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

September 12, 2019 1:13 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 10, 2019 2:09 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 6, 2019 10:19 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 2, 2019 1:34 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However Scarce the World May Make this Sense—In Awe One Feels Profoundly the Immense!

August 30, 2019 12:17 am

You simply do not know the flesh. The concept is too complex for you. What do you think taught your souls your souls in Sheol their perfection? Was it not suffering? Yes, they enter perhaps twisted and burnt if they have failed to see beyond suffering on Earth, and some may disappear. But in Sheol, over the centuries of suffering and longing, others are purged and purified. Since we generally think of aggression as being destructive, I shall not need to illustrate this beyond a brief personal example. I was engaged to speak at a conference of the junior executives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. This conference was part of a six-week training session held on the campus of a New England college and, I assumed, an expression of the humanistic interest of AT&T. I had spoken at such conferences before with gratifying results. However, I found, to my surprise and some bewilderment, that my talk was confronted with strange, invisible barriers. I have always been convinced of the truth of Walt Whiteman’s statement that the “audience makes the speech.” This audience seemed alert and fresh bur, try as I would, I just could not communicate my main ideas. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

At a recess I discovered that, for this part of their training, these young executives (being judged for possible promotion to the few top positions in the corporation) were being trained to be “aggressive,” and that AT&T has retained a couple of professors from college to grade the men and women on how efficiently they could shoot holes in the arguments presented. What I was really facing was not an audience that wanted to learn or even a group present for the pleasures of intellectual stimulation. Its aim was entirely different; the audience was listening not to what I said, but for the errors, the weaknesses in the argument. This was, in short, a sophisticated form of listening geared toward putting down the speaker. The aggression had a weighty competitive reward, namely promotion to high office. This is an example of noncommunication. Such an attitude will successfully inhibit any speaker; you cannot bring forth your ideas unless you feel that they will at least be heard. This does not mean that they will be agreed with; but it does mean that they will be listened to for their own intrinsic merit. If I had known about the purpose of this audience at the outset I could have simply changed the whole theme of my talk to aggression and its purposes and effect; then we would at least have been communicating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Many are wondering, as we speak about communication, how is the mass market formed on which popular culture is sold and perpetuated? In the first place, individual taste has become uneconomic for the purchaser and for the seller, and this effectively stunts its growth. People are prepared accordingly throughout the educational process. Group acceptance, shared taste, takes the place of authority and of individual moral and aesthetic judgment and standards. However, people often move from group to group. Any tastes therefore that cannot be sloughed off—an individual taste, not easily divided from the person in whom it dwells—becomes an obstacle to adaptation. Success is hindered by a discriminating personal taste which expresses or continues an individual personality, and success is fostered by an unselective appetite. Numerous precautions are taken, beginning in nursery school (itself hardly an individualizing institution) to avoid elaboration of personal discernment and to instill fear of separation from the group. Group acceptance is stressed through formal and informal popularity contests, teamwork, and polling. Education altogether stresses group instruction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

For instance, the size of one’s classes and the class average, not the qualities of individual pupils, are often considered the measure of the teacher. The student oneself is so much treated as part of a group that, except in higher education (which is only partly immune), one may be automatically promoted with one’s group regardless of individual achievement or variation. Finally, the surviving individual talent is instructed not to cultivate, but to share, itself. The writer gives a writing course, the scholar lectures and writes popularizations, the beauty models of appears on TV, and the singer deserts the concert hall for the juke box. The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes. The actual social function of advertising is not to mold tastes in any particular way, nor to debase it. This goes for manufacturers, publishers and movie-makers too. They are quite content to produce and advertise what people want—be it T.S. Eliot or Edgar Guest, Kierkegaard or Norman Vincent Peale, “September Morn” or mobiles. It does not matter what people want to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mas production possible. Advertising helps to unify tastes, to de-individualize it and thus to make mass production possible. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories which hold that wicked capitalists, through advertising and mass media, deliberately (or stupidly) debauch the originally good, natural tastes of the masses. Mass production—capitalist or socialist—demands unified taste; efficiency (or profitableness) is dependent only on its being shared by sizeable groups. Can one say anything about mass tastes beyond saying that they are widely shared? Are they homogenized on the lowest common denominator? There seem to be no good reasons to assume that the lowest tastes are most widespread. One may say something of the sort about some crowds untied temporarily by crude common appetites at the expense of reason, restraint and refinement. However, why consider consumers a crowd? Even the fare offered by the entertainment media is usually consumed by people separately or in very small groups. (Except for movies, but moviegoers are isolated from each other though they are together.) Producers have no interest in lowering tastes or in catering to low rather than high taste. They seek to provide for a modal average of tastes which through advertising they try to make as congruent with the mean average as possible. Neither average can be identical with the lowest common denominator. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Yet in one sense consumers are treated as a crowd: their individual tastes are not catered to. The mass-produced article need not aim low, but it must aim at an average of tastes. In satisfying all (or at least many) individual tastes in some respects, it violates each in other respect. For there are—so far—no average persons having average tastes. Averages are but statistical composites. A mass-produced article, while reflecting nearly everybody’s tastes to some extent, is unlikely to embody anybody’s taste fully. This is one source of the sense of violation which is rationalized vaguely in theories about deliberate debasement of taste. The sense of violation springs from the same thwarting of individuality that makes prostitution (or promiscuity) psychologically offensive. The cost of inexpensive and easy availability, of mass production, is wide appeal; and the cost of wide appeal is de-individualization of the relationship between those who cater and those who are catered to; and of the relationship of both to the object of the transaction. By using each other indiscriminately as impersonal instruments (the seller for profit, the buyer for sensation—or, in promiscuity, both parties for sensation and relief of anxiety) the man or woman of the night and his or her client sacrifice to seemingly more urgent demands the self which, in order to grow, needs continuity, discrimination and completeness in relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Though profit and sensation can be achieved by depersonalization, the satisfaction ultimately sought cannot be, for the very part of personality in which it is felt—the individual self—is stunted and atrophied, at least if de-individualization continues long enough and is comprehensive. Ultimately, the sense of violation too is numbered. Now, the depersonalizing effects of the mass production of some things—say, electric clocks—may be minor as far as consumers are concerned and more than offset by the advantages of affordability. The same cannot be said for mass entertainment or education. And though some individuals may, society cannot have one without the other. The effects of mass production on people as producers and consumers are likely to be cumulative. Besides, even goods that seem purely utilitarian include elements of non-utilitarian, of aesthetic and psychic (for instance, prestige) appeal. Indeed, less than half of consumer expenditure goes for the satisfaction of simple biological needs. (More, perhaps, in the lowest income groups, and much less still in the higher ones.) One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Distinctions of this kind are necessarily hazy, but if cigarettes, newspapers, television, drinks, shaving lotion or lipstick, the prestige location of one’s Cresleigh Home, the fashionableness of one’s clothing, and so forth, are taken to satisfy nonbiological needs—and we can do without them biologically—then we are motivated by psychic needs in spending most of our money. This, of course, is not in itself objectionable—except that the processes by which many of these needs now arise and are stilled bring to mind the processes by which bread is now mass produced. In milling and baking, bread is deprived of any taste whatever and of all vitamins. Some of the vitamins are then added again (taste is provided by advertising). Quite similarly with all mass-produced articles. They can no more express the individual tastes of producers than that of consumers. They become impersonal objects, however pseudo-personalized. Producers and consumers go through the mass production mill to come out homogenized and de-characterized—only it does not seem possible to reinject the individualities which have been ground out, the way the vitamins are added to enrich bread. The human relations industry tried to do just that and it doubtlessly supplies a demand and can be helpful, just as chemical sedatives or stimulants can be. However, it seems unlikely that any assembly line—including manned by human relations counselors—can give more than the illusion of individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

To produce more, people work under de-individualizing conditions and are rewarded by high income and leisure. Thus they can and do consume more. However, as consumers, they must once more rid themselves of individual tastes. The benefits of mass production are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption. The more discontinuous income earning and spending become physically, the more continuous they seem to become psychologically. Failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end the production of standardized things by persons demands also the production of standardized persons. This intellectual preparation and emotional purification is a task that strains being’s faculties to the extreme. Nobody therefore need expect it to be other than a lifetime’s task. Few even succeed in finishing it in a single lifetime—a whole series is required in most cases. Nature has taken a very long time to bring beings to one’s present state, so she is in no hurry to complete their development in any particular reincarnation. Yet such is the mystery of grace, that this is always a grand possibility, always the sublime X-factor in every case. However, the individual aspirant cannot afford to gamble with this chance, which, after all, is a rare one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

One must rely on one’s personal efforts, on one’s own strivings, more than anything else, to being one nearer to the desired goal. In a material sense, this assembly-line shaping, packaging and distributing of persons, of life, occurs already. Most people perch unsteadily in mass-produced, impermanent dwellings throughout their lives. They are born in hospitals, fed in cafeterias, married in churches or castles or mansions or rose gardens. After terminal care they perish in hospitals, are shelved briefly in funeral homes, and are finally incinerated or put in the ground. On each of these occasions—how many others?—efficiency and economy are obtained and individuality and continuity stripped off. If one lives and dies discontinuously and promiscuously in anonymous surroundings, it becomes hard to identify with anything even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything even one’s own individuality. The rhythm of individual life loses autonomy, spontaneity, and distinction when it is tired into a stream of traffic and carried along according to the speed of the road, as we are, in going to work, or play, or in doing anything. Traffic lights signal when to stop and go, and much as we seem to be driving we are driven. To stop spontaneously, to exclaim, Verweile doch Du bist so schoen (Stay, for you are beautiful), may not lose the modern Faust his soul—but it will cause a traffic jam. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The egoism which falsifies our true sense of being and the materialism which distorts our true sense of reality are maladies which can hardly be cured by our own efforts. Only by calling, in trust and love, on a higher power, whether it be embodied in another man or in ourself, can their mesmeric spell ultimately be broken. Yet it is our own efforts which first must initiate the cure. Turning inward upon oneself might be retiring to a fool’s paradise or into a real one. To make progress inwardly is ultimately all that matters, everything else passes except the fruit of our spiritual efforts. Mysticism is the theory and practice of a technique whereby a being seeks to establish direct personal contact with spiritual being. The ideal here may not set at becoming a sinless saint but at becoming an enlightened and balanced human being. The ultimate point to be attained is fully humanity. One alone who has developed on all sides in this way is fully human. It is one sign of the sage who lives in perfect detachment that one does not miss an enjoyable experience which has passed away, and another sign that one is not afraid of this passing while one is enjoying it. What happened in all those earlier years is now veiled history to the enlightened being; what happens now, in the Eternal Now, is the important significant matter. Thus one’s mind is free from old burdens and errors. Yet, if needed, dead events can be resuscitated by intense concentration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The background of one’s mind is far away from everyday consciousness as if invisible, but it can spring instantly forward if needed. There is no split between higher and lower mind: they are in harmony but the kind of activity is different. It would not be correct to say that one’s consciousness splits itself into two. The proficient can mentally turn inside from the busyness of one’s environment and within a few moments find the divine presence there. One part of one can enter frequently into cerebral thinking but another part can drop out of this into celestial experience. Our work remains active in the foreground of consciousness, while our wisdom remains in the background as its inspirer. One moves in the World of bodily senses and their surrounding objects without losing the Presence, being held by it rather than holding on to it. Primitive society was organized for a certain kind of production of life, a ritual technique of manufacture of the things of the World that used the dimension of the invisible. Beings used their ingenuity to fill one’s stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of one’s organism; this is only logical and natural. However, this stomach-centered characteristic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

One reason is that beings were never content to just stop at food: they wanted more in life in the widest sense of the term—exactly what we would expect an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self-conscious about life and death and the need to continue experiencing. Food is only one part of that quest; being quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All of being’s higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. All morality is fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. It is all right for a being to talk about spiritual aims; what one really means is aims for merits that qualify one for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions. Thus the sacrificial lamb is no longer the young of an ewe slaughtered at the Paschal Feast as the embodiment of some god in order to promote the life of the crops, but a symbol expressing a sum of innocence, purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, redemption and divinity. Doubtless many will be scandalized at any attempt to derive the cure of souls for the cravings of the stomach. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even so the rising generation may find cause not for anger, but for wonder, in the rapidity with which beings, so late emerged from the brute, has proceeded from the conquest of matter to that of the spirit. No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that beings are capable of. As a creature one is most attuned to the living miracle of the cosmos and responds to that miracle with a fineness and a nobility that are in themselves wondrous; the whole thing is surely part of a divine mystery. However, the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as some would seem to make it out. The earning of spiritual points is the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction. For most beings faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organism stomach project. Many people what is going on in the mind that ideas they were pondering should break through at a sudden moment. Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me, incontestable, and traces of it can be found in other cases where it is less evident. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness. The appearance of the illumination is not due to the relief from fatigue—for instance, simply taking a rest. It is more probably that this rest has been filled out wit unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer or someone seriously considering the solution to a problem. Only the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form. When it comes to the conditions of unconscious work, it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen expect after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing. The aspirant’s decision to aim for the highest Goal is the governing factor: if one sticks to this decision, one is bound to succeed sooner or later. The question now arises: What is this Goal? It is the fulfilment of the Real Purpose of life, as apart from the lower purposes of earning a livelihood, rearing a family, and so forth. The aspirant will become fully Self-conscious—as aware of the divine Overself as one now is of one’s Earthly body. And this achievement will be perpetual, not just a matter of occasional glimpse or fleeting intuitions. Even though the Quest has become more difficult under modern conditions, it has not become impossible. The timeworn means t this end must simply be brought up to date. What are the means? They are thought, feeling, will, and intuition used in a special way. This constitutes the fourfold path, or Quest. “And now, behold, my joy is great, even unto fulness, because of you, and also this generation; yea, and even the Father rejoiceth, and also the holy Angels, because of you and this generation; for none of them are lost,” reports 3 Nephi 30. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

August 29, 2019 12:46 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 28, 2019 1:39 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My First Act of Free Will Shall be to Believe in Free Will

August 23, 2019 12:38 am

My courtyard banana trees had not been touched by a heatwave this Summer, and grew thick and drowsing as ever against the stucco walls. The wild impatients and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water splashed from the cherub’s horn into the basin. And the flowers introduced a profusion of colors which had never been before in nature, expect in the rainbow! Colors we had known in Heaven and thought to be purely celestial and now we saw they were in this beautiful community. Trees rose in their mature fullness; rain came in whispering gusts, full of fragrance. They sky warmed and colors everywhere expanded or deepened. These souls took the invisible fabric of Heaven, whatever it is—energy, essence, the light of God, the Creative Power of God—and in a twinkling surrounded us all with wonderous constructions representing their curiosity, their concepts of beauty and their desires! What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough occurred? Taking this experience of mine as a start, we noticed, first of all, that the insight broke into my conscious mind against what I had been really trying to think rationally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

I had a good, sound thesis and I had been working very hard trying to prove it. The unconscious, so to speak, broke through in opposition to the conscious belief to which I was clinging. There is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness. The relationship is compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issues, my unconscious will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are unconsciously smitten with doubt about an idea, the more strict and rigidly we fight for it in our conscious argument. This is also why persons as different as Saint Paul on the Damascus road and the alcoholic in the Bowery go through such radical conversions—the repressed unconscious side of the dialectic erupts and takes over the personality. The unconscious seems to take delight (if I may so express it) in breaking through—and breaking up—exactly what we cling to most rigidly in our conscious thinking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

What occurs in this breakthrough is not simply growth; it is much more dynamic. It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle. A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what one consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision. The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its source in the fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight destroyed my other hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my professors believed, a fact that caused me some concern. Whenever there is a breakthrough of a significant idea in science or a significant new form in art, the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual and spiritual World. This is the source of guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked, “Every act of creation is first of all an action of destruction.” The breakthrough carried with it also an element of anxiety. For it not only broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-World relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

At such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation, the existence of which I as yet do not know. This is the source of the anxious feeling that comes at the moment of the breakthrough; it is not possible that there be a genuinely new idea without this shake up occurring to some degree. However, beyond guilt and anxiety, as I said above, the main feeling that comes with the breakthrough is one of gratification. We have seen something new. We have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists call an experience of elegance. When the Universe itself runs down and disintegrates given enough time, how can this little and limited being of a person hope to preserve one’s personal consciousness, one’s personality, one’s character just as it is today? Any belief fostered by any kind of authority—religious or metaphysical or any other—which fosters this illusion is a false one. However, this said, let it be counted by that other truth which is needed to complete the thought. If the individualized being must one day part with its limited consciousness, this is only in order to return to its origin in the universal consciousness, for consciousness cannot come out of nothing. It came from and goes back to the universal mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Therefore, if a being loses the little and temporary immortality of the ego, it will only be to gain the greater and true immortality of that mind. The higher individuality is preserved, but the lower personality, with its miserable limitations, is not. The difference between the individual and the universal self persists throughout the incarnations and no mystical emotionalism or metaphysical jugglery can end it. It will end indeed not by the individual transforming oneself into the greater being but by one’s merging oneself into it, that is, by the disappearance of one’s separate consciousness in the pure essence of all consciousness. However, it need not so end unless one wants it. Even if we should surrender it to God, there is no reason why we should not preserve own individuality. When the higher self encloses and absorbs the ego, the goal is achieved. Through one has been caught up into something immensely great than oneself, one still remains an individual—albeit a loosely held one. One’s further life will be a record of discovery rather than speculation, of insights rather than intellections. What will happen to one’s environment after illumination? Nothing. It will not be miraculously transformed so that one sees auras, ghost, and atoms mixed up with its ordinary appearance. It will still look as it did before. The grass will have the same shapes and colour. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

However, the question of inequality has not yet been answered. For now we must ask—why do some of us receive more than others in the very beginning, before using or wasting our talents is even possible? Why does the one servant receive five talents, and the second, two, and the third, one? Why is one person born to desperate less affluence, and another to affluence? To reply that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given, and little of those to whom little is given, is not adequate. For it is just this original inequality, internal and external, that gives rise to the question. Why is the power to gain so much more out of one’s being human given to one human being rather than to another? Why is so much given to one that much can be asked of one, while little can be asked of another, because little was given one? If we consider this problem in relation not only to individual beings, but also to classes, races, and nations, the question of political inequality also arises, and with it the many ways in which beings have tried to abolish inequality. In every revolution and way, the will to solve the riddle of inequality is a driving force. However, neither war nor revolution can answer it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

And even though we may imagine that most social inequalities will be conquered in the future, there remain three realities: the inequality of talents in body and mind, the inequality created by freedom and destiny, and the inequality of justice deriving from the fact that all generations before the time of such equality would by nature be excluded from its blessings. This last would be the greatest inequality possible! No! In the face of one of the deepest and most tormenting problems of life, we cannot permit ourselves to be so shallow or foolish as to try to escae into a social dreamland. We have to live now. We have to live this life. We must face the riddle of inequality today. Let us not confuse the riddle of inequality with the fact that each of us is a unique and incomparable self. Our being individual certainly belongs to our dignity as beings. This being was given to us, and must be made use of an intensified, not drowned in the gray waters of conformity that threaten us so much today. One should defend every individuality and the uniqueness of every human self. However, one should not be deluded into believing that this is a solution to the riddle of inequality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Unfortunately, there are social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion in order to justify social injustice. They are at least as foolish as those who dream of the future abolition of inequality. One who has witnessed hospitals for the ill and insane, prisons, sweat shops, battlefields, people starving, family tragedies, or moral aberrations should be cured of any confusion of the gift of individuality with the riddle of inequality. One should be cured of any sense of easy consolation. If any teacher or organization asks you to swear ceremoniously that you will not reveal to others what you are taught, be sure that you will receive inferior occultism, not philosophic truth. For the truth hides itself from the unready: it does not have to be hidden from them. Do not confuse the necessary secrecy of philosophic presentation with the portentous secrecy of charlatanic cults. It is not necessary to call meetings or to organize societies in order to propagate truth. There is no crowd salvation, no communal redemption. The monasteries and ashrams, the organizations and societies, the institutions and temples have their place and use. However, the one is very elementary and the other is very limited. Whatever is most worthwhile to, and in, a being must come forth from one’s own individual endeavour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Society improves only as, and when, its members improve. This is strikingly shown by the moral failure of some states with dictatorships, and by the half-failure of established religions. Most institutions and organizations have developed in time the fault of an egocentrism which cases them to lose sight of their original higher purpose, and so they join the list of additions to societies which have a mixed selfish and idealistic character. Too many spiritual organizations exist mainly to serve those who create or staff them. When those who direct the affairs of an institution become more concerned about the state of its revenue than about its state of spirituality, when they are more affected by its increasing financial returns than about its increasing materiality, it is time to pick up one’s hat and stick and bid it farewell. Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substances, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The death instinct is directed against the organism itself and this is a self-destructive drive, or it is directed outward, and in this case tends to destroy others rather than oneself. When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. Even though Dr. Freud suggested at various times that the power of the death instinct can be reduced, the basic assumption remained: beings were under the sway of an impulse to destroy either oneself or others, and one could do little to escape this tragic alternative. It follows that, from the position of the death instinct, aggression was not essentially a reaction to stimuli but a constantly following impulse rooted in the constitution of the human organism. The death instinct is a biological force in all living organisms: this should mean that animals, too, express their death instinct either against themselves or against others. Hence one should find more illness or early death in less outwardly aggressive animals and vice versa; but, of course, there are no data supporting this idea. Yet, there is a dualistic concept in which two basic forces are opposed to each other. This dichotomy was at first that between self-preservation and libido, and later that between life and death instincts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

There is a vastness and the precariousness of existing fully and the courage required to preserve in the face of ill health and depression. The organism has a great stake in blowing itself up in size, importance, and durability. Because only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand how it is only in society tat beings can get the symbolic measures for the degrees of one’s importance, one’s qualification for extradurability. And it is only by contrasting and comparing oneself to like organism, to one’s fellow being, that one can judge if one has some extra claim to importance. Obviously it is not very convincing about one’s ultimate worth to be better than a lobster, or even a fox; but to outshine that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black eyes—now that is something that carries the conviction of ultimacy. The faces beings carry the highest meaning to other beings. Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for joking relationships and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor in games, feats of strength, hunting and warfare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Sociologist have very nicely described the dynamics of status forcing and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in, by playing intricate games of one-upmanship. However, you cannot force your status vis-à-vis someone else unless there is a someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions for playing around with status, for coming out of social groups with increases self-inflation. Society almost everywhere provides codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways—like displaying one’s superior achievements, even if it is only skill in hunting that feeds everyone’s stomach. A being cannot impart life to oneself but must get it via ritual from one’s fellow being, then we can say even further that beings cannot impart importance to oneself; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life: importance equals durability equals life. However, I do not want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-aggrandizement, or that beings can only expand their sense of self at the expense of others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

This would not be true, even though it is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. Primitive society also expressed its genius by giving to people much less invidious and competitive forms of self-expansion. People impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social damage and deflation. People do this in their interpersonal encounters by using verbal formulas that express proper courtesies, permit gentle handling, save the other’s face with the proper subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on. Social life is interwoven with salutations foe greeting and taking leave, for acknowledging others with short, standardized conversations which reinforce the sense of well-being of all the members. Beings in society manage to give each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outside rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings that prevent the undermining and deflation that can result from the clash of organismic ambitions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

However, now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked—how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get inside primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to pay in the generative rituals. We have so long been stripped of a ritual role to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to understand this, to get this into perspective. We do not know what it means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community dramatization of the forces of nature—unless we belong to an active religious community. Nr can we feel the immense sense of achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution: the ritualist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; one has contributed to sustaining and renewing the Universe. If rituals generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritualist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community. Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid casual affair, but the primitive feels the effect of one’s ability to generate life, one is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

We may console ourselves about our historical demotion from the status of cosmic heroism by saying that at least we know what true religion is, whereas these cosmic creators lived according to immature magic. I will admit that our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober Worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. Magic is religion we do not believe in, and religion is magic we believe in. Voila tout. A school should exist not only to teach but also to investigate, not to formulate prematurely a finalized system but to remain creative, to go on testing theories by applying them and validating ideas by experience. The formation of a society of seekers may have a social value but it has little instructional value, for it merely pools their common ignorance. The justification of a society educationally is its possession of a competent teacher—competent because one’s instruction possess intellectual clarity and one’s knowledge possesses justifiable certitude. “I will not show unto the wicked of my strength, to one more than the other, save it be unto those who repent of their sins, and hearken unto my words,” reports Helaman 7.23. The mind passes through a stage, when seeking after truth, it finds out that the World is other than it seems to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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This is the Price that Must be Paid for the Passions of this Earth thus I Have Given the Recipe for the Absurd Victory!

August 19, 2019 12:46 am

Making sense of the senseless and finding the freedom in a capricious, perilous World is our primary philosophical concern. We must help each other live with and even benefit from the unfathomable conditions of life. When meaning or traditions dissolve, the legend of Christ becomes relevant. Mourners understand it; so do unemployed factory workers. Victims of war, crime, and brutality also know it, as do passionless couples. Why do they (or we) get up in the morning? How do they/we face the futility of our lives? We all have limits and destinies to play out, and we are all used for mysterious ends. The questions are, What are we going to make of out limits and destinies? How are we going to respond to them? Are we going to accept them passively—as many who are depressed and dependent do—or are we going to deny them—as do many who boast? Finally, are we going to engage them, try to fashion something of value from them, and surrender to them only when nothing is left? That is what therapy must inquire. We live facing he curve of the gulf, the sparking sea, and the smiles of the Earth. A decree of God is necessary. We must not let anyone snatch us from our joys, leading us forcibly back to the underworld, where our rock is ready for us. Many of us are abused heroes. We are as, as much through our passions and through our torture. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Our scorn of God, our hatred of death, and our passions for life wins us that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing noting. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this Earth. Legends are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this one, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the stone, which represents our would, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one see the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two Earth-clotted hands. At the very end of this long effort measures by skyless space and times without depth, the purpose is achieved. We watch our soul rush down in a few moments toward that lower World whence we will have to push it up again toward the summit (Heaven). We go back down to the plain. We do not have a chip on our shoulder, but a mighty and serious tasks that could cost us our blessing of eternal life. Sometimes we go back down with a heavy measure stepping toward the torment of which we will never know the end. The lucidity that is to constitute our torture at the same time crowns our victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometime performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. Yes, you can, you have made images before for mortals. You know you can. You have wrapped them in spells. You are as strong as we are. You have achieved a very interesting stage in your development. I knew I was right about you all along. I am in awe of you. Human’s aggressive behavior has manifested in war, crime, personal quarrels, and all kinds of destructive and sadistic behavior and it is due to a phylogenetically programmed, innate instinct which seeks for discharge and waits for the proper occasion to be expressed. Nothing short of an analysis in depth of our social system can disclose the reasons for the increase in destructiveness, or suggest ways and means of reducing it. The instinctivistic theory offers to relieve us of the hard task of making such an analysis. It implies that, even if we all must perish, we can at least do so with the conviction that our nature forced this fate upon us, and that we understand why everything had to happen as it did. In contemporary industrial society, beings are cerebrally oriented, feel little, and consider emotions a useless ballast—those of the psychologists as well as those of their subjects. Defensive aggression is, indeed, part of human nature, even though not an innate instinct, as it used to be classified. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

All human aggression, including the passion to kill and to torture is an outcome of biologically given aggression, transformed from a beneficial to a destructive force because of a number of factors. However, human groups differ so fundamentally in the respective degree of destructiveness that the fact can hardly be explained by the assumption that destructiveness are cruelty are innate; various degrees of destructiveness can also be correlated to other psychical factors and to differences in respective social structures, and the degree of destructiveness increases with the increased development of civilization, rather than the opposite. Human beings are the only primates that kills and tortures members of their own species without any reason, either biological or economic, and who feels satisfaction in doing so. Humans can be driven by love or by the passion to destroy; in each case one satisfies one of one’s existential needs: the need to effect, or to move something, to make a dent. Whether human’s dominant passion is love or whether it is destructiveness depends largely on social circumstances; these circumstances, however, operate in references to human’s biologically given existential situation and the needs springing from it and not to an infinitely malleable, undifferentiated psyche, as environmentalist theory assumes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

All instincts spring from this psychophysical constitution and noninstinctual character-rooted passions, too, are the outcome of one’s biological constitution. This theoretical basis opens up the possibility for a detailed discussion of the various forms of character-rooted, malignant aggression, especially of sadism—the passion for unrestricted power over another sentient being—and of necrophilia—the passion to destroy life and the attraction to all that is dead, decaying, and purely mechanical. These impulses can be conscious, but more often they are unconscious. They are, most of the time, integrated in a relatively stable character structure. The realm of human passions consists of love, hate, ambition, greed, jealousy, envy. By investigating these aspects of reality, we are able to research human’s soul in its most secret and subtle manifestations. Life instinct and death instinct give human destructiveness its dignity as one of two fundamental passions in humans. It frees such passions as the strivings to love, to be free, as well as the drive to destroy, to torture, to control, and to submit, from their forced married to instincts. Instincts are a purely natural category, while the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Although not directly serving physical survival passions are as strong—and often even stronger—that instincts. They form the basis for being’s interest in life, one’s enthusiasm, one’s excitement; they are the stuff from which not only one’s dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama—all that makes life worth living. Beings cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup one; suffers severely when one is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if one has all the security one wants. Beings seek for drama and excitement; when one cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, one created for oneself the drama of destruction. The contemporary climate of thought encourages the axiom that a motive can be intense only when it serves an organic need—for instance, that only instincts have intense motivating power. If one discards this mechanistic, reductionist viewpoint and starts from a holistic premise, one beings to realize that being’s drives must be seen in terms of their function for the life process of the whole organism. Their intensity is not due to specific physiological needs, but to the need of the whole organism to survive—to grow both physically and mentally. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

These passions do not become powerful only after the more elementary ones have been satisfied. They are at the very root of human existence, and not a kind of luxury which can afford after the normal, lower needs have been satisfied. People have experienced death by suicide because of their failure to realize their passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Causes of death by suicide because of a lack of satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh are virtually nonexistent. These noninstinctual passions excite beings, fire one on, make life worth living. Un homme sans passions et desires cesserait d’etre un homme (a being without passion or desires would cease to be a being). This statement is of course to be understood in the context of the philosophical thinking of the Old World. People from the Old World have an entirely different concept of passions. In order to appreciate the difference between Old World and New World passions, we have to understand the distinction between irrational passions, such as ambition and greed, and rational passions, such as love and care for all sentient beings. What is relevant, however, is not this difference, but the idea that life concerned mainly with its own maintenance is inhuman. When the images of Earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call for happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in a being’s heart. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

When I speak of passions, I refer to all energy-charged impulses as distinct from those which have their origin in the need for the physiological maintenance of the body. Love and no-greed are, I believe, the highest form of manifestation of human energy. The human passions transform beings from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous limitations tries to make sense of life. One wants to be one’s own creator, to transform one’s state of being unfinished into one with some goal and some purpose, allowing one to achieve some degree of integration. Being’s passions are not banal psychological complexes that can be adequately explained as caused by childhood traumata. They can be understood only if one goes beyond the realm of reductionist psychology and recognizes them for what they are: being’s attempt to make sense out of life and to experience the optimum of intensity and strength one can (or believes one can) achieve under the given circumstances. They are one’s religion, one’s cult, one’s ritual, which one as to hide (even from oneself) in so far as they are disapproved by one’s group. To be sure, by bribery and extortion, for instance, by skillful conditioning, one can be persuaded to relinquish one’s religion and to be concerted to the general cult of the no-self, the automaton. Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus we obey faith without know it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, this psychic cure deprives one of the best one has, of being a human and not as a thing. The truth is that all human passions, both the good and the evil, can be understood only as a person’s attempt to make sense of one’s life. Change is possible only if one is able to convert oneself to a new way of making sense of life by mobilizing one’s life-furthering passions and thus experiencing a superior sense of vitality and integration to the one one had before. Unless this happens one can be domesticated, but one cannot be cured. However, even though the life-furthering passions are conducive to a greater sense of strength, joy, integration, and vitality than destructiveness and cruelty, the latter are as much an answer to the problem of human existence as the former. Even the most sadistic and destructive being is human, as human as the saint. One can be called a warped and sick being who has failed to achieve a better answer to the challenge of having been born human, and this is true; one can also be called a human who took the wrong way in search of one’s salvation. Salvation comes from the Latin root sal, “salt” (in Spanish salud, “health”). The meaning stems from the fact that salt protects meat from decomposition; “salvations” is the protection of beings from decomposition (to protect one’s health and well-being). In this sense each being needs “salvation” (in a nonetheologial sense). #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

These considerations by no means imply, however, that destructiveness and cruelty are not vicious; they only imply that vice is human. They are indeed destructive of life, of body and spirit, destructive not only of the victim but of the destroyer oneself. They constitute a paradox: they express life turning against itself in the striving to make sense of it. They are the only true perversion. Understanding them does not mean condoning them. However, unless we understand the, we have no way to recognize how they may be reduced, and what factors tend to increase them. Such understanding is of particular importance today, when sensitivity toward destructiveness—cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society. The spirit of necrophilia was expressed in literary form by F.T. Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. The same tendency can be seen in much of the art and literature of the last decades that exhibits a particular fascination with all that is decayed, unalive, destructive, and mechanical. The Falangist motto, Long life death, threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

According to Memnoch in Memnoch The Devil “First, to be worthy of Heaven—to have a ghost of a chance with God, I could say—the Soul had to understand life and death in the simplest sense. I found many souls who did. Next there had to be in this understanding an appreciation of the Beauty of God’s work, the harmony of Creation from God’s point of view, a vision of Nature wrapped in endless and overlapping cycles of survival and reproduction and evolution and growth. Many souls had come to understand this. Many had. But many who thought life was beautiful, felt that death was sad and endless and terrible and they would have chosen never to have been born, had they been given the choice!” And when God decides to come down to Earth as Jesus, he response by saying, “I am God Incarnate.” How could I have a human soul? What is important is that I will remain in this body as it is tortured and slain; and my death will be evidence of my Love for those whom I have created and allowed to suffer so much. I will share their pain and know the pain. My resurrection will confirm the eternal return of the spring after winter. It will confirm that Nature all things have evolved have their place.” This study tries to clarify the nature of this necrophilous passion and the social conditions that tend to foster it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The conclusion will be that help in any broad sense can come only through radical changes in our social and political structure that would reinstate beings to their supreme role in society. The call for “law and order” (rather than for life and structure) and for stricter punishment of criminals, as well as the obsession with violence and destruction among some “revolutionaries,” are only further instances of the powerful attraction of necrophilia in the contemporary World. We need to create the conditions that would make the growth of beings, this unfinished and uncompleted being—unique in nature—the supreme goal of all social arrangements. Genuine freedom and independence and the end of all forms of exploitative control are the conditions for mobilizing the love of life, which is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead. We have considered forgetting as a way in which life drives towards its own renewal. What and how do we forget? What did Saint Paul forget, when he strained forward to what lay ahead? Obviously, he longed to forget his past as a pharisee and a persecutor of Christianity. However, every word of his letters proves that he never forgot. There seem to be different kinds of forgetting. There is the natural forgetting of yesterday and most of the things that happened in it. If reminded, we might still remember some of them; but slowly, even they tend to disappear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The whole day disappears, and only what was really significant in it is remembered. So most of the days of our lives vanish in forgetfulness. This natural process of forgetting operates without our cooperation, like the circulation of our blood. However, there is another aspect of forgetting that is familiar to us all. Something in us prevents us from remembering, when remembering proves to be too difficult and painful. We forget benefits, because of the burden of gratitude is too heavy for us. We forget former loves, because the burden of obligations implied by them surpasses our strength. We forget former hates, because the task of nourishing them would disrupt our mind. We forget former pain, because it is still too painful. We forget former guilt, because we cannot endure its sting. Such forgetting is not the natural, daily form of forgetting. It demands our cooperation. We repress what we cannot stand. We forget it by entombing it within us. Ordinary forgetting liberates us from innumerable small things in a natural process. Forgetting by repression does not liberate us, but seems to cut us off from what makes us suffer. We are not entirely successful, however, because the memory is buried within us, and influences every moment of our growth. And sometimes it breaks through its prison and strikes at us directly and painfully. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Then there is a forgetting, to which Saint Paul witnesses, that liberates us not from the memory of past guilt but from the pain it brings. The grand old name for this kind of forgetting is repentance. Today, repentance is associated with a half-painful, half-voluptuous emotional concentration on one’s guilt, and not with a liberating forgetfulness. However, originally it meant a turning around, leaving behind the wrong way and turning towards the right. It means pushing the consciousness and pain of guilt into the past, not by repressing it, but by acknowledging it, and receiving the word of acceptance in spite of it. If we are able to repent, we are able to forget, not because the forgotten act was unimportant, and not because we repress what we cannot endure, but because we have acknowledged our guilt and can now live with it. For it is eternally forgotten. This was how Saint Paul forgot what lay behind him, although it always remained with him. This kind of forgetting is decisive for our personal relationships. None of them is possible without a silent act of forgiving, repeated again and again. Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather, but in the way of the great in spite of that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relations could endure healthily. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

I do not refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. However, I speak of the lasting willingness to accept one who has hurt us. Such forgiveness is the highest form of forgetting, although it is not forgetfulness. The stumbling block of having violated another is pushed into the past, and there is the possibility of something new in the relationship. Forgetting in spite of remembering is forgiveness. We can live only because our guilt is forgiven and thus eternally forgotten. And we can love only because we forgive and are forgiven. The techniques of ritual beings imagined that they took firm control of the material World, and at the same time transcended that World by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them supernatural, raised them over and over above material decay and death. In the World of ritual there are not even any accidents, and accidents, as we know, are the things that make life most precarious and meaningless. Our knees grow weak when we think of a young lady of awesome beauty who dies in a plane crash simply because she was working to make an honest living; if life can be so subject to chance, it must not have too much meaning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

However, how can that be that life has no meaning, since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive beings take care of this problem by imagining that one’s control over nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens unless somebody wants it to happen. So a person dies in a plane crash because some powerful dead spirit is jealous of that living, or some witch is secretly working her ritual against that person. In psychoanalysis, working through all the different individual forms of anxiety, one gradually recognizes the fact that the basic anxiety underlies all relationships to people. While the individual anxieties may be stimulated by actual cause, the basic anxiety continues to exist even though there is no particular stimulus in the actual situation. If the whole neurotic picture were compared to a state of political unrest in a nation, the basic anxiety and basic hostility would be similar to the underlying dissatisfactions with and protests against the regime. Surface manifestations may be entirely missing in either case, or they may appear in diversified forms. In the state they may appear as riots, strikes, assemblies, demonstrations; in the psychological sphere, too, the forms of anxiety may manifest themselves in symptoms of all sorts. Regardless of the particular provocation, all manifestations of the anxiety emanate from one common background. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

All too soon an institution becomes a restricted, or even closed, system. Its ideas get frozen into strict and rigid doctrines, its members begin to suffer from intellectual paralysis, and its methods begin to savour of totalitarianism or tyranny. The being who is captured by a particular religion, sect, group, or organization frequently builds a wall around it, sets up a barrier between oneself and non-members, excludes every approach to God other than one’s own. The independent seeker, who affiliates oneself with no sectarian group, no fanatic organization, no narrowing cult, avoids the tensions and discards the prejudices which such affiliation usually brings with it. For those who are affiliated, contact with other denominations creates the need of defending the selfish interests and the given strict and rigid doctrines of their own, either directly or obliquely by attacking the others. In this way the tensions and prejudices arise and subsist. They cannot come to an end until this exclusiveness itself comes to an end. How many evils, hatreds, fights, and injustices come from it! How many unjust malignments of character does it lead to! How much blind bigotry does it cause, a bigotry which refuses to allow, and is unable to see, the good in cults other than its own! As soon as they begin to organize a movement, the other things begin also to emerge—the narrow fanaticism, the limiting sectarianism, the intolerant attitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Every organization which perpetuates strict and rigid doctrines dares not admit new ideas which correct the error of those strict and rigid doctrines, for such ideas would affront the beliefs of its followers! In all matters spiritual, mystical, and religious, humanity is bewitched both by spell of the past and the prestige of the institution. There are several systems, methods, groups, and organizations, but of acceptable ones there are only few. Too often the clinging to a particular teacher, the membership of a particular groups, leads at best to a naïve faith in the self-sufficiency of the tenets advocated, at worst to a new sectarianism. Sectarianism, zealotry, and bigotry develop by stages in the minds of followers. Typically, the bigger an organization becomes, the more likely are dissentions and quarrels to arise within it, despite all its professions of special sanctity or proclamations of fellowship and love. The essential things get gradually lost, the accidental are made more of and treasured up. The Spirit is squeezed out, the superfluities brought in. One may be said to have entered and settled in the fourth state of consciousness when one is aware of its purity egolessness and freedom at all times, and even during the torpor of sleep or the activity of work. When this awareness is so stabilized that it maintains itself at all times awake or asleep, one is at the end of the quest. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The divine presence does not leave the enlightened being when one goes to sleep and return to one when one awakes, nor does it leave one when enters the state of dream and return to one when one leaves it; it is in truth something which is ever present. If one enters the sleeping state, one enters it while in the light of knowledge, and the same applies if one enters the dream state. The enlightened persons does not retire at night in the darkness, the ignorance of ordinary sleep, but in the light of the Consciousness, the ever-unbroken Transcendence. One’s sleep is a suspended state, with one’s awareness never fully lost but retracted into a pin-point. There are no breaks in the awareness of one’s higher nature. There is no loss of continuity in the consciousness of one’s immortal spirit. Therefore one is not illuminated at some hour of the day and unillumined at another hour, nor illumined while one is awake and unillumined while one is asleep. That alone is the final attainment which can remain with one through all the three states—waking, dream, and deep sleep—and though all the day’s activities. “And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of beings; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea,” reports Ether 3.4. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The distinction between one’s lower self and higher self will slowly become clear to one through inner experience and reflection thereon. As I listened, rapt, to all details both large and small, he told me the provenance of the pearls sewn into my tunic, of how they had come from the oysters of the sea. Boys had dived into the depths to bring these precious round white treasures up to the surface, carrying them in their very mouths. Emeralds came from mines within the Earth. Men killed for them. And diamonds, as, look at these diamonds. He took a ring from his finger and put it on mine, his fingertips stroking my finger gently as he made sure of the fit. Diamonds are the white light of God, he said. Diamonds are pure. What, in a general way, is missing in one’s development as a human being moving on from animality to higher Awareness must be supplied. By prayer and study the mind returns, like a circle, upon itself, with the result that when this movement is successfully completed, it knows itself in its deepest divinest phase. That which appears as the spiritual seeker engaged on a Quest is itself the spiritual self that being sought. We have not to become divine for we are divine. We have, however, to think and do what is divine. “Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of beings,” reports Ether 3.5. Despites many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

How Long is it Since You were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?

August 14, 2019 10:32 pm

Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

What manner of men and women need thirty feet of steel and four hundred horsepower to take them, singly, to their small destinations? Who demand that what they eat is wrapped so that forests are cut down to make the paper that is thrown away, and what they smoke and chew is sealed so that the sealers can be tossed in gutters and caught in twigs and grass? What kind of beings can afford to make the streets of their towns and cities hideous with neon at night, and their roadways hideous with signs by day, wasting beauty; who spill their trash into ravines and make smoking mountains of refuse for the town’s rats? What manner of beings choke off the life in rivers, streams and lakes with the waste of their produce making poison of water? Who is as rich as that? Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of beings and the stigma of their improvidence. Who is so rich that ne can squander forever the wealth of Earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed; or so prosperous in land that one can sacrifice nature for unnatural desires? The Earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

And when we are long dead, what will we leave behind us? Temples? Amphora? Sunken treasure? Or mountains of twisted, rusted steel, canyons of plastic containers, and a million miles of sores garlanded, not with the lovely wrack of the sea, but with the cans and bottles and light-bulbs and boxes of people who conserved their convenience at the expanse of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built on waste. As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power; might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no being is angry any more at wrongdoing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, God will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them. Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude. We have a natural desire for solitude because we are beings. We want to feel what we are—namely, alone—not in pain and horror, but with joy and courage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

There are many ways in which solitude can be sought and experienced. And if it is true that religion is what a being does with one’s solitariness, each way can be called religious. One of these ways is the desire towards the silence of nature. We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea. This solitude we can have, but only for a brief time. For we realize that the voice of nature cannot ultimately answer the questions in our minds. Our solitude in nature can easily become loneliness, and so we return to the World of being. Solitude can also be found in the reading of poetry, in listening to music, in looking at pictures, and in sincere thoughtfulness. We are alone, perhaps in the midst of multitudes, but we are not lonely. Solitude protects us without isolating us. However, life calls us back to its empty talk and the unavoidable demands of daily routine. It calls us back to its loneliness and the cover that it, in turn, spreads over our loneliness. Without a doubt, this last describes not only a being’s general predicament, but also, and emphatically, our time. Todays, more intensely than in preceding periods, beings are so lonely that they cannot bear solitude so they take to social media to build a fantasy life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The epidemic of this fantasy life that people present on social media to cure their loneliness has become so pervasive that they even gather in groups in public to act out their roles they cast themselves in in the real World. It is as if life, for many people has become so lonely, that they feel the need to collect their fake friends and act out scenes in real life. People have become so lonely that they conjure up marriages, relationships, vacation and lifestyles all with the click of a button. Some do it for profit, others do it to make themselves feel better. However, the bottom line is they are trying to make an impression for an individual or a wide audience. People try desperately to become a part of the crowd. Everything in our World supports them. They are able to cyberstalk people, to figure out where they might be and what they might be think, and with the technology to track a cellphone or with the cameras all over the place, which are supposed to add to our security, people can then make a cameo in a person’s life and impersonate someone the individual know or act out a fantasy for a brief moment. It is a symptom of our disease that teachers and parents and the managers of public communication do everything possible to deprive us of the external conditions for solitude, the simplest assistant to privacy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Even our houses, instead of protecting the solitude of each member of the family or group, are constructed to exclude privacy almost completely with Alxea the virtual assistant, Roomba, and other devices spying on us, while pretending to make life easier. People can also access digital information and figure out where you go and be there waiting on you. Can you imagine how annoying that is? You wake up in the morning wonder what story is your mother going to tell you today? What scene are people in the community going to be acting out? What stupid question is someone going to ask? And who is going to become the fakest person in the World on social media, while all you are looking for is some solitude and something real, but people are all selling their souls because they want to look cool and feel special. The same holds true f the forms of communal life, the school, college, office and factory. An unceasing pressure attempts to destroy even our desire for solitude. However, sometimes God thrusts us out of the crowd into a solitude we did not desire, but which nonetheless takes hold of us. The prophet Jeremiah says—“I sit alone, because thy hand was upon me.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

God times lays hands upon us. He wants to ask the question of justice that many bring us suffering and death, and that can grow in us only in solitude. He wants us to break through the ordinary ways of beings that may bring disrepute and hatred upon us, a breakthrough that can happen only in solitude. God wants us to penetrate to the boundaries of our being, where the mystery of life appears, and it can only appear in moments of solitude. There may be some among you who long to become creative in some realm of life. However, you cannot become or remain creative without solitude. One hour of conscious solitude will enrich your creativity far more than hours of trying to learn the creative process. What happens in our solitude? Listen to Mark’s words about Jesus’ solitude in the desert—“And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the Angels ministered to him.” He is alone, facing the whole Earth and Sky, the wild beasts around him and within him, he himself the battlefield for divine and demonic forces. So, first, this is what happens in our solitude: we meet ourselves, not as ourselves, but as the battlefield for creation and destruction, for God and the demons. Solitude is not easy. Who can bear it? It was not easy even for Jesus. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

We read—“He went up into the hills to pray.” When evening came, he was alone.” When evening comes, loneliness becomes more lonely. We feel this when a day, or a period, or all the days of our life come to an end. Jesus went up to pray. Is this the way to transform loneliness into solitude and to bear solitude? It is not a simple question to answer. Most prayers do not have this much power. Most prayers make God a partner in a conversation; we use God to escape the only true way to solitude. Such prayers flow easily from the mouths of both ministers and laymen. However, they are not born out of a solitary encounter of God with beings. They are certainly not the kind of prayer for which Jesus went up into the hills. Better that we remain silent and allow our soul, that is always longing for solitude, to sign without words to God. This we can do, even in a crowded day and a crowded room, even under the most difficult external conditions. This can give us moments of solitude that no one can take from us. In these moments of solitude something is done to us. The center of our being, the innermost self that is the ground of our aloneness, is elevated to the divine center and taken into it. Therein can we rest without losing ourselves. Now perhaps we can answer a question you may have already asked—how can communion grow out of solitude? #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

We have seen that we can never reach the innermost center of another being. We are always alone, each for one’s self. However, we can reach it in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from God to the other self. In this way being’s aloneness is not removed, but taken into the community with that in which the centers of all beings rest, and so into community with all of them. Even love is reborn in solitude. For only in solitude are those who are alone able to reach those from whom they are separated. Only the presence of the eternal can break through the walls that isolate the temporal from the temporal. One hour of solitude may bring us closer to those we live than many hours of communication. We can take them with us to the hills of eternity. And perhaps when we ask—what is the innermost nature of solitude? we should answer—the presence of the eternal upon the crowded roads of the temporal. It is the experience of being alone but not lonely, in view of the eternal presence that shines through the face of the Christ, and that includes everybody and everything from which we are separated. In the poverty of solitude all riches are present. Let us dare to have solitude—to face the eternal, to find others, to see ourselves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Observation shows beyond any doubt that if they feel the deprivations to be just, fair, necessary or purposeful, children, as well as adults, can accept a great many deprivations. A child does not mind education for cleanliness, for example, if the parents do not put an undue stress on it and do not coerce the child with subtle or gross cruelty. Nor does a child mind an occasional punishment, provides it feels certain in general of being loved and provided it feels the punishment to be fair and not done with the intention of hurting it or humiliating it. The questions of whether frustration as such incites to hostility is difficult to judge, because in surroundings which impose many deprivations on a child plenty of others provocative factors are usually present. What matters is the spirit in which frustrations are imposed rather than the frustrations themselves. The reasons I stress this point is that the emphasis often placed on the danger of frustration as such has led many parents to carry the idea still farther than did Dr. Freud himself and to shrink from any interference with the child lest one might be harmed by it. Jealousy can certainly be a source of formidable hatred in children as well as in adults. There is no doubt about the role that jealousy between siblings and jealousy of one or the other parent may play in neurotic children, or about the lasting influence this attitude may have for later life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One who is educated by dread is educated by possibility, and only the being who is educated by possibility is educated in accordance with one’s infinity. Possibility is therefore the heaviest of all categories. One often hears, it is true, the opposite affirmed, that possibility is so light but reality is so heavy. However, from whom does one hear such talk? From a lot of miserable beings who never have known what possibility is, and who, since reality showed them that they were not fit for anything and never would be, mendaciously bedizened a possibility which was so beautiful, so enchanting; and the only foundation of this possibility was a little youthful tomfoolery of which they might rather have been ashamed. Therefore by this possibility which is said to be light one commonly understands the possibility of luck, food fortune and so forth. However, this is not possibility, it is a mendacious invention which human depravity falsely embellishes in order to have reason to complain of life, of providence, and as a pretext for being self-important. No, in possibility everything is possible, and one who truly was brought up by possibility has comprehended the dreadful as well as the smiling. When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that one can demand of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every being, and has learned the profitable lesion that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, one will then interpret reality differently. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

One will then extol reality, and even when it rests upon one heavily one will remember that after all it is far, far lighter than the possibility was. Only thus can possibility educate; for finiteness and the finite relationships in which the individual is assigned a place, whether it be small and commonplace or World-historical, educate only finitely, and one can always talk them around, always get a little more out of them, always Shaffer, always escape a little from them, always keep a little apart, always prevent oneself from learning absolutely from them; and if one is to learn absolutely, the individual must in turn have the possibility in oneself and oneself fashion that from which one is to learn, even though the next instant it does not recognize that it was fashioned by one, but absolutely takes the power from one. However, in order that the individual may this absolutely and infinitely be educated by possibility, one must be honest towards possibility and must have faith. By faith I mean the inward certainty which anticipates infinity. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will then disclose all finitudes and idealize them in the form of infinity in the individual who is overwhelmed by dread, until in turn one is victorious by the anticipation o faith. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Everyone uses from time to time such expressions as, “a thought pops up,” an idea comes “from the blue” or “dawns” or “comes though out of a dream,” or “it suddenly hit me.” These are various ways of describing a common experience: the breakthrough of idea from some depth below the level of awareness. I shall call this realm “the unconscious: as a catchall for the subconscious, preconscious, and other dimensions below awareness. When I use the phrase “the unconscious,” I, of course, mean it as shorthand. There is no such thing as “the unconscious”; it is, rather, unconscious dimensions (or aspects or sources) of experience. I define this unconscious as the potentialities for awareness or action which the individual cannot or will not actualize. These potentialities are the source of what can be called “free creativity.” The exploration of unconscious phenomena has a fascinating relationship to creativity. What are the nature and characteristics of the creativity that has its source in these unconscious depths of personality? When a body is still and ego-mind is at rest, there is peace, sometimes even ecstasy. However, when both are active I am not, when there is neither questing nor non-questing, there is unchanging stability. That is realization. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

When the sense of this presence is a continuous one, when the knowledge of the mentalness of this World-experience is an abiding one, and when the calm which comes as a result is an unshakeable one, it may be said that one is established in the Truth and in the Real. One does not have to enter into formal prayer to find one’s soul. It is an ever-present reality for one, not merely an intellectual conception or emotional belief. If one has no need to sit down specially for an arranged period of prayer, it is only because one has successfully gone through several stages of the practice. In the World you will find only two kinds of people—the unconscious and the conscious. The first kind know only their own little egos and their own large desires. The second kind know continually that they are in the presence of the Overself, and enjoy it great peace. The consciousness of Consciousness never deserts one. It remains somewhere on the outer periphery of the mind all the time and expands to its fullness at special times—that is, when withdrawn from all activity for a few minutes. One lives inwardly silent thought—free awareness of whatever is presented to one, whether it be the body in which one must live or the environment in which one finds oneself. One enjoys a supernal calm, being indeed free while living. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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