on others around them? What about the blithe existence built on one’s own convictions and one’s own integrity alone, unaware of the outreaching waves from one to others? Is this not a kind of unreal purity—a mortal life fashioned as though one is not a mortal—which can no longer, in our interdependent World, be accepted, let alone praised as righteous? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageBecause the likelihood is that this kind of innocence has as it purpose to cover up something; it is the innocence of the child when the person is no longer a child. Having the capacity to experience the World, one has at the same time the responsibility for not closing one’s sensibilities to that experience. The choice is clear: we must pay our human sacrifice to the Sphinx outside the city gates, or we must accept guilt and responsibility as realities within ourselves. One who cannot accept one’s guilt with responsibility will find oneself projecting one’s guilt on the Sphinx outside the city. Why so we always sacrifice the innocents? Hey obviously have a special attraction for the human-flesh-eating creature; it loves the tender, the helpless, and the powerless rather than the experiences.  We know that this is true in the fantasies of all of us—the innocent and powerless, the inexperienced, have a special attraction. It is that we can give them the experience, thus augmenting our own self-esteem? We never hear of the dragon devouring an eighty-year old corrupt district attorney, or a haggardly seventy-year old former garden, prompting to news anchor for preying on the innocent. However, it is the youths and virgins that are required to satisfy the taste of the dragon. It is obvious that the establishment is envious of youth, envious of the innocent, whose lives are ahead of them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageThis envy of youth is exacerbated, particularly in America, by the worship of youth; it is usually always better to be young. The older people, those who have lost their innocence long since, declare wars that these virginal youths are required to fight; and we go through the complex ritual of uniforms and bands and songs and disseminating an enormous amount of propaganda which is largely a projection of society’s own aggression and violence. The established people, who represent established ways, are also afraid of the youth. This is particularly obvious in our own day and society. Envy and fear—these are two motives for the sacrifice, and while they do not go very deep, they may help us for the moment. Curiously, but understandably, there seems to be inherent in human life an urge to get over innocence. Is this related, in some curious way, to the urge to get beyond the age when we can be so easily scarified? The normal child wants to grow up, to experience what is about one, to become a man or woman of the World; and although one possesses natural guards against too precipitous experiences, one looks forward to the age when one will be sufficiently self-reliant to let down those guards. There is a tendency for normal innocence to get lost. The flirtatiousness shown by girls just entering into their teen, most of it quite unconscious, is also part of the drama in the age-old urge to get over innocence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageThe temptation of Adam and Eve, symbolized by eating the apple and thus gaining the knowledge of good and evil, was a headlong drive to experience and be experienced, to leave innocence behind, to make it something of the past. It is not by accident that pleasures of the flesh is take as the symbol for the loss of innocence, the attainment of experience. The headlong push to get rid of virginity at an early age can well backfire into a loss of experience rather than a gain. The experience itself is not very momentous (some of my female patients tell of saying to the man who has deflowered them: “Is that all?” or “I was not ready.” or “You make me feel inferior.” “I did not want it.” “I am dirty and shamed.” Even some men get tired of pleasures of the flesh saying, “I got expletive.” or “I am tired of expletive.” If they are ready to leave their innocence behind, the girl/woman and boy/man can be released into a while new dimension of experience, and can present them with infinitely more possibilities for awareness and tenderness than life had before. In rebellions on campus and the by the likes of Greta Thunberg, one can often observe the curious need—generally unconscious—on the part of the student to get themselves caught and in this way to overcome one’s innocence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageFor instance, my friends and his cohorts held students hostage on campus and they were arrested by the police and were promptly dismissed from university for the rest of the year. One of the best students in the university, my friend found himself thrown out of his class and with plenty of leisure on his hands. What did he do? He went up into New England and took the next few weeks to pray. One had the feeling that this was the purpose of it all: he had wanted to be caught. He was calling for a structureless World to give him some structure; a young mand with a steady stream of success behind him, son of a famous father, never anything against which he could test his strength, nothing yet that would stand in one’s path and require him to try his mettle. In such students, this is a cry for experience equivalent to their previous innocence. Young people have already lost their innocence in one sense: concentration camps and atom bombs and 9/11 have rendered their World structureless, but they are without the equivalent experience to go with it. They cry for experience to match their precociously lost innocence. The dragon and the Sphinx are within you. If that is where the dragon and the Sphinx are really located, we must first become aware of them. Out error is not in our myth-making; this is a health, necessary function of the human imagination, a help toward mental health; our denial of it on the basis of rationalistic doctrines only makes the evil in ourselves and our World harder to get at. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageNo, the dragon and the Sphinx are not in themselves the problem. The problem is only whether you project them or confront and integrate them. To admit them in ourselves means admitting that evil and good dwell within the same being, and that potentialities for evil increase in proportion to our capacity for good. The good we seek is an increased sensitivity, a sharpened awareness, a heightened consciousness of both good and evil. Violence has the face of the fallen Angels. However, what are fallen Angels expect human beings; and what are human beings expect fallen Angels? Surely enough. Forgive the humans their violence…for violence has a human face. Through the vision of your intent takes form it originates from darkness and unlimited possibility. This is the manipulation of reality. You have to take back the essence of your creation as your on. This is internal power and the externalization of it to create change in your World. It is the power of counter creation. It is your birthright as a child of God. Remember people bend reality. It something is true for one, another has the opportunity to think otherwise making the others truth a lie. All that exists is within the perception of the observer alone. This paradox is a direct result of the illusion of the limits of creation. All is true and so nothing exists but the lie. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageBeing centered within your own God like power is of utmost importance upon the path. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. “That ye contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but that ye receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that ye humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place ye may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that ye live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he doth bestow upon you,” Alma 34.38. We must recognize what is not always recognized, that the growth of mind and character takes time, just as the growth f trunk and limb takes time. A being does not begin to mature and become what one is likely to be until one is past thirty. The young being who has the wisdom to devote some of one’s abundant energies to this quest will one day be the envy of the antiquated being who would devote only one’s slackened forces and shortened days to it. Give substance to your desire so it can take shape upon their spiritual planes and manifest here on the corporeal realm of existence. This process creates a reciprocal gateway of energy which has intense alchemical effects. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20Image

As the Essence of Courage is to Stake One’s Life on a Possibility, so the Essence of Faith is to Believe that the Possibility Exists!

ImageSo, nobody ever accused me of acquiring any real wisdom in my two hundred years on this Earth. I know only one way to proceed. Previous investigations have pointed to the multiplicity of causes of loneliness. Those experiencing loneliness tend to be widowed and single people, living alone, in their eighties rather than in their sixties, they tend to be men rather than women and to be the relatively infirm. Loneliness cannot be regarded as the simple direct result of social circumstances, but is rather an individual response to an external situation to which other seniors may react quite differently. There seems to be no single cause of severe loneliness in those in retirement age. In several respect the present inquiry reached similar results. Forty-sic percent of widowed people said they were very or sometimes lonely, 42 percent of those living alone, 53 percent of those in their late seventies and eighties and 43 percent of those who were infirm, compared with 27 percent in the sample as a whole. However, it is possible that less emphasis should be given to personal differences and to a multiplicity of causes. The results also suggested that a single social factor may be fundamental to loneliness. This is the recent deprivation of the company of a close relative, usually a husband or wife or a child, through death, illness or migration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

ImageExamination of individual interview-reports showed that of the 56 people saying they were very or sometimes lonely, 28 had been recently bereaved and 17 separated from children. This seemed to be the chief cause of their loneliness. A further 11 had experiences other drastic changes in family circumstances. It is necessary to consider these lonely people. All but four of the 28 who had been recently bereaved had lost a husband or wife within the previous 10 years. “No one know what loneliness is till your partner happens to go.” “You do not realize it until you know it. But loneliness is the worst thing you can suffer in life.” The men in particular talked about their bereavement with very deep feeling. “I miss her. Every time I look over there—that is her seat. People kept telling me to have someone to look after me but I said to myself, there will never be another woman who will take her place.” Three of them did not talk, they wept. Mr. Heart had lost his wife seven years earlier. He lived with an unmarried son but he had no daughter. “Sometimes I get lonely. I think of her. There is not a day passes but se is in my mind. When she died, I do not know how I stood on my feet. You do not know what it is when you do not have a wife. I wish I had a daughter. If you had a daughter it would put your in mind of your wife. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Image“Sometimes I think I hear her calling in the next room. She was what you call exceptional, exceptional good. You never had to run round any public house for her. My son still goes and puts flowers on her grave. You cannot tell how you miss someone until they go. Death is a terrible thing, to lose someone you love.” One of the major consequences of a wife’s death was that the man saw less of his children. He acknowledged it was the mother who held the family together. “When my missus was alive, I had to come and have tea in the bedroom because there was not room in here. The place was crowded out with them (married children and their families on Saturdays and Sundays).” “My daughter used to come round often when my wife was alive, but I do not see so much of them now. But they like to know I am comfortable and being looed after.” Widowers in fact saw less of their children, particularly of their sons, than married men and married or widowed women, as judged by average frequency of contact. However, this falling-off did not apply to all a widower’s children. A close relationship with one child was usually maintained. Several lived with a single or married daughter, or visited a married daughter daily, and then described the pleasure grandchildren gave them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Image“My young granddaughter likes swinging and I pick her up and she swings between my legs. And then she climbs up on me. Playing with my grandchildren is my greatest pleasure.” They found some consolation here. “I am a grandfather,” said one man, “and that is the only goodness I get out of life.” The loss of the marriage partner was not quite such a disaster for women. They had always depended less on husbands than husbands on them, and they found it easier to console themselves wit their families. Nevertheless, many of them were lonely, particularly if their husbands had died recently and particularly if infirmity or shortage of relatives prevented them from finding comfort readily in companionship of others. One woman’s husband had died eight years previously. She had no children. “I get so lonely I could fill up the teapot with tears.” Mrs. Pridy was very infirm and her husband had died only a year previously, when she was 80. She lived with a daughter and grandchildren. “I sit here for hours and hours and sometimes thinking about it. I get depressed and I start crying. We was always together. I can remember even his laughing. “Come on, girl,” he’s say, “don’t get sitting about. Let’s liven ‘em up.” They say what is to be will be. I never thought he would…But we have all got to go. A good many of them do not even know he is gone (neighbors). I sit here for hours thinking about him. I cannot get over it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

ImageWe cannot all have the strength to live like a Christ. However, something worthwhile is within reach of all of us. Let us therefore aim at the immediately practicable, which in its turn will lead to something more. It is foolish to waste time and strength unavailingly grasping for what is out of reach. Almost every man and woman whose husband or wife has died within the previous five years, compared with half between five and ten years and a quarter over that limit, felt lonely. The shorter the period since the death the more likely were people to complain of loneliness. Although practically everyone felt lonely at first after about five or six years the presence or not of an affectionate family seemed to determine how long such feelings persisted. Four people had lost a child and not a husband recently. Three were women widowed in the war who said a son had died in the previous few years. One had lost two sons in the war and another three years previously. “I could cry my heart out sometimes when I sit here.” There was also a married woman who son had been killed at Arnhem. “He is never out of my mind. I always see him in my mind and they are still talking about wars.” In speaking of the loss of children and other relatives it was notable how long people felt grief and how indelible was the memory of these people. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

ImageThere is a point in our lives in which our minds must fall back baffled by the great mystery which surrounds us. Reflect and reason, search and probe as much as one can, one can go no farther. However, this does not mean that life is meaningless or that the Universe is meaningless. Only a being superior to humans might possibly penetrate this mystery. The “In Memoriam” column of a local East London newspaper provides many examples of the feelings of relatives for those who had died, some of them several years previously. In the following three illustrations, printed in the newspaper, only the names have been changed. Howard—To the beautiful memory of my beloved daughter, Alice, who feel asleep June 17th. Time takes away the edge of grief, but memories turn back every leaf. Ever in our thoughts—Mum and all. Talewill—In treasured memory of our dear Mum, who fell asleep June 7th. Not a day do we forget you, Mum, in our hearts you are ever near, loved, remembered, longed for always, brining many a silent tear. Sadly missed—Loving sons and daughters. Huggins—In loving memory of our dear nephew who passed away June 6th. Sad and sudden was the call, to one so dearly loved by all, this month of June comes with regret, it brings back a tragedy we shall never forget. –From Aunt Caroline, Uncle Bill, Uncle Herbert, Uncle Steve and cousins Mary, Alice, and children. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

ImageAfter bereavement, recent separation from children and grandchildren was the most important reason for loneliness, affecting 17 of the 56 people. Eleven of the 17 had no contact with a child living in the district although recently at least one child had been there. What happened was that, if the last child to get married moved out of the district or was unable to find a home in it and there were no other children living nearby, the senior greatly missed their daily companionship, particularly if widowed. A further three seniors had a son living nearby but the daughters had recently moved away. And three widows who had been living with married children now lived alone, although some of their children still lived in the same district. We must work within our own inescapable limits. It is futile to nurture wild ambitions which one is not qualified to realize. In short, let one know oneself. One may then have a key to better knowledge of other things, especially of the meaning of one’s own life. If needs be in the hope of attainting truth, it is only the few, after all, who have the inborn inclination to sacrifice everything. What of the lesser souls who have no such passport, whose temperament, environment, family, or position forbids them from aspiring heroically to the highest goal? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

ImageCan we hold no hope for lesser soul who are blocked from obtaining the highest goal?  It is to be a cause of all or nothing? The answer is that nobody is asked to undertake more than lies within one’s strength or circumstances. There is room here for those with humble aims who do not feel equal to more than the slightest philosophic effort. This is not possible let them accept these teachings on simple faith alone. Let them absorb a few leading tenets which makes special appeal to them or which are more easily understandable by them than others. If they do not have time or tendency to practise more, let the practise a few minutes’ prayer only once or twice weekly. Let them keep in only occasional touch by letter or otherwise with someone who represents in oneself a definite personal attainment which, although beyond their own reach, is not beyond their own veneration. Thus they take the first step to establish right tendencies. If however they are unable to do any of these things, let them not despair. There still remains the path of occasional service. Let individual give from time to time, as suits their capacity or convenience, a little help in kind or toil or coin to those who are themselves struggling against great odds to enlighten a World sorrow-struck through ignorance. For thus they will earn a gift of glad remembrance and internal notice whose unique value will be out of all proportion of that is offered. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

ImageThe karmic benefit of such offering will return to them, and even if it be long deferred they will have the intangible satisfaction which comes from all service placed on the Overself’s altar. If one is unable to gather enough strength to seek the Truth, then let one seek it for the sake of the services it can render to one. Although hardly any seeker can perfect oneself in the quest’s varied requirements, all seekers can develop something of each needed quality. If the regeneration sought is to be that also, the change in thinking and living habits must theoretically be a total one. However, the compulsions of earning a livelihood, fitting into the local community, and adjusting to family opposition make this impossible in all but exceptional cases. Beings who have to take these actualities into their consideration in practice attempt to compromise with hard necessity and present environment. This does not mean that they discard the truth—they must indeed keep it loyally as the Ideal—but that they relate it to the prevailing conditions and somehow arrive at some kind of a reconciliation between the two. Nor does it mean that the teaching is impractical, for the few exceptions already mentioned are able to put it into practice a hundred percent simply because they are willing and able to pay the heavy price of isolation for doing so. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

ImageIt means that although the teaching is adequate to all circumstances, its devotees are unwilling to court the extra suffering and struggle involved in fighting the insanity and tension of those existing circumstances. The latter tend to promote materialism and are best suited to a materialistic way of thinking and living. Those who, while reading its true character aright, submit to it and refuse to withdraw from it, are entitled to do so—if at the same time they have the clear understanding that the higher illuminations, as well as the permanent one, will have to remain inaccessible to them. Is there not enough to do in climbing to the lesser one, and are they not sufficiently glorious rewarding? There are many who are not seeking for the quickest attainment of the highest goal. They feel, quite pardonably, that the demands of training for it are too great for their modest equipment. However, they are seeking for occasional inspiration and they would be content with just a few glimpses during their lifetime. Although these people are not fully committed to the Quest, they are in general sympathetic with it. If one feels that rising to a higher level of consciousness would be too much for one, then one could simple try to become a better being. If one has to live within one’s limitations, it is some kind of a victory over self for beings to be willing to live without distress. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

ImageHowever, suppose on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that the World is not the ultimatum. Suppose you find yourself a very well spring, of zeal and the virtue of exiting by truth faith as soldiers live by courage; as by strength of heart, the sailor sights with roaring seas. Supposed, however thickly evils crown upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring int trusting on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if not it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the World, and that our own reactions on the World, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be decisive help to determine the definition. A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition of a feather’s weight; a long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters n-o-t. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view; and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

ImageNow, in this description of faiths that verify themselves, I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience which makes this visible order good for moral beings. Our faith in the seen World’s goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen World. However, will our faith in the unseen World similarly verify itself? Who knows? Once more it is a case of maybe; and once more maybes are the essence of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible World may not in part depend on their personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. If they mean anything, for my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. However, it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved Universe our nature is adapted. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

ImageThe deepest thing in our name is this Binnenleben (as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the Earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example which the strict positivist pronounced upon our faith—sound to us like mere chatterings of teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; as the essence of courage is to stake one’s life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists. These, then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The scientific proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. However, the faithful fighter of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

ImageThose who feel that there are too many evils in the cotemporary ways of living and of earning a livelihood, who sincerely deplore these evils, nevertheless often feel also that there is little of nothing they can do about it until society as a whole develops new and better ways. However, this is only a first look at their situation; it reveals the appearance of it but not the reality. Do they really need to wait until the unlikely event of wholesale and voluntary amendment takes place all around them? For the challenge today, as will be made more clear as time goes on, is not a social but an individual one. More beings are free to take the first steps towards their own liberation from these evils than they usually realize. When their caution becomes excessive, it also becomes a vice. It may prevent them from making mistakes, but it also prevents them from doing anything at all—leading, in fact, to a kind of inertia. Even if they cannot do more, they can make a start to apply new ideals and then see what happens. Will yourself to being down the dense veil of illusion and limitation. The false light and energy of creation will be consumed by the power of truth. This will enable one to become a perceiver of spiritual vision and insight found outside of this World of gross limitation and stasis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

ImageRemember that in theory reality cannot exist outside of the observer. Therefore, to erase it from perception is to weaken it and make it more malleable. The more people do this exercise the less hold the limits of this World may have upon us as a collective. It is a powerful dynamic. One can perform this by itself throughout the day, and over times you will be surprised at the results attained. We are using the limits of matter to our benefit making it bow to us and serve our purpose by expanding possibility within this World. Feel God’s eternal grace begin to close in on you until you begin to feel it touch you. Feel it devouring any weaknesses in the soul. Feel it healing any spiritual wounds that may be effecting the power and expansion of self. If one has yet to develop their psychic faculties enough to directly perceive and hear God being conjured, observing the many blessings in your life will begin to open up doorways within the mind for more direct communication. It must be understood that when a force is stirred it does indeed answer. It does indeed respond and it is a great mistake to not come to this realization. The trick is in learning to observe and perceive the spirit or force by training the mind to do so. The adept must learn to listen. “Wherefore, having this perfect knowledge of God, he could not be kept from within the veil; therefore he saw Jesus; and he did minister unto him” reports #Ether 3.20. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15Image