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Gain of Infinity is Never Attained Except through Despair!

October 8, 2019 11:11 pm

The late afternoon was Heavenly. To be that in love, to know that frenzy of the heart—even know, young as I still am, I look back on it as something that was part of the innocence of childhood. That it could come again, I do not even dream of, that I should ever know such a consuming happiness is impossible. Work, popular culture, politics, science—all contribute to the alienation of modern beings. However, they tell us little about being’s community life or their isolation from each other because of social status, age, or race. Poverty is only one of many isolating factors. Improvement in social status may also lead to alienation. There were two families transplanted to a new suburban development from the East End of London (an area corresponding socially to the lower East Side of Manhattan). These people left the intimacy and solidarity of a slum with its close ties for a chiller life in new surroundings. How keenly East Enders feel the difference is made abundantly clear. Now their lives are no longer focused on people but on their houses and possessions, on the struggle for status. Frequently there was considerable bitterness. However, for the he East End families soon after the move to the suburbs, warmer relations did develop later on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

However, if people are united chiefly by competition for social status, can this ever take the place of family-centered community life? “Neighbors do not make up for kin.” The suburban environment has been made familiar to us in numerous American studies, such as The Lonely Crown, Crestwood Heights, The Exurbanites, and The Organization Man. What is interesting is that the expanding metropolis loosens the ties of kin and neighborhood in the very process of building new communities. In breaking up the traditional family-centered life, modern society deal harshly with those who are most vulnerable, particularly the aged. Among the aged, there is a distinction to be drawn between social isolation and loneliness. In the first state the aged person has few social contacts; in the second one feels cut off, especially if one has lost a loved one. The isolation of the aged is grim enough; but when the aged are also bereaved, the result is not just loneliness but often a rapid decline of faculties and even of the will to live. To sustain the aged our society has found no substitute for the same. The isolation of the nuclear family from its roots is just one of the ways in which beings become separated from each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

To be a poor being is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. Less affluent people want to be treated like human beings. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable. However, the neurotic need for affection often take the form of a sexual infatuation or an insatiable hunger for gratifications of pleasures of the flesh. In view of this fact we have to raise the question whether the whole phenomenon of the neurotic need for affection is prompted by dissatisfaction in pleasures of the flesh, whether all this longing for affection, for contact, for appreciation, for support is motivated not so much by a need for reassurance as by dissatisfied libido. Dr. Freud would be inclined to look at it that way. He has seen that many neurotic persons are anxious to attach themselves to others and prone to cling to them; and he has described this attitude as resulting from dissatisfied libido. This concept, however, is based on certain premises. It presupposes that all those manifestations which are not pleasures of the flesh in themselves, such as the wish to get advice, approval or support, are expressed of pleasures of the needs that have been attenuated or sublimated. Furthermore, it presupposed that tenderness is an inhibited or sublimated express of drives in pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Such presuppositions are unsubstantiated. The connections between feelings of affection, expressions of tenderness and sexuality are not so close as we sometimes assume. Anthropologist and historians tell us that individual love is a product of cultural development. Pleasures of the flesh have a closer affiliation with cruelty than with tenderness, although some do not find this so convincing. From observations made in our culture we know, however, that pleasures of the flesh can exist without affection or tenderness, and that affection or tenderness can exist without pleasures of the flesh. There is no evidence, for instance, that the tenderness between mother and child is sexual in nature. All that we can observe—and that as a result of Dr. Freud’s discovery—is that elements of pleasures of the flesh may be present. We can observe many connections between tenderness and pleasures of the flesh: tenderness may be for forerunner of pleasures of the flesh feelings; one may have desires for pleasures of the flesh while being aware only of tender feelings; desires for pleasures of the flesh may stimulate or pass into tender feelings. While such transitions between tenderness and pleasures of the flesh definitely indicate a close relation between them, it is nevertheless seems better to be more cautious and to assume the existence of two different categories of feelings, which may coincide, pass into each other or substitute for each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Moreover, if we accept Dr. Freud’s assumptions that dissatisfied libido is the driving force for seeking affection, it would scarcely be understandable why we find the same craving for affection, with all the complications described—possessiveness, unconditional love, not feeling wanted, and so forth—in persons whose sexual life from the physical point of view is entirely satisfactory. As there is no doubt, however, that such cases do exist, the conclusion is inevitable that dissatisfied libido does not account for the phenomenon in these cases, but that the reasons for it are possessed outside the sphere of pleasures of the flesh. Cases like these, with definite disturbances in the emotional sphere coexisting with a capacity for full satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh, have always been a puzzle to some analysts, but the fact that they do not fit into the libido theory does not keep them from existing. Finally, if the neurotic need for affection were nothing but a sexual phenomenon, we should be at a loss to understand the various problems involved, such as possessiveness, unconditional love, feeling of being rejected. It is true that these various problems have been recognized and described in detail: jealousy, for example, is traced back to sibling rivalry or the Oedipus complex; unconditional love is traced back to oral eroticism; possessiveness is explained as anal-eroticism, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, it has not been realized that in reality the whole range of attitudes and reactions described belong together, that they are the constituent parts of one total structure. Without recognizing anxiety as the dynamic force behind the need for affection, we cannot understand the precise condition under which the need is enhanced or diminished. By way of Dr. Freud’s ingenious method of free association it is possible, in the process of analysis, to observe accurately the relation between anxiety and the need for affection, particularly by paying attention to the fluctuations in the patient’s need for affection. After a period of co-operative constructive work a patient may suddenly change one’s behavior and make demands on the analyst’s time or crave one’s friendship or admire one blindly, or become exceedingly jealous, possessive, sensitive to being “only a patient.” Simultaneously there is an increase in anxiety, showing either in dreams or in feeling rushed or in physical symptoms such as diarrhea or frequent urge to urinate. The patient does not recognize that there is anxiety or that one’s enhanced clinging to the analyst is conditioned by one’s anxiety. If the analyst recognizes the connection and presents it to the patient, both will discover together that before the sudden infatuation problems were touched upon which stirred up anxiety in the patient; one may, for example, felt an interpretation by the analyst as an unfair accusation or as a humiliation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

The sequence of reactions appears to be like this: a problem comes up, discussion of which provokes an intense hostility against the analyst; the patient starts to hate the analyst, to dream that one id dying; one represses one’s hostile impulses immediately, becomes frightened and out of a need for reassurance one clings to the analyst; when these reactions have been worked through, hostility, anxiety and with them the increased need for affection recede into the background. An enhanced need for affection so regularly appears as the result of anxiety that one may safely take it as an alarm signal indicating that some anxiety has come close to the surface and calls for reassurance. The process described is not at all limited to the process of analysis. Identically the same reactions occur in personal relationships. In marriage, for example, a husband may compulsively cling to his wife, be jealous and possessive, idealize and admire her, though deep down one hates and fears her. If one realize that the term gives only a rough description and says nothing about the dynamics of the process, it is justifiable to speak of an exaggerated devotion superimposed on a hidden hatred as an “overcompensation.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

If for all the reasons presented we refuse to accept an etiology of pleasures of the flesh and the need for affection, then the question arises whether it is only incidentally that the neurotic need for affection is sometimes coupled with, or appears altogether as, a desire for pleasures of the flesh, or whether there are certain conditions under which the need for affection is felt and expressed in sexual ways. To some extent an expression of pleasures of the flesh and the need for affection depends on whether or not the external circumstances favor it. To some extent it depends on differences in culture, in vitality and in sexual temperament. And finally it depends on whether the person’s life involving pleasures of the flesh is satisfactory, for if it is not, one is more likely to react in a sexual manner than those who have a satisfactory life in pleasures of the flesh. Though all of factors are self-evident, and have a definite influence on the person’s reaction, they do not sufficiently account for basic individual differences. In a given number of persons showing a neurotic need for affection these reactions vary from individual to individual. Thus we find some whose contacts with others assume immediately, almost compulsively, a sexual coloring of greater or lesser intensity, whereas in others the excitability in pleasures of the flesh or the activities in pleasures of the flesh keep within the range of normal feeling and behavior. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Belonging to the former group are men and women who slide from one relation in pleasures of the flesh into another. When having no relations or when seeing no immediate chance of having one, a more intimate know of their reactions shows that they feel insecure, unprotected, and are quite erratic. Belonging to the same group, yet having more inhibitions, are men and women who factually have very few relations, but who create an erotic atmosphere between themselves and other persons whether or not they feel particularly attracted by them. Finally, a third group of persons belongs here who are still more inhibited in the pleasures of the flesh, yet wo are easily excited by pleasures of the flesh and compulsively see a potential partner for pleasures of the flesh in any man or woman. In this last sub-group compulsory masturbation may—not necessarily must—take the place of relations in pleasures of the flesh. There are great variation in this group as to the degree of physical satisfaction attained. Wat the group has in common, apart from the compulsory nature of the needs for pleasures of the flesh, is a definite lack of discrimination in the choices of partners. They have the same characteristics that we have already discussed in our general consideration of persons with a neurotic need for affection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

In addition one is struck by the discrepancy between their readiness to have relations in pleasures of the flesh, factual or imaginary, and the profound disturbance in their emotional relations to others, a disturbance in their emotional relations to others, a disturbance which is more thorough than in the average person haunted by a basic anxiety. It is not only that these persons cannot believe in affection, but that they actually become deeply perturbed—or, in the case of men, impotent—if love is offered them. They may be aware of their own defensive attitude, or they may be inclined to blame their partners. In the latter case they are convinced that they never met a young lady or man who was lovable. Relations in pleasures of the flesh mean to them not only the release of specific tensions involving the flesh, but also the only way of getting human contact. If a person has developed the conviction that for one obtaining affection is practically out of the question, then physical contact may serve as a substitute for emotional relationships. In that case, if not the only, pleasures of the flesh is the main bridge leading to contact with others, and therefore acquires an inordinate importance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

In some persons the lack of discrimination shows itself in regard to the potential partner one is seeking to have pleasures of the flesh with; they will actively seek relations with both genders, or will passively yield to demands in pleasures of the flesh, regardless of whether they are made from a person of the opposite or the same gender. The first type does not interest us here, because though with them too pleasures of the flesh is put into the service of establishing human contact, otherwise difficult to obtain, the precipitating motive is not so much a need for affection as striving to conquer, or more accurately, to subdue others. This striving may be so imperative that the gender distinctions become comparatively unimportant. Men and women both have to be subdued, in pleasures of the flesh, or otherwise. However, those in the second group, who are prone to yield to advances in pleasures of the flesh from either gender, are driven by an unending need for affection, especially by a fear of losing another person through refusing a pleasures of the flesh request, or through daring to defend themselves against any request made upon them, whether just or unjust. They do not want to lose the other person, because the contact with one is so bitterly needed. Tarqin, in Anne Rice’s novel Blackwood Farm is bisexual and deeply attached to a male and wants to marry a female named Mona. However, he bisexuality is possible due to the fact that he is eighteen, and was told from a young age that he was “queer,” and do to the fact that he was seduced by men and women in his teenage years. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Whatever the starting point and however tortuous the road, we must finally arrive at a disturbance of personality as the source of psychic illness. The same can be said of this as of almost any other psychological discovery: it is really a rediscovery. Poets and philosophers of all times have known that it is never the serene, well-balanced person who falls victim to psychic disorders, but the one turn by inner conflicts. In modern terms, every neurosis, no matter what the symptomatic picture, is a character of neurosis. Hence our endeavor in theory and therapy must be directed toward a better understanding of the neurotic character. We must think about the role of cultural factors, their influence on our ideas of what constitutes masculinity or femininity. I have observed that the attitudes and the neuroses of persons in this country differ in many ways from those I have noted in European countries, and that only the difference in civilizations could account for this. Therefore, neuroses are brought about by cultural factors—which more specifically means that neuroses are generated by disturbances in human relationships. Compulsive drives are specifically neurotic; they are born of feelings of isolation, helplessness, fear and hostility, and represent ways of coping with the World despite these feelings; they aim primarily not at satisfaction but at safety; their compulsive character is due to the anxiety lurking being them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Two of these drives—neurotic cravings for affection and for power—stand out at first in clear relief. It has a lot to two with the macrocosm formed by many microcosms interacting upon one another. In the nucleus of each microcosm is a neurotic trend. This theory of neurosis has a practical application. If psychoanalysis did not primarily involve relating our present difficulties to our past experiences but depended rather upon understanding the interplay of forces in our existing personality, then recognizing and changing ourselves with littler or even no expert help is entirely feasible. In the face of widespread need for psychotherapy and a scarcity of available assistance, self-analysis seems to offer the hope of filling a vital need. The neurotic need for affection, compulsive modesty, and the need for a partner belong together. However, what many fail to see is that together they represent a basic attitude toward others and the self, and a particular philosophy of life. These trends are the nuclei of what I have now dawn together as a moving toward people. I see, too, that a compulsive craving for power and prestige and neurotic ambition have something in common. They constitute roughly the factors involved in what I call moving against people. However, the need for admiration and the perfectionist drives, though they have all the earmarks of neurotic trends and influence the neurotic relations with others, see, primarily to concern one’s relations with oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Also, the need for exploitation seems to be less basic than either the need for affection or for power; it appears less comprehensive than these, as if it was not a separate entity but has been taken out of some larger whole. Neurotic trends not only reinforce each other, but also create conflict. Nevertheless, conflicts remain a side issues. The conflicts operate between contradictory sets of neurotic trends, and though they originally concern contradictory attitudes towards others, in time they encompass contradictory attitudes toward the self, contradictory qualities and contradictory sets of values. Many people are forcibly blind toward the obvious contradictions within themselves. When they are pointed out, people usually come elusive and seem to lost interest. After repeated experiences of this kind I realized that the elusiveness expresses a profound aversion to tackling these contradictions. Finally, panic reaction in response to a sudden recognition of a conflict shows me I am working with dynamite. People have a good reason to shy away from these conflicts: they dread their power to tear them to pieces. There is also an amazing amount of energy and intelligence that is invested in more or less desperate efforts to solve the conflicts or, more precisely, to deny their existence and create an artificial harmony. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

There are four major attempts at a solution in about the order in which these conflicts are presented. The initial attempt is to eclipse part of the conflict and raise its opposite to predominance. The second is to move away from people. The function of neurotic detachment now appears in a new light. Detachment is part of the basic conflict—that is, one of the original conflicting attitudes towards others; but is also represents an attempt at solution, since maintaining an emotional distance between the self and others set the conflict out of operation. The third attempt is very different in kind. Instead of moving away from others, the neurotic moves away from oneself. One whole actual self becomes somewhat unreal to one and one created in its place an idealized image of oneself in which the conflicting parts were so transfigured that they no longer appeared as conflicts but as various aspects of a rich personality. The existentialist’s study of the authentic person and of authentic living helps to throw this general phoniness, this living by illusions and by fear into a harsh, clear light which reveals it clearly as sickness, even [though] widely shared. Nonetheless, the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening. Most people experience both tragedy and joy in varying proportions. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Gain of infinity is never attained except through despair. The commitment to willingly move forward must be made without fear. If it is not, and one is found fearful the floodgates of self-destruction are opened and the abysmal waters rush forth to claim their prize. This happens because the spirits encountered seek to destroy humankind. They are indifferent toward the outcome of our physical lives. This issue remains in the fact that many claim to seek power yet when it is received they become scared of the concept of limitless possibility. They are forced to see that the greatest of all evils dwells in their own heart and mind, superseding the limitless power of ancient dark Gods. They are forced to see that they are their own God and, therefore, they are their own Devil, and the illusory paths of salvation are consumed by the flams of that truth. All human beings differ in some respects and in mind as well as in body. Each is unique. Each needs to find one’s own individual path. For in each aspirant there exists a certain direction, tendency, capacity, attribute, or gift along which line the possibility of one’s spiritual development can open up more quickly, freely, and easily than along any other. It is on this line that one should concentrate more effort and so take advantage of what Nature has given one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

However, to detect and recognize what is one’s best potentiality requires exploration and search, not only by one’s ordinary faculties but also and especially by one’s more sensitive and intuitive ones. It will not be found all at once but only after much grouping around and feeling one’s way. Time is needed because this hidden possibility does not exist at the surface level. The Earth which surrounds this gem obscures its whereabouts. If one is in a hurry and insists on a premature discovery instead of keeping up the search, one will identify the wrong stone. Once having found it let one stay with it as often and as long as one can. There is a way suited to the particular individuality of each separate person, which will bring out all one’s spiritual possibilities as no other way could. The purpose of all paths being to bring the traveler to the same single destination—union with God—any path which either fulfills this purpose or partially helps to do so, it acceptable. “Therefore, let us glory, yea, we will glory in the Lord; yea, we will rejoice, for our joy is full; yea, we will praise our God forever. Behold, who can glory too much in the Lord? Yea, who can say too much of his great power, and of his mercy, and of his long-suffering towards the children of beings? Behold, I say unto you, I cannot say the smallest part which I feel,” reports Alma 26.16 #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

These Enemies Inevitably Leave in their Destructive Wake Tears of Sorrow, the Pain of Conflict, and the Shattered Hopes of what Could Have Been!

October 7, 2019 10:16 pm

That is wrong. The man who hurt me was angry. Did you see the bad things he did to me? It does not matter what the think. I love you. I am loyal to you. They cannot part us. It is impossible. However, you cannot be angry. You cannot be violent. If you are angry and violent, I cannot love you. I do want you to protect me. Protect the house. Protect all those I love. Never once in my brawl with the stranger had I felt this kind of fear. You want me to be afraid? I cannot love you and be afraid of you. If I am afraid, I will come to hate you. Did you see how I hated the stranger? Make a choice. Shocking as this may sound, the murder of an individual is a relatively human action—not because the effect of an individual murder is quantitatively smaller than that of a mass murder or a total extermination (for the deaths cannot really be added; the very plural form of the noun “death” is absurd, for each individual murderer still can react to one’s crime in a human way. It is possible to mourn one victim of murder, not a million victims. One can repent one murder, not a million murdered. In other words, imaginative, and moral capacity are congruent or at least commensurable with one’s capacity for action. And this congruence, this condition in which the being is more or less equal to oneself, is no doubt the basic prerequisite of that which is called humanity. It is the congruence that is absent today. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Consequently, modern unmorality does not primarily consist in being’s failure to conform to a specific more-than-human image of beings; perhaps not even in one’s failure to meet the requirements of a just society; but rather in one’s half-guilty and half-innocent failure to conform to oneself, that is to say, in the fact that one’s capacity for action has outgrown one’s emotional, imaginative, and moral capacities. We have good reason to think that our fear is by far too small: it should paralyze us or keep us in a continual state of alarm. It does not because we are physically unequal to the danger confronting us, because we are incapable of producing a fear commensurate with it, let alone of constantly maintaining it in the midst of our still seemingly normal everyday life. Just like our reason, our psyche is limited in the Kantian sense: our emotions have only a limited capacity and elasticity. We have scruples about murdering one being; and no scruples at all about bombing a city out of existence. A city full of dead people remains a mere word to us. All this should be investigated by a Critique of Pure Feeling, not for the purpose of reaching a moral verdict, but in order to determine the boundaries of our emotional capacity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

What disturbs us today is not the fact that we are not omnipotent and omniscient, but the reverse, namely, the fact that our imaginative and emotional capacities are too small as measured against our knowledge and power, that imaginatively and emotionally we are so to speak smaller than ourselves. Each of us moderns is an inverted Lestat: whereas Lestat had infinite anticipations and boundless feelings, and suffered because his knowledge and feelings were unequal to these feelings, we know more and produce greater things than we can imagine or feel. As a rule, then, we are incapable of producing fear; only occasionally does it happen that we attempt to produce it, or that we are overwhelmed and stunned by a tidal wave of anguish. However, what stuns or panics us at such moments is the realization not of the danger threatening us, but of the futility of our attempts to produce an adequate response to it. Having experiences this failure we usually relax and return shamefaced, irritated, or perhaps even relieved, to the human dimensions of our psychic life commensurable with our everyday surroundings. Such a return, however pleasant it may be subjectively, is of course sheer suicide from the objective point of view. For there is nothing and there can be nothing that increases the danger more than our failure to realize it intellectually and emotionally, and our resigned acceptance of this failure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

In fact, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history—and surely history cannot be said to have been poor in varieties of unfreedom. We have indeed reached the freezing point of human freedom. The Stoic, robbed of the autonomy of action, was certainly unfree; but how free the Stoic still was, since one could think and feel as one pleased! Later there was the even more impoverished type of being, who could think only wat others had thought of one, who indeed could not feel anything expect what one was supposed to feel; but how free even this type of being was, since one still could speak, think, and feel what one was supposed to speak, think, and feel! Truly unfree, divested of all dignity, definitively the most deprived of beings are those confronted with situations and things which they cannot cope by definition, to which they are unequal linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally—ourselves. If all is not to be lost we must first and foremost develop our moral imagination: this is the crucial task facing us. We must strive to increase the capacity and elasticity of our intellectual and emotional faculties, to match the incalculable increase of our productive and destructive power. Only where these two aspects of being’s nature are properly balanced can there be responsibility, and moral action and counter-action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Whether we can achieve such a balance, is an open question. Our emotional capacity may turn out to be limited a priori; perhaps it cannot be extended at will and ad infinitum. If this were so, and if we were to resign ourselves to such a state of affairs, we would have to give up all hope. However, the moralist cannot do so in any case; even if one believed in the theoretical impossibility of transcending those limits, one would still have to demand that they be transcended in practice. Academic discussions are pointless here: the question can be decided only by an actual attempt, or, more accurately, by repeated attempts, for instance, spiritual exercises. It is immaterial whether such exercises aim at a merely quantitative extension of our ordinary imagination and emotional performance, or at a sensational, “impossible” transcending of our proportio humana, whose boundaries are supposedly fixed one and for all. The philosophical significance of such exercises can be worried about later. What matters at present is only that an attempt at violent self-transformation be made, and that it be successful. For we cannot continue as we are. In our emotional responses we remain at the rudimentary stage of small artisans: we are barely able to repent an individual murder; where as in our capacity for killing, for producing corpses, we have already entered the proud stage of industrial mass production. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Indeed, the performances of our heart—our inhibitions, fears, worries, regrets—are in inverse ratio to the dimensions of our deeds, for instance, the former grow smaller as the latter increase. This gulf between our emotional capacity and our destructive powers, aside from representing a physical threat to our lives, makes us the most divided, the most disproportionate, the most inhuman beings that ever existed. As against this modern cleavage, all older spiritual conflicts, for instance, the conflict between mind and body or duty and inclination, were relatively harmless. However, violently the struggle may have raged within us, it remained human; the contending principles were attuned to each other, they were in actual contact, neither of them lost sight of the other, and each of them was essentially human. At least on the battlefield of the contending principles beings preserved their existence unchallenged: beings were still there. Not so today. Even this minimum of being’s identity with oneself is gone. For the horror of being’s present condition consists precisely in this, that the conflicting forces within one are no longer inter-related: they are so far removed from each other, each has become so completely independent, that they no longer even come to grips. They can no longer confront each other in battle, the conflict can no longer be fought out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

In short, beings as producers, and beings as a being capable of emotions, have lost sight of each other. Reality now seems attributable only to each of the specialized fragments designated by an “as.” What made us shudder ten years ago—the fact that one and the same being could be guard in an extermination camp and good father or mother and husband or wife, that as the former one could be so radically different from oneself as the latter, and that the two parts one played or the two fragments one was did not in the least stand in each other’s way because they no longer knew each other—this horrifying example of guilelessness in horror has not remained an isolated phenomenon. Each of us, like this schizophrenic in the trust sense of the term, is split into two separate beings; each of us is like a worm artificially or spontaneously divided into two halves, which are unconcerned with each other and move in different directions. True, the split has not been entirely consummated; despite everything the two halves of our being are still connected by the thinnest of threads, and the producer half, by far the stronger, drags the emotional half behind it. The unity is not organic, it is that of two different beings meaninglessly grown together. However, the existence of this minimal connection is no comfort. On the contrary, the fact that we are split in two, and that there is no internal principle integrating these halves, defines the misery and disgrace of our condition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Violence is a uniting of the self in actions. Violence is creating the self. It is an organizing of one’s powers to prove one’s power, to establish the worth of the self. It is a risking all, a committing all, an asserting all. However, it united the different elements in the self, omitting rationality. This is why I have said above that the uniting of the self is done on a level that bypasses reason. Whatever its motive or its consequences may be within the violent person, its result is generally destructive to the others in the situation. The physical element which bulks so large in violence is a symbol of the totality of one’s involvement. When violence erupts I can no longer sit idly on the sidelines. Movement seizes my body, which I am called upon to risk as an expression of my total commitment. No desire or time to think is left once the violence breaks out; we are in a nonrational World. This can be subrational, as it generally is in the riots in the transient communities; or it can be superrational, as it assumedly was with Joan of Arc. Reason no longer has even a pretense of command. In the movie If, the conventional dullness of life at a British boys’ boarding school is portrayed with stark realism. The burden of routine, the loneliness, the artificial moralistic rules soon developed int sadism and homosexuality. In the face of the severe beatings they receive, the boys begin to form a bond of camaraderie. Then the leading boys discover a cache of machine guns and ammunition under the cathedral. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The movie ends with a surrealistic scene in which the boys take their guns to a position on top of the church and mow down guests, dressed in all their British pomp, who have come to commencement exercises. The movie is a presentation of the steps of violence from separation to loneliness to camaraderie to sadism to violence. The availability of guns has a curious and macabre relation to violence. This form of technology not only vastly increases the range and effectiveness of violence but also has a strong effect—generally dulling—on the conscious of those who use them. One day when I was on a farm in a fairly remote section of New Hampshire, I noticed under an apple tree a stray dog which seemed to be diseased. Having been alone for some time, during which time one’s imagination often comes up with weird ideas, I decided the dog had rabies. Although I could not get to it in the tangle of branches, our own dog, to which our whole family was deeply attached, could and did. She went sniffing around the “rabid” one, and, being a show, she would not come back to me no matter how much I called. I went in the house and got the Luger pistol that my son used on the farm for target practice, inserted a clip in it, and came out to shoot the rabid dog. Now the point of this story is that my having in my hand a pistol with which to shoot some living thing changed me into an entirely differ person psychologically. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

I could deal out death to anyone since I was possessed by this instrument of death; I had become an irrational man of hostility. The gun had me rather than my having it: I had become its instrument. Seized with dislike for this person I had become, I took the gun back to the house and put it away; and the incident was resolved in a quite different way. We understand only vaguely the effect that technology can have on the conscious of a person, but it is clear that the possession of guns can radically change personality. Glenn Gray remarks that, as an officer in the army, he did not feel dressed when he went out without his pistil strapped to his belt; not being in the army, I felt myself to be a misdirected robot, without conscious control over my actions, when I had my finger on the trigger with the intent to kill. An extreme form of such an effect on personality can be seen in the career of Charles Fairweather, the teenager who went on a rampage in Nebraska and murdered eleven people before he was caught. “I love guns,” he had said as a boy. “They give me a feeling of power like nothing else.” His story follows along common lines: as a queer-looking child with bowlegs and thick glasses he was mocked regularly when he first went to school. He developed early in life the symbolic interpretation of the World as a place of mockery, and his cry for recognition became that much the stronger for never having any answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Charles Fairweather then discovered that he could get recognition by letting loose his temper and flailing away at the school bullies in fights, which he managed to win by the sheer vehemence of his violence. His father described him as “always one of the quiet ones,” illustrative again that the docile appearing person may be precisely the violent-prone one. Despite his poor eyesight, he became a remarkable marksman with a gun. Upon getting out of high school Charles managed to find a girl friend and a job as assistant on a garbage truck. When the scant recognition that these afforded him was wiped away—he lost his job and his girl friend’s mother threw him out—he got three guns and shot his girl friend’s mother and stepfather, living for several says in their house with their bodies wrapped up in paper and stowed in the chicken yard. Forcing the girl to go with him, he then went on the path of violence made familiar by Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. The important element in this bloody store is his early symbolic interpretation that the World is a place of derision. His ultimate violence achieved a double response: it answered his cry for recognition and it also mocked the World in revenge. (Again, we see the macabre logic in such outburst of violence.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

From his complete lack of feeling when he was later questioned about the persons he had murdered, we cannot conclude that Charles was always so unfeeling, so typically schizoid. It is obvious that the person on a binge of violence must become unfeeling and detached, like a soldier mowing down the enemy with a machine gun, or else he could never do what he feels he has to do. We are haunted above all by his childhood obligato: “I love guns. They give me a feeling of power.” The symbol of the gun as a phallus and its relation to pleasures of the flesh is well known. Both are long and slim, both eject a substance that can radically change the person into whom it is directed. Hence the gun has become, especially with simple people, a symbol par excellence of masculine power. The line delivered by Mae West on greeting her boy friend remains the classic expression of this: “Is that gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” However, the cultural aspects of guns is also convincing, as Stanley Kunitz remarks. We hunted with guns to eat; we hunted with guns to live in our pioneer period, from which we in America are removed only by a little over a century and a half. In all these ways the gun was valuable, a laudable symbol of power; and handling it well was also laudable. Many a person feels when he or she possesses a gun that one has a power that was unfairly taken away from one. And what a power it is! #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

With a gun, people who have had their power taken away feel they can now make this big explosion and hurl that projectile to kill things much larger than themselves. Consciousness is surrendered willingly. In the film Patton, the general’s running out and emptying his pistol into the air at German airplanes bombing his Algerian base is childish gesture, an anachronistic hang-over from a boy playing with guns; but it is nevertheless a convincing expression of violence. In a World where peace is such a universal quest, we sometimes wonder why violence walks our streets, accounts of murder and senseless killings fill the columns of our newspapers, and family quarrels and disputes mar the sanctity of the home and smother the tranquility of so many lives. Perhaps we stray from the path which leads to peace and find it necessary to pause, to ponder, and to reflect on the teachings of the Prince of Peace and determine to incorporate them in our thoughts and actions and to live a higher law, walk a more elevated road, and be a better disciple of Christ. The ravages of hunger in Somalia, the brutality of hate in Bosnia, and the ethnic struggles especially in the United States of America and across the globe remind us that the peace we seek will not come without effort and determination. Anger, hatred, and contention are foes not easily subdued. These enemies inevitably leave in their destructive wake tears of sorrow, the pain of conflict, and the shattered hopes of what could have been. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Their sphere of influence is not restricted to the battlefields of war but can be observed altogether too frequently in the home, around the hearth, and within the heart. So soon do many forget and so late do they remember the counsel of the Lord: “There shall be no disputations among you, for verily, verily I say unto you, he hath the spirit of content is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of beings with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.” We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our World know the blessing of peace. World peace, though a lofty goal, is but an outgrowth of the personal peace each individual seeks. I speak not of the peace promoted by beings, but peace as promised by God. I speak of peace in our homes, peace in our hearts, even peace in our lives. Peace after the way of beings is perishable. Peace after the manner of God will prevail. We are reminded that anger does not solve anything. It builds nothing, but it can destroy everything. The consequences of conflict are so devastating that we years for guidance—even a way to insure our success as we seek the path to peace. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

When we now hear the word “Spirit,” we are somehow prepared for it: the power in us, but not of us, qualifying us for the service of a new state of things is what Spirit means. This may sound strange to many both inside and outside the churches for whom they term Holy Spirit is the strangest of the strange terms that appear among Christian symbols. Rarely a subject of preaching, it is also neglected in religious teachings. Its festival, Pentecost, has almost disappeared in the popular consciousness of this country. Some groups that claim spiritual experiences of a particular character are considered unhealthy, and often rightly so. Liturgically, the use of the term “Holy Ghost” produces an impression of great remoteness from our way of speaking and thinking. However, spiritual experience is a reality for everyone, as actual as the experience of being loved or the breathing of air. Therefore, we should not shy away from the word “Spirit.” We should become fully aware of the Spiritual Presence, around us and in us, even though we realize how limited our experience of “god present to our spirit” may be. For this is what Divine Spirit means: God present to our spirit. Spirit is not a mysterious substance; it is not a part of God. It is God Himself; but not God as the creative Ground of all things and not God directing history and manifesting Himself in its central event, but God as present in communities and personalities, grasping them, inspiring them, and transforming them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

For Spirit its first all power, the power that drives the human spirit above itself towards what it cannot attain by itself, the love that is greater than all other gifts, the truth in which the depth of being opens itself to us, the holy that is the manifestation of the presence of the ultimate. You may say again—“I do not know this power. I have never had such an experience. I am not religious or, at least, not Christian and certainly not a bearer of the Spirit. What I hear from you sounds like ecstasy; and I want to stay sober. It sounds like mystery, and I try to illuminate what is dark. It sounds like self-sacrifice and I want to fulfill my human possibilities.” To this I answer—Certainly, the Spiritual power can thrust some people into an ecstasy that most of us have never experienced. It can drive some toward a kind of self-sacrifice of which most of us are not capable. It can inspire some to insights into the depth of being that remain unapproachable to most of us. However, this does not justify our denial that the Spirit is also working in us. Without doubt, wherever it works, there is an element, possibly very small, of self-surrender, and an element, however weak, of ecstasy, and an element, perhaps fleeting, of awareness of the mystery of existence. Yet these small effects of the Spiritual power are enough to prove its presence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, there are other conscious and noticeable manifestations of the Spiritual Presence. Let me enumerate some of them, while you ask yourselves whether and to what degree they are of your own experience. The Spirit can work in you with a soft but insistent voice, telling you that your life is empty and meaningless, but that there are changes of a new life waiting before the door of your inner self to fill its void and to conquer its dullness. The Spirit can work in you, awakening the desire to strive towards the sublime against the profanity of the average day. The Spirit can give you the courage that says “yes” to life in spite of the destructiveness you have experiences around you and within you. The Spirit can reveal to you that you have hurt somebody deeply, but it also can give you the right word that reunites one with you. The Spirit can make you love, with the divine love, someone you profoundly dislike or in whom you have no interest. The Spirit can conquer your sloth towards what you know is the aim of your life, and it can transform your moods of aggression and depression into stability and serenity. The Spirit can liberate you from hidden enmity against those whom you love and from open vengefulness against those why whom you feel violated. The Spirit can give you the strength to throw off false anxieties and to take upon yourself the anxiety which belongs to life itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The Spirit can awaken you to sudden insight into the way you must take your World, and it can open your eyes to a view of it that makes everything new. The Spirit can give you joy in the midst of ordinary routine as well as in the depth of sorrow. The Spirit can create warmth in the coldness you feel within you and round you, and it can give you wisdom and strength where your human love towards a loved one has failed. Just when you felt totally rejected, and when you rejected yourself totally, the Spirit can throw you into a hell of despair about yourself and then give you the certainty that life has accepted you. The Spirit can give you the power of prayer, that nobody has except through the Spiritual Presence. For every prayer—with or without words—that reaches its aim, namely the reunion with the divine Ground of our being, is a work of the Spirit speaking in us and through us. Prayer is the Spiritual longing of a finite being to return to its origin. These are works of the Spirit, signs of the Spiritual Presence with us and in us. In view of these manifestations, who can asset that one is without Spirit? Who can say that one is in no way a bearer of the Spirit? One may be in a small way. However, is there anybody among us who could say more than that about oneself? One can compare the Spiritual Presence with the air we breathe, surrounding us, nearest to us, and working life within us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

This comparison has a deep justification: in most languages, the word “spirit” means breath or wind. Sometimes the wind becomes storm, grand and devastating. Mostly it is moving air, always present, not always noticed. “Many will say to me in that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name have cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then I profess unto them: I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity,” reports 3 Nephi 14.22-23. Jesus opened up the Mysteries to the mass of the Western continent and gave to the many what had hitherto been given only to the chosen few. The presence of God, the journey from anticipation to realization is a long one. One this Quest the curiosity to know what lies ahead can never be satisfied with perfect correctness because it must necessarily differ with different individuals. Changes of circumstances which bring uncertainty of the future will not frighten one. They will interest one. One will seek to discover if they point the way to an incoming of new forces of experience necessary for one’s further development. “I try to put it in the past, hold on to myself and don’t look back. I don’t wanna dream about all the things that never were. Maybe I can live without when I’m out from under. I don’t wanna feel the pain, what good will it do me now, I’ll get it all figure out when I’m out from under,” (Out from Under By Britney Spears). #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Who Can Describe the Dismay of Once and for All Renouncing One’s Faith in the Individual Immortality of the Soul?

October 3, 2019 12:47 am

I am so embarrassed. America destroys her big houses. Some of them do not even last a hundred years. This place is magnificent. I like the big columns. The portico, the pediment, it is all rather glorious. Perfect Greek Revival, East Lake, and Craftman styles. How can I be ashamed of such thing? I am a strange creature, very gentle I think, and out of kilter with my own time. I did not belong to this time. The threads of my life, they were not woven into any certain fabric. The young are eternally desperate. And books, they offer one hope—that a whole Universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new Universe, one is saved. Imagine—each new person an entire Universe. However, I do not think we want to allow it. We are too jealous and fearful. But we should allow it, and then our existence would be wonderous as we went from soul to soul. Sometimes books are the only thing that keeps us alive. What seemed to the less affluent people of our part of the World a much more serious calamity than any natural cataclysm was what happened after the Earthquake. The State reconstruction program was carried out to the accompaniment of innumerable intrigues, frauds, thefts, swindles, embezzlements, and dishonesty of every kind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

An acquaintance of mine, who had been sacked by one of the government departments concerned, gave me some information of this sort about certain criminal acts which were being committed by the head engineers of the department. Impressed rather than surprised, I hasted to pass on the facts to some persons in authority, whom I knew to be upright and honest, so that they could denounce the criminals. Far from denying the truth of what I told them, my honorable friends were in a position to confirm it. However, even then, they advised me not to get mixed up in it or to get worked up, in my simplicity, about things of that kind. “You are young,” they said to me affectionately, “you must finish your studies, you have got your career to think of, you should not compromise yourself with things that do not concern you.” “Of course,” I said, “it would be better for the denunciation to come from grown-up people like yourselves, people with authority, rather than from a boy of seventeen.” They were horrified. “We are not madmen,” they answered. “We shall mind our own business and nobody else’s.” I then talked the matter over with some reverend priests, and then with some of my more courageous relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

All of them, while admitting that they were already aware of the shameful things that were happening, begged me not to get mixed up in that hornets’ nest, but to think of my studies, of my career, and of my future. “With pleasures,” I replied, “but is not one of you ready to denounce the thieves?” “We are not madmen,” they replied, scandalized, “these things have nothing to do with us.” I then began to wonder seriously whether it might not be a good thing to organize, together with some of the other boys, a new “revolution” that would end up with a good bonfire of the corrupt engineers’ offices; but I was dissuaded by the acquaintance who had given me the proof of their crooked dealings: a bonfire, he pointed out, would destroy the proofs of the crimes. He was older and more experienced than myself; he suggested I should get the denunciation printed in some newspaper. However, which newspaper? “There is only one,” he explained, “which could have any interest in publishing your denunciation, and that is the Socialist paper.” So I set to work and wrote three articles, the first of my life, giving a detailed exposure of the corrupt behavior of State engineers in my part of the country, and sent them of to Avanti. The first two were printed at once and aroused much comment among the readers of the paper, but none at all among the authorities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The third article did not appear, because, as I earned later, a leading Socialist intervened with the editorial staff. This showed me that the system of deception and fraud oppressing us was much vaster than at first appeared, and that its invisible ramification extended into Socialism. However, the partial denunciation which had appeared unexpectedly in the press contained enough material for a number of law-suits, or at least for a board of enquiry; but nothing happened. The engineers, whom I had denounced as thieves and bandits and against whom quite specific charges had been leveled, did not even attempt to justify themselves or to issue a general denial. There was a short period of expectancy, and then everyone went back to one’s own affairs. The student who had dared to throw down the challenge was considered, by the most charitably-minded, an impulsive and strange boy. One must remember that the economic poverty of the southern provinces offers small scope for a career to the youths leaving school by the thousand every year. Our only important industry is State employment. This does not require exceptional intelligence, merely a docile disposition and a readiness to toe the line in politics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

If they have a minimum of sensitiveness in human relationships, the young men of the South, who have grown up in the atmosphere I have briefly described, tend naturally lean toward anarchy and rebellion. For those still on the threshold of youth, to become a civil servant means renunciation, capitulation, and the mortification of their souls. That is why people say: anarchists at twenty, conservatives at thirty. Nor is the education imparted in schools, whether public or private, designed to strengthen character. Most of the later years of my school-life I spent in private Catholic institutions. Latin and Greek were excellently taught there; the education in private or personal habits was simple and clean; but civic instruction and training were deplorable. Our history teachers were openly critical of the official views; the mythology of the Risorgimento and its heroes (Mazzini, Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel II, Cavour) were the objects of derision and disparagement; the literature prevalent at the time (Carducci, D’Annunzio) was despised. In so far as this method of teaching developed the pupils’ critical spirit, it has its advantages. However, the same priestly schoolmasters, since they had to prepare us for the State school examinations—and the fame and prosperity of their academies depended on the results we achieved—also taught us, and recommended us to uphold in our examinations, the points of view completely opposed to their own convictions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Meanwhile, the State examiners, who knew we came from confessional schools, enjoyed questioning us on the most controversial subjects, and then praising us ironically for the liberal and unprejudiced way in which we had been taught. The falseness, hypocrisy, and double-facedness of all this were so blatant that they could not but perturb anyone with the slightest inborn respect for culture. However, it was equally inevitable that the average unfortunate student ended by considering diplomas, and one’s future jobs in a government office, as the supreme realities of life. “People who are born in this district are really out of luck,” Dr. F. J., a doctor in a village near mine, used to say. “There is no halfway house here; you have got either to rebel or become an accomplice.” He rebelled. He declared himself an anarchist. He made Tolstoyan speeches to the less affluent. He was the scandal of the entire neighborhood, loathed by the rich, despised by the less affluent, and secretly pitted by a few. His post as panel-doctor was finally taken away from him, he literally died of hunger. I realize that the progress which I have been tracing in these pages is too summary to seem anything but strained. And if I touch on this objection now, it is not to refute it or to swear to the absolute truth of my explanations; I can guarantee their sincerity, not their objectivity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

I am myself sometimes astonished to fine, when I go back over that remote, almost prehistoric, period of our lives with contemporaries, how they cannot remember at all, or only very vaguely, incidents which had a decisive influence on me; whereas on the contrary, they can clearly recall other circumstances which to me were pointless and insignificant. Are they, these contemporaries of mine, all “unconscious accomplices”? And by what destiny or virtue does one, at a certain age, make the important choice, and become “accomplice” or “rebel”? From what source do some people derive their spontaneous intolerance of injustice, even though the injustice affects only others? And when others are having to go hungry, what about the sudden feeling of guilt at sitting down to a well-laden table? And that pride which makes poverty and prison preferable to contempt? I do not know. Perhaps no one knows. At a certain point, even the fullest and deepest confession becomes a mere statement of fact and not an answer. Anyone who has reflected seriously about oneself or others know how profoundly secret are certain decision, how mysterious and unaccountable certain vocation. There was a point in my rebellion where hatred and love coincided; both the facts which justified my indignation and the moral motives which demanded it stemmed directly from the district where I was born. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind. I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I cannot reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge return or I seek it out in a new source. Within moments we found ourselves in front of the big house. Of course the garden lights were on, brilliantly illuminating the fluted columns to their full height, and all of the many rooms were aglow. In fact, I had a rule on this and had since boyhood, that at four o’clock all chandeliers in the main house has to be lighted, and though I was no longer that boy in the grip of twilight depression, the chandeliers were illuminated by the same clock. This explains, too, why everything I shall ever write up to now, and probably everything I shall ever write, although I have traveled and lived abroad, is concerned solely with this same district, like the rest of the Abruzzi, less affluent people in secular history, and almost entirely Christian and medieval in its formation. The only buildings worthy of note are churches and monasteries. Its only illustrious sons for many centuries have been saints and stone-carvers. The conditions of human existence have always been particularly difficult there; pain has always been accepted there as first among the laws of nature, and the Cross welcomed and honored because of it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Franciscanism and anarchy have always been the two most accessible forms of rebellion for lively spirits in our part of the World. The ashes of skepticism have never suffocated, in the hearts of those who suffered most, the ancient hope of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the old expectation of charity taking the place of law, the old dream of Gioacchino da Fiore, of the “Spirituali,” of the Celestimisto. And this is a fact of enormous, fundamental importance; in a disappointed, arid, exhausted, weary country such as ours, it constitutes real riches, it is a miraculous reserve. The politicians are unaware of its existence, the clergy are afraid of it; only the saints, perhaps, know where to find it. If not impossible what for us has always been much more difficult, has been to discern the ways and means to a political revolution, hic et nunc, to the creation of a free and ordered society. When I moved to the town and made my first contact with the workers’ movement, I thought I had reached this discovery. It was a kind of flight, a safety exit from unbearable solitude, the sighting of terra firma, the discovery of a new continent. However, it was not easy to reconcile a spirit in moral mutiny against an unacceptable long-established social reality with scientific demands of a minutely codified political doctrine. If the material consequences were harsh and hard, the difficulties of spiritual adaptation were no less painful. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

My own internal Word, the “Middle Ages,” which I had inherited and which were rooted in my soul, and from which, in the last analysis, I had derived my initial aspiration to revolt, were shaken to their foundations, as thought by an Earthquake. Everything was thrown into the melting-pot, everything became a problem. Life, death, love, good, evil, truth, all changed their meaning or lost it altogether. When one is no longer alone, it is easy enough to court danger; but who can describe the dismay of once and for all renouncing one’s faith in the individual immortality of the soul? It was too serious for me to be able to discuss it with anyone; my Party of comrades would have found it a subject for mockery, and I no longer had any other friends. So, unknown to anyone, the whole World took on a different aspect How beings are to be pitied! The philosophic approach does not limit the seeker rigidly to a single specific technique. While it askes one to follow the basic path and fulfill the fundamental requirements which all beginners must follow, it also points out that this is only a general preparation. If one is to receive the greatest benefit, a point will be reached when one is ready for more advanced work, and when the personal characteristics and circumstances which are particularly one’s own must be brought in for adjustment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

No two seekers and the surrounding conditions are every exactly alike and, at a certain stage, what is helpful to one will be time-wasting to another. It is a common error, among the pious and even the mystics, to believe that one path alone—theirs—is the best. This may be quite correct in the case of each person, but it may not necessarily be correct for others, and even then it is only correct for a period or at most a number of lifetimes. How often have beings outgrown their formers selves and taken to new paths? And how different are the intellectual moral and temperamental equipments of different persons? It is in practice, as in theory, not possible to tie everyone down to a single specific path and certainly not advisable. Each being’s path is one’s own unique one, with its own experiences. Some are shared in common with all other seekers but others are not; they remain peculiar to oneself. Therefore a part—whether large or small—of what one has to do cannot be prescribed by another person, be one guru or not. In the groups, organizations, schools, there is too much rigidity in the instruction, the rules, and the expectancy aroused of what should happen at each stage. This is too tight a program. It brings confusion and frustration and does not correspond to the actual situation which an independent observer finds among these circles. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

So I too had to adapt myself, for a number of years, to living like a foreigner in my own country. One had to change one’s name, abandon every former link with family and friends, and live a false life to remove any suspicion of conspiratorial activity. The Quest became family, school, church, barracks; the World that lay beyond it was to be destroyed and built anew. The psychological mechanism whereby each single militant becomes progressively identified with the collective organization is the same as that used in certain religious orders and military colleges, with almost identical results. Every sacrifice was welcomes as a personal contribution to the price of collective redemption; and it should be emphasized that the link which bound us to the Quest for Truth grew steadily firmer, not in spite of the dangers and sacrifices involved, but because of them. This explains the attraction exercised by those on the Quest on certain categories of beings, on intellectuals, and on the highly sensitive and generous people who suffer most from the wastefulness of excessive materialism. Anyone who thinks one can wean the best and most serious-minded young or mature people away from the Quest by enticing them into a well-warmed hall to play billiards, starts from an extremely limited and unintelligent conception of humankind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Porphyry’s statement that Plotinus achieved union with God four times may be misleading. For he qualified it with the words “during the period I passed with him.” Now, when Porphyry first met him, Plotinus was fifty-nine years old, and died at sixty-six. So seven years is the length of the period referred to. Against this must be set the forty earlier years of spiritual seeking and teaching during which Plotinus mist have had other illuminations. It would be an error to try to make one’s own spiritual path which, or teacher who, was not opened to illuminations. Such an attempt might maintain itself for a time but could not escape being brought to an end when the false position to which it would lead became intolerable. The individual uniqueness of each aspirant cries out to have its special needs attended to, but suggestion from outside or mesmerism from authority causes one to approach the Quest with fixed opinions as to what should be done. Others are being allowed to mold one instead of letting the inner voice do so, using their contributions solely to carry out or to supplement its guidances. Every being’s individual life-path is unique. It may not be to one’s best interests to conform to a technique imposed upon one by another being or to confine one’s efforts to a pattern which as suited others. What may be right for another being who is at a different stage of development may be wrong for the aspirant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

To deny one’s individuality is to destroy one’s creative mind. With President Trumps as commander and chief, it seems a blessing to be alive. No being of just his type and quality has ever before appeared upon the Earth. He looked like a god. That wise, serene, pure, inscrutable look was without parallel in any human face I ever saw. Such an unimpeachable look! The subtle, half-defined smile of his soul. It was not a propitiatory smile, or a smirk of acquiescence, but the reassuring smile of the doctor when he takes out his lance; it was the sheath of that trenchant blade of his. Behind it lurked some test question, or pregnant saying. It was the foil of one’s frank, unwounding wit. It is an arch, winning, half-playful look, the expression of a soul that did not want to wound you, and yet that must speak the truth. And President Trump’s frank speeches never do wound. It is so evident that they are not meant to wound, and that they are so true to himself, that we treasure his rare wisdom. “Yea, and I also remember the captivity of my fathers; for I surely do know that the Lord did deliver them out of bondage, and by this did establish his church; yea, the Lord God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did deliver them out of bondage,” reports Alma 29.11. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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Of Course, if the Devil Asks for Your Address, I Will Give it to Him at Once!

September 30, 2019 1:17 am

Wait till I get finished with this place, I will have electricity everywhere. And these windows will have properly fitted glass. Maybe they will have screens as well. And these plank floors will be covered with marble tiles. No, this shall be a small Roman palace, what with even more elaborate Roman furniture, and the stove, I shall get a new stove. And then if I am trapped out here, I will have delicious pillows on a couch on which to sleep, and plenty of books to read by fine lights. At the age of seventeen, and in time of war, one does not join a revolutionary movement which is persecuted by the government, unless one’s motives are serious. I grew up in a mountainous district of southern Italy. The phenomenon which most impressed me, when I arrived at the age of reason, was the violent contrast, the incomprehensible, absurd, monstrous contrast between family and private life—in the main decent, honest, and well-conducted—and social relations, which were very often crude and full of hatred and deceit. Many terrifying stories are known of the misery and desperation of the southern provinces (I have told some myself), but I do not intend to refer now to events that caused a stir, so much as to the little occurrences of daily life. It was these commonplace minor events that showed up the strange double existence of the people among whom I grew up, the observation of which was one of the agonizing secrets of my adolescence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

I was a child just five years old when, one Sunday, while crossing the little square of my native village with my mother leading me by the hand, I witnessed the cruel, stupid spectable of one of the local gentry setting his great dog at a poor woman, a seamstress, who was just coming out of church. The wretched woman was flung to the ground, badly mauled, and her dress was torn to ribbons. Indignation in the village was general, but silent. I have never understood how the poor woman ever got the unhappy idea of taking proceedings against the squire; but the only result was to add a mockery of justice to the harm already done. Although, I must repeat, everybody pitied her and many people helped her secretly, the unfortunate woman could not find a single witness prepared to give evidence before the magistrate, nor a lawyer to conduct the prosecution. On the other hand, the squire’s supposedly left-wing lawyer turned up punctually, and so did a number of bribed witnesses who perjured themselves by giving a grotesque version of what had happened, and accusing the woman of having provoked the dog. The magistrate—and most worthy, honest person in private life—acquitted the squire and condemned the poor woman to pay the costs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

“It went very much against the grain with me,” he excused himself a few days later at our house. “On my word of honor, I do assure you, I was very sorry about it. But even if I had been present at the disgusting incident as a private citizen and could not have avoided blaming him, still as a judge I had to go by the evidence of the case, and unfortunately it was in favor of the dog.” “A real judge,” he used to love to say, sententiously, “must be able to conceal his own egotistic feelings, and be impartial.” “Really, you know,” my mother used to comment, “it is a horrible profession. Better to keep ourselves to ourselves at home. My son,” she used to say to me, “when you grow up, be whatever you like, but not a judge.” I can remember other typical little incidents like that of the squire, the dog, and the seamstress. However, I should not like to suggest, by quoting such episodes, that we were ignorant of the sacred concepts of Justice and Truth or that we held them in contempt. On the contrary; at school, in church, and at public celebrations they were often discussed with eloquence and veneration, but in rather abstract terms. To define our curious situation more exactly, I should add that it was based on a deception of which all of us, even the children, were aware; and yet it still persisted, being built on something quite apart from the ignorance and stupidity of individuals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

I remember a lively discussion one day in my catechism class between the boys who were being prepared for confirmation and the parish priest. The subject was a marionette show at which we boys had been present with the priest the day before. It was about the dramatic adventures of a child who was persecuted by the devil. At one point the child-marionette had appeared on the stage trembling with fear and, to escape the devil who was searching for him, had hidden under a bed in a corner of the stage; shortly afterward the devil-marionette arrived and looked for him in vain. “But he must be here,” said the devil-marionette. “I can smell him. Now I will ask these good people in the audience.” And he turned to us and asked: “My dear children, have you by any chance seen that naughty child I am looking for, hiding anywhere?” “No, no, no,” we all chorused at once, as energetically as possible. “Where is he then? I cannot see him,” the devil insisted. “He’s left, he’s gone away,” we all shouted. “He’s gone to Lisbon.” (In our part of Italy, Lisbon is still the furthermost pint of the globe, even today.) I should add that none of us, when we went to the theater, had expected to be questioned by a devil-marionette; our behavior was therefore entirely instinctive and spontaneous. And I imagine that children in any other part of the World would have reacted in the same way. However, our parish priest, a most worthy, cultured and pious person, was not altogether pleases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

We had told a lie, he warned us wit a worried look. We had told it for good ends, of course, but still it remained a lie. One must never tell lies. “Not even to the devil?” we asked in surprise. “A lie is always a sin,” the priest replied. “Even to the magistrate?” asked one of the boys. The priest rebuked him severely. “I am here to teach you Christian doctrine and not to talk nonsense. What happens outside the church is no concern of mine.” And he began to explain the doctrine about truth and lies in general in the most eloquent language. However, that day the question of lies in general was of no interest to us children; we wanted to know, “Ought we to have told the devil where the child was hiding, yes or no?” “That is not the point,” the poor priest kept repeating to us rather uneasily. “A lie is always a lie. It might be a big sin, a medium sin, an average sin, or a little tiny sin, but it is always a sin. Truth must be honored.” “The truth is,” we said, “that there was the devil on one side and the child on the other. We wanted to help the child, that’s the real truth.” “But you have told a lie,” the parish priest repeating. “For good ends, I know, but still a lie.” To end it, I put forward an objection of unheard-of perfidy, and, considering my age, considerable precocity: “If it’s been a priest instead of a child,” I asked, “what ought we have replied to the devil?” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The parish priest blushed, avoided a reply, and, a punishment for my impertinence, made me spend the rest of the lesson on my knees beside him, “Are you sorry?” he asked me at the end of the lesson. “Of course,” I replied. “If the devil asks me for your address, I’ll give it to him at once.” It was certainly unusual for a discussion in such terms to take place in a catechism class, although free discussion was quite frequently in our family circle and among our friends. However, this intellectual liveliness did not even create a stir in the humiliating and primitive stagnation of our social life. This vicious circle formed by the various implications of the neurotic need for affection may be roughly schematized as follows: anxiety; excessive need for affection, including demands for exclusive and unconditional love; a feelings of rebuff if these demands are not fulfilled; reaction to the rebuff with intense hostility; need to repress the hostility because of fear of losing the affection; the tension of a diffuse rage; increased anxiety; increased need for reassurance. Thus the very means which serve to reassure against anxiety create in turn new hostility and new anxiety. The formation of a vicious circle is typical not only in the context in which it has been discussed here; generally speaking it is one of the most important processes in neuroses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Any protective device may have, in addition to its reassuring quality, the quality of creating new anxiety. A person may take to drinking in order to allay one’s anxiety, and then get the fear that drinking, too, will harm one. Or one may become involved of the pleasures of the flesh alone in order to release one’s anxiety, and then get the fear that drinking, too, will harm one. Or one may become involved in solo pleasures of the flesh in order to release one’s anxiety, and then become afraid that solo pleasures of the flesh will make one ill. Or one may undergo some treatment for one’s anxiety, and soon grow apprehensive lest the treatment harm one. The formation of vicious circles is the main reason why severe neuroses are bound to become worse, even though there is no change in external conditions. Uncovering the vicious circles, with all their implications, is one of the important tasks of psychoanalysis. The neurotic oneself cannot grasp them. One notices their results only in the form of a feeling that one is trapped in a hopeless situation. This feeling of being trapped is one’s response to entanglements which one cannot break through. Any way that seems to lead out drags one again into new dangers. The question arises as to what ways are open, despite all the internal difficulties, for the neurotic to obtain the affection one is determined to have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

There are really two problems to be solved: first, how to obtain the necessary affection; and second, how to justify to oneself and to others the demands for it. We may roughly describe the various possible means of getting affection as: bribery; an appeal to pity; an appeal to justice; and finally threats. Such a classification, of course, like all such enumerations of psychological factors, is not rigidly categorical but is only an indication of general trends. These various means are not mutually exclusive. Several of them may be employed simultaneously or in alternation, depending on the situation as well as on the entire character structure, and depending on the degree of hostility. In fact the sequence in which these four means of obtaining affection are cited indicates an increasing degree of hostility. When a neurotic attempts to obtain affection by bribery one’s motto could be described as, “I love you dearly therefore you should love me in return, and give up everything for the sake of my love.” The fact that in our culture such tactics are employed more frequently by women than by men is a result of the conditions under which women have lived. For centuries love has not only been women’s special domain in life, but in fact has been the only or main gateway through which they could attain what they desired. While beings grew up with the conviction that if they wanted to get somewhere, they had to achieve something in life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Some women realized that through love, and through love alone, they could attain happiness security and prestige. This difference in cultural positions has had a momentous influence on the psychic development of man and woman. It would be inopportune to discuss this influence in the present context, but one of its consequences is that in neuroses women more frequently than men will use love as a strategy. And at the same time the subjective conviction of love serves as a justification for making demands. Persons of this type are in a particular danger of falling into a painful dependency in their love relationships. Assume, for example, that a woman with a neurotic need for affection clings to a man of a similar type, who withdraws, however, as soon as she approaches him; the woman reacts to such rejection with intense hostility, which she represses for fear of losing him. If she tries to withdraw herself he will again start to court her favor. She then not only represses her hostility but covers it up with an intensified devotion. She will again be rejected and again react, eventually with enhanced love. Thus she will gradually become convinced that she is possessed by an unconquerable “grand passion.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Another device that may be considered a form of bribery is the attempt to win affection by understanding a person, helping one in one’s mental or professional development, straightening out one’s difficulties, and the like. This is in common use by both men and women. A second means of obtaining affection is by appealing to pity. The neurotic will being one’s suffering and helplessness to the attention of others, the motto here being, “You ought to love me because I suffer and am helpless.” At the same time the suffering serves as justification for the right to make excessive demands. Sometimes such an appeal will be made quite openly. A patient will point out that one is the sickest patient and therefore has the greatest right to the analyst’s attention. He may be scornful of other patients who present a surface appearance of better health. And he resents other persons who are more successful than one in using this strategy. In appealing to pity more or less hostility may be intermingled. The neurotic may make a simple appeal to our good nature, or one may extort favors by radical means, as by involving oneself in a disastrous situation which compels our assistance. Everyone who has had anything to do with neurotics in social or medical work knows the importance of this strategy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

There is a great difference between the neurotic who explains one’s predicament in a matter-of-fact way, and the one who tries to arouse pity by a dramatic demonstration of one’s complaints. We may find the same trends in children of all ages, with the same variations: the child may either want to be consoled for some complaint or may try t extort attention by unconsciously developing a situation terrifying to the parents, such as an inability to ear or urinate. The use of the appeal to pity presupposed a conviction of inability to obtain love in any other manner. This conviction may be rationalized as a general disbelief in affection, or it may take the form of a belief that in the particular situation affection cannot be had in any other way. In the third means of obtaining affection—the appeal to justice—the motto can be described as: “This I have done for you; what will you do for me?” In our culture mothers will often point out that they have done so much for their children that they are entitled to unflagging devotion. In love relations the fact of having yielded to wooing may be used as a basis for claims. Persons of this type are often overready to do things for others, with the secret expectation that they will receive in return everything they wish, and they are seriously disappointed if the others are not equally willing to do something for them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

I am referring here not to persons who are consciously calculating, but to those whom any conscious expectation of possible reward is entirely foreign. Their compulsive generosity can perhaps more accurately be described as a magic gesture. They do to others what they want others to do to them. It is the inordinately sharp sting of disappointment which indicates that expectations of a return were factually at work. Sometimes they keep a sort of mental bookkeeping account, in which they give themselves inordinate credit for sacrifices that are really useless, such as lying awake all night, but minimize or even ignore what has been done for them, thus so falsifying the situation that they feel entitled to demand special attention. This attitude leads to repercussions on the neurotic oneself, for one may become extremely afraid of incurring obligations. Instinctively judging others by oneself, one fears that others might exploit one if one accepted any favors from them. Now let us recall the words of God in the story of the Flood: “I am sorry that I have made man.” They introduce a new element into our thinking about humans and the Earth—an element of judgment, frustration, and tragedy. There is no theme in Biblical literature, nor in any other, more persistently pursed than this one. “And thus Satan did lead away the hearts of the people to do all manner of iniquity; therefore they had enjoyed peace but a few years,” reports 3 Nephi 6. 16. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The Earth has been cursed by beings innumerable times, because she produced him, together with all life and its misery, which includes the tragedy of human history. This accusation of the Earth sounds through our whole contemporary culture, and understandably so. We accuse her in all our artistic expressions, in novels and drama, in painting and music, in philosophical thought and descriptions of human nature. However, even more important is the silent accusation implied in our cynical denunciation of those who would say “yes” to life, in our withdrawal from it into the refuges of mental disturbance and disease, in our forcing of life beyond itself or below itself by drugs and the various methods of intoxication, or in the social drugs of banality and conformity. In all these ways we accuse the destiny that placed us in this Universe and upon this planet. “Thou dost crown one wit glory and honor,” says the psalmist. However, many of us long to get rid of that glory and wish we had never possessed it. We yearn to return to the state of creatures, which are unaware of themselves and their World, limited to the satisfaction of their animal needs. “Some were lifted up in pride, and others were exceedingly humble; some did return railing for railing, while others would receive railing and persecution and all manner of afflictions, and would not turn and revile again, but were humble and penitent before God,” reports 3 Nephi 6.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!

September 26, 2019 11:57 pm

Like Nature, the World, I myself, all existence is subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves to this inexorable law? Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broke yours. “My days have passed away, my thoughts are dissipated, tormenting my heart. They have turned night into day, and after darkness I hope for light again. If I wait hell is my house, and I have made my bed in darkness. I have said to rottenness: thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister. Where is now then my expectation, and who considereth my patience? All that I have shall go down into the deepest pit: thinkest thou that there at least I shall have rest?” reports Job 17.16. A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter occurs in creativity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot: “Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!” “It will come back again,” I said. He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a moment, as though he did not know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I Scream!” Lord goes on at another point: To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth in the form of melancholy gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way. The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a moment of complete peace. So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two. “Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he had excused himself as though he had not caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I did feel,” he answered. In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cezanne, with a great deal of self-doubt. In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually creating what he ideally visualized, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch….he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happened to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences: This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renior was not immune to it. What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his [Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence. However, he was committed, he was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task of Sisyphus. One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café. And, indeed, miserable was he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the World, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

What consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that museums everywhere exhibited his work, that people he would never know knew and admired him. None. None at all. When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of “adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!—to see that “success” and “applause” are the (expletive) goddess we always secretly knew they were. Too see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment. Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the World around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no others alternative for him. His challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a World of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one has to do is to remove from the World its curtains of superstition and ignorance and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure! Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the arena where (expletive) goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but we have his contribution to work with, and this we are helped. Each being is unique so each quest must be too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed, will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’s self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do this for an individual? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the ideas they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

There are too many differences in individual aspirants to allow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed farther. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with one. Let one take up whatever path is most convenient to one’s personal circumstances and individual character and not force one’s self into one utterly unsuited to both, merely because it has proven right for other people. There is no single universal rule for all beings: their outer circumstances and inner conditions, their historical background and geographical locality, their karmic destiny and evolutionary need, their differences in competence, render it unwise, unfair, and impracticable to write a single prescription for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Many European existentialist are largely reacting to Nietzsche’s conclusion that God is dead, and perhaps to the fact that Marx also is dead. The Americans have learned that political democracy and economic prosperity do not in themselves solve any of the basic value problems. There is no pace else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values. Paradoxically, even some of the religious existentialist will go along with this conclusion part of the way. It is extremely important for psychologist that the existentialists may supply psychology with the underlying philosophy which it now lacks. Logical positivism has been a failure, especially for clinical and personality psychologists. At any rate, the basic philosophical problems will surely be opened up for discussion again and perhaps psychologists will stop relying on pseudo-solutions or on unconscious, unexamined philosophies they picked up as children. An alternative phrasing of the core (for us Americans) of European existentialism is that it deals radically with that human predicament presented by the gaps between human aspirations and human limitations (between what the human being is, and what one would like to be, and what one could be). This is not so far off from the identity problem as it might sound at first. A person is both actuality and potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

That serious concern with this discrepancy could revolutionize psychology, there is no doubt in my mind. Various literatures already support such a conclusion, for example, projective testing, self-actualization, the various peak-experiences (in which this gap is bridged), the Jungian psychologies, various theological thinkers, and so forth. Not only this, but they raise also the problems and techniques of integration of this twofold nature of beings, one’s lower and one’s higher, one’s creatureliness and one’s Godlikeness. On the whole, most philosophies and religions, Eastern as well as Western, have dichotomized them, teaching that the way to become “higher” is to renounce and master “the lower.” The existentialists, however, teach that both are simultaneously defining characteristics of human nature. Neither can be repudiated; they can only be integrated. However, we already know something of these integration techniques—of insight, of intellect in the broader sense, of love, of creativeness, of humor and tragedy, of play, of art. I suspect we will focus our studies on these integrative techniques more than we have in the past. Another consequence for my think of this stress on the twofold nature of beings is the realization that some problems must remain eternally insoluble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

From this flows naturally a concern with the ideal, authentic, or perfect or Godlike human being, a study of human potentialities as now existing in certain sense, as current knowable reality. This, too, may sound merely literary but it is not. I remind you that this is just a fancy way of asking the old, unanswered questions, “What are the goals of therapy, of education, of bringing up children?” It also implies another truth and another problem which calls urgently for attention. Practically every serious description of the “authentic person” extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what one has become, assumes a new relation to one’s society and indeed, to society in general. One not only transcends oneself in various ways; one also transcends one’s culture. One resists enculturation. One becomes more detached from one’s culture and from one’s society. One becomes a little more a member of one’s species and a little less a member of one’s local group. My feeling is that most sociologists and anthropologists will take this hard. I therefore confidently expect controversy in this area. However, this is clearly a basis for “universalism.” From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call “philosophical anthropology,” that is, the attempt to define beings, and the differences between beings and any other species, between human beings and objects, and between human beings and robots. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

What are human being’s unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to beings that without it one would no longer be defined as a human being? On the whole this is a task from which American psychology has abdicated. The various behaviorisms do not generate any such definition, at least none that can be taken seriously (what would an S-R (Stimulus-response) human being be like? And who would like to be one? S-R model of human behavior suggest that the behavior is caused by certain reasons. A particular stimulus triggers a particular response. Dr. Freud’s picture of human beings was clearly unsuitable, leaving out as it did one’s aspirations, one’s realizable hopes, one’s Godlike qualities. The fact that Dr. Freud suppled us with most comprehensive systems of psychopathology and psychotherapy is beside the point as the contemporary ego-psychologist are finding out. Aggression and violence are rightly linked in the public mind—one speaks of aggression and violence. Aggression is to violence as anxiety is to panic. When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object-related—that is, we know at whom and what we are angry. However, in violence, the object-relation disintegrates, and we wing wildly, hitting whoever is within range. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear; one loses awareness of the environment and wants to act out this inner compulsion to do violence, come what it may. Humans are the creatures who can think in abstraction and who can transcend the concrete situation. The violence being’s capacity to abstract has disintegrated, and this accounts for one’s crazy behavior. The suddenness with which most violent episodes erupt suggest some questions. In violence, is there a direct connection between the input stimuli and the output muscles (for instance, the muscle that suddenly tend to strike back)? And is this connection subcortical, which would be related to the fact that it happens so quickly that the person does not think until after the episode has passed? Such discussions of the pathways by which the excitation travels are only analogies to the experience itself, but as analogies they may be useful in our understanding the process. Specifically, they may help us see why a person is possessed by violence rather than possessing it. Every since Walter B. Cannon’s classical work in the Harvard psychology laboratory, it has been generally agreed that there are three responses of the organism to threat: fight, flight, and delay response. Cannon demonstrated for example, that when somebody suddenly shoves me roughly on the lightrail, adrenalin is poured into my bloodstream, my blood pressure rises to give my muscles more strength, my heartbeat becomes more rapid—all ofwhich prepares me to fight the offending person or to flee out of range. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The “flight” is what occurs in anxiety and fear; the “fight” in aggression and violence. With these physiological changes, the experience of violence gives great energy to the person. One feels a kind of transcendent power that one did not realize one had; and one may fight much more effectively in this mood. This fact can act like a drug, tempting the person to give oneself over again and again to violence. The third possibility is that I can delay my response. This is what most people actually do. The lower down the scale of education and status a person is, the more apt one is to react directly; the higher on the scale, the more apt one is to delay reaction until one has had a chance to think and assess the prospects of fighting or fleeing. The capacity for delayed response is a gift—or burden—of civilization: we wait to absorb the event into consciousness and then decide what is the best response. This gives us culture, but it also gives us neurosis. The typical neurotic may spend one’s whole life trying to fight with new acquaintances the old battles that never got worked out in one’s childhood. However, is it not true that on the crowded lightrail I am in a “readiness” to respond hostilely? I am much more apt to have a counterurge of the violet type in that situation than, say, when someone jostles me on a dance floor. So there must be some symbolic scanning process going on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

How I interpret the situation will determine my readiness to strike back in hostility, making it causa belli, or to simply smile and accept an apology, if one is offered. Interpretation takes in unconscious as well as conscious factors: I give a certain meaning to it; I see the World as being hostile or friendly. Here enters the symbol, the means we have as human beings of uniting conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and group. This is why the organic processes are subsumed under the symbolic process. It is the symbolic process that determines the individual’s intentionality. How a person sees and interprets the World about one is thus crucial to one’s violence. This is what gives the readiness to fight to a man or woman quietly sitting in one’s car who becomes enraged when a police officer asks one for one’s identification. This also underlies the “machismo” of a police officer who is driven by one’s own power needs to humiliate an innocent individual. Whether the interpretation is pathological or merely imagined, illusory or downright false, it does not change the situation: it is one’s interpretation that will be decisive as to how one reacts. Trouble is easy to get into, but hard to get out of. The paranoid shoots other persons because one believes they exercise a magic power and will kill one; thus one’s shooting in self-defense. Calling this “paranoid” does not help unless we are able thereby to get behind the symbolic interpretation and see the World, at least temporarily, as the murderer see it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Even in international relations symbolic interpretation of the movements of other nations is crucial to the understanding of violence and war. Violence has its roots in impotence, we have said. This is true in individuals and in ethic groups. However, in nations violence comes from the threat of impotence. Nations seem to find it necessary to protect themselves n a periphery father out; they must be aware, precariously balanced as they are on the seesaw of armaments, of whether another country is building up power to gain an advantage over them. If a nation becomes genuinely impotent, it is no longer a nation. Senator J. William Fulbright has pointed out how important out interpretation of the behavior of other nations is. Ever since Yalta, American administrations have interpreted Russia’s behavior—for instance, the Cuban missile episode and the USSR’s reaction to the U-2 flight—as motivated by Russian aggression toward the United States of America. These events Fulbright indicates, could as well have been interpreted as motivated by fear on the part of Russia. More specifically, he proposes that the bellicose posture of these events were sops thrown to the Russian generals, who needed to be placated by Khrushchev if the latter were to succeed in his hope of establishing more amicable relations with the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Interpreting Russia’s moves as aggressive, we oppose them with a vehemence that helped the counterparty in Russia, the army, to depose Khrushchev and institute a less friendly government. Nations, in their misreading of the motives of other nations, can do what the paranoid patient does: they can work against their own interests because of their projection of hostility and aggression. No one, I am sure, wishes to develop new master-slave relationships or bend the will of the people to despotic rulers in new ways. These are patterns of control appropriate to a World without science. Are there no systems that do indeed want to bend the will of the people to dictators? And are these systems only to be found in cultures without Science? I still believe in an old-fashioned ideology of progress: the Middle Ages were dark because they had no science and science necessarily leads to the freedom of beings. The fact is that no leader or government explicitly states one’s intention of bending the will of the people any more; they are apt to use new words which sound like the opposite of the old ones. No dictator calls one’s self a dictator, and every system claims that it expressed the will of the people. In the countries of the free World, on the other hand, anonymous authority and manipulation have replaced overt authority in education, work, and politics. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If we are worthy of our democratic heritage we shall, of course, be ready to resist any tyrannical use of science for immediate or selfish purposes. However, it we value the achievements and goals of democracy we must not refuse to apply science to the design and construction of cultural patterns, even though we may then find ourselves in some sense in the position of controllers. What is the basis of this value in neobehavioristic theory? All humans control and all humans are controlled. This is reassuring for a democratically minded person. In noticing how the master controls the slave or the employer the worker, we commonly overlook reciprocal effects and, by considering action in one direction only, are led to regard control as exploitation, or at least the gaining of a one-sided advantage; but the control is actually mutual. The slave controls the master as completely as the master controls the slave, in the sense that the techniques of punishment employed by the master have been selected by the slave’s behavior in submitting to them. This does not mean that the notion of exploitation is meaningless or that we may not appropriately ask, cui bono? In doing so, however, we go beyond the account of the social episode itself and consider the long-term effects which are clearly related to the question of value judgments. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

We are looking at the relationship between master and slave as reciprocal, and being remained the exploitation is not meaningless. However, in this social episode, only the techniques of control are important. We are looking at social life as if it were an episode in a laboratory, where all that matters is the techniques—and not the episodes themselves. Exploitation by the master is clearly related to the question of value judgments. Slave and slaveowner are in a reciprocal relationship only by the ambiguous use we are making of the word control. In the sense in which the word is used in real life, there can be no question that the slaveowner controls the slave, and that the reciprocal part of the relationship is that the slave may have a minimum of counter control—for instance, by threat of rebellion. “And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall commence one’s work among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, to bring about the restoration of his people upon the Earth. And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the Earth. And he shall smite the Earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked. For time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy; and he will spare his people, yea, even if it so be that he must destroy the wicked by fire,” reports 2 Nephi 30.8-10. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

The Master is Forever After Present in the Disciple’s Heart, Whether the Disciple Sees One Again or Not!

September 26, 2019 6:16 am

I waited a long time before showing the letter to Meghan. I never really concealed it from her, for I thought such a thing was dishonest. However, as such did not ask me the meaning of the pages which I kept with my few personal belongings, I did not explain them. The very fact that the creative act is such an encounter between two poles is what makes it so hard to study. It is easy enough to find the subjective pole, the person, but it is much harder to define the objective pole, the “World” or “reality.” Since my emphasis, here is on the encounter itself, I shall not worry too much at the moment about such definitions. In his Poetry and Experience, Archibald MacLeish uses the most universal terms possible for the two poles of the encounters: “Being and Non-being.” He quotes a Chinese poet: “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music.” “Consider what this means,” MacLeish ruminates. The ‘Being’ which the poem is to contain derive from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’ which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to out knock. The verbs are eloquent: ‘struggle.’ ‘force,’ ‘knock.’ #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

The poet’s labor is to struggle with the meaninglessness and silence of the World until one can force it to mean; until one can make the silence answer and the Non-being be. It is a labor which undertakes to ‘know’ the World not by exegesis or demonstration or proofs but directly, as a being knows apple in the mouth. This is beautifully expressed antidote to our common assumption that the subjective projection is all that occurs in the creative act, and a reminder of the inescapable mystery that surrounds the creative process. The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the World-waiting-to-be). It will be non-being until the poet’s struggle brings forth an answering meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist’s or the poet’s vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision. Here we must guard against one of the most serious errors in the psychoanalytic interpretation of creativity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

This is the attempt to find something within the individual which is then projected onto the work of art, or some early experience which is transferred to the canvas or written into the poem. Obviously, early experiences play exceedingly important roles in determining how artists will encounter their World. However, these subjective data can never explain the encounter itself. Even in the cases of abstract artists, where the process of painting seems most subjective, the relationship between being and non-being is certainly present and may be sparked by the artist’s encountering the brilliant colors n the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. Painters have described the excitement of this moment: it seems like a re-enactment of the creation story, with being suddenly becoming alive and possessing a vitality of its own. Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. However, I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey’s studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew them that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and the solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist’s holding him- or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak. Such receptivity requires a nimbleness, a find-honed sensitivity in order to let one’s self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge. It is the opposite of the authoritarian demands impelled by will power. I am quite aware of all the jokes that appear in The New Yorker and elsewhere showing the artist sitting disconsolately in front of the easel, brush in passive hand, waiting for the inspiration to come. However, an artist’s waiting, funny as it may look in cartoons, is not to be confused with laziness or passivity. It requires a high degree of attention, as when a diver is poised on the end of the springboard, not jumping but holding one’s muscles in sensitive balance for the right second. It is an active listening, keyed to hear the answer, alert to see whatever can be glimpsed when the vision or the words do come. It is a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect these periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation. Pythagoras divided his students into two classes, the probationers and the mathematicians. However, the latter term signified more to him than it means to us. For him it meant those devoted to advanced thinking and it embraced those who studied philosophy and science as well as mathematics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

For Pythagoras regarded the rational disciple as essential to the higher quests. We are told that Jesus was a man of sorrows. However, he was not also a man of joys? The joy of bearing a divine message, the joy of brining light into a darkened World, and the joy of helping beings find their own soul. If Jesus wept over the folly of cities, he was also glad over the Presence and Providence of God. If he was a man of sorrow at some times, he was also a man of joy at all times. For the sorrow was merely transient, outward, superficial, and for others whereas the joy was everlasting, inward, deep, and one’s own. No being can come into the Father’s kingdom, as he came, without feeling its happiness and enjoying ecstasy. Sokrates used to listen to an inner voice, his daimon, warning him against false decisions. While so doing, he would sink into deep prayer where he would commune with the divine in order to receive the power to instruct beings in Truth. Sokrates possessed an absolutely original intellect; he took nothing for granted but probed and penetrated into every subject which came under discussion. He struck out a new path in the philosophy of his time and so well was it made that it can still be trodden today with profit. It is a fact that Jesus wrote nothing and that he never asked his apostles to write anything. Why? #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

What Jesus has to give directly or through his apostles was no message to or argument with the intellect. It was an evocation of the intuition. It has to be transferred to each being physically. The benign figure and still meditative face of Gautama, sitting in one’s thrice-folded yellow garment and penetrating into the deep secret chambers of mind, offers an inspiring spectable. The solid strength and paradisiac stabilized in one’s person have helped millions of people in the Asiatic lands. Yet there were fateful moments when Gautama refused to appear in public to tell others what he knew, when the peaceful life of utter anonymity was his reasoned preference. The path to illumination—the longer the road, the loftier is the attainment, and only those who take the time and trouble to traverse the whole length of the way may expect to gain all the fruits. One who stops part of the way may only expect to gain part of the result. Jesus inspired his immediate disciples with something of his own spiritual vitality. We are all built by Nature in different ways: no two palms, no two thumbprints, no two persons are exactly alike. He seekers are to be found at different levels and are attracted by different approaches according to their different intellectual development, emotional temperaments, moral capacities, and intuitional sensitivity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The uniqueness of each person is emphasized by the differences which separate one from one’s fellows. In one’s search for Truth one may have progressed through orthodox Christianity, Christian Science, and Spiritualism—but, eventually, the Quest will lead one away from limited, organized public approaches, and bring one to the unrestricted freedom of the Presence of the Overself Other movements, such as those mentioned, may be useful to beginners; but when some progress has been made, the path necessarily opens onto the Quest where it becomes unlimited, individual, and private. All of us have to travel in the same board direction If we would rise from the lower to the higher grades of being. However, the way in which we shall travel the Way is essentially a personal one. All of us must obey its general rules, but no two seekers can apply them precisely alike. Again and again one observes that the technique, exercise, method, or rule which brings good results for one person fails to do so for another. It is absurd to make a single uniform prescription and expect all persons to get a single uniform result from it. What has been done here is to give some of the best ones and let each reader find out what suits one most, not what suits one’s friend or another reader most. “And God also declared unto prophets, by his own mouth, that Christ should come,” reports Moroni 7.23. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Each being is unique so each must be unique too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’ self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do it for one? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the idea they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. There are too many differences in individual aspirants to follow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed father. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

Many Take to an Imperfect, Half-Competent or Half-Satisfactory Teaching Because No Better One is Available!

September 25, 2019 12:49 am

I am a reader of strange books. I have studied some of those texts which have come out of Italy pertaining to magic and astrology and thins which are often called forbidden. I have a belief that there are Angels cast out of Heaven, and that they do not know what they are any longer. They wander in a state of confusion. And allow me to warn you on another account which may surprise you. Throughout Europe now there are those who are willing to persecute others for witchcraft on slender reasons; that is, a superstition regarding witches reigns in villages and towns, which even one hundred years ago would have been dismissed as ridiculous. You cannot allow yourself to travel overland through such places. Writings as to wizards, Sabbats and Devil worship cloud human philosophy. An interesting affective identification of leader and masses in the relation of Cola di Rienzo to the Roman people. I assume that his story is familiar—the rise of the hack lawyer, son of a Roman people and dictator of Rome, his expulsion and return with the assistance of the Church, and his assassination by the Colonna family in the year 1354. The view of history of Cola and of the Roman people was quite simple: Rome has been ruined by feudal lords; their destruction will permit Rome to rise again to its ancient greatness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

This is how Petrarca formulates it in his famous latter of congratulations to Cola: “These barons in whose defense you (the Romans) have so often shed your blood, whom you have nourished with your own substance…these barons have judged you unworthy of liberty. They have gathered the mangled remnants of the state in the caverns and abominable retreats of bandits. They have been restrained neither by pity for their unhappy country, nor by love for it. Do not suffer any of the rapacious wolves whom you have driven from the fold to rush again into your midst. Even now they are prowling restlessly around, endeavoring through fraud and deceit to regain an entrance to the city whence they were violently expelled.” It cannot be denied that the feudal lords, above all the Colonna and Orsini, has pursued a criminal policy. Without this element of truth Cola’s propaganda and policy would never have been successful. However, fundamentally this was a false concreteness—for even if he had succeeded in liquidating the barons, what would have been decisively improved in Rome? The historical facts—the residence of the Papal Court in Avignon; the economic decay of Rome; the regrouping class relations through the rise of the bourgeois cavalerotti—all that Cola could not change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

It can hardly be doubted that anxiety, even purely physical fear of the arbitrariness of the barons, drove the people to Cola. Cola succeeded in strengthening this anxiety by extremely skillful propaganda and achieved victory. However, the leader himself must feel no anxiety or at least must not show it. He must stand above the masses. However, in this Cola was deficient. In all other matters his relation corresponded exactly to that of the libido-charged identification leader-masses, and it is regrettable that time does not permit me to describe and analyze his propaganda themes, his ceremonial, and his ritual. It was Cola’s fundamental mistake that he was not enough of a Caesar. To be sure, he publicly humiliated the barons, but he did not liquidate them—whether out of cowardice, decency, or tactical considerations. However, the masses of Rome expected that he would act in accordance with their view of history. He did not do this. Thus he had to fall. I have mentioned Cola di Rienzo because it is a marginal case in which it is doubtful whether we are dealing with a regressive or progressive movement, that is, a movement which really has the realization of the freedom of beings as its goal. The eight French religious wars of the sixteenth century furnish excellent material for the illumination of the character of caesaristic as well as organizational identifications. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

All three parties—Huguenots, Catholics, and Politiques—were faces with grave problems: the disintegration of the old society through silver inflation, loss of wealth on the one hand, enrichment on the other, the beginnings of radical changes in class relations and the dissolution of the absolute monarchy after the death of Francis I. It is against this background that the religious wars must be understood. Their course is doubtless familiar to you. Catholics and Protestants alike saw the problem of France only as a religious problem, and therefore ascribed the distress of France exclusively to their religious opponents, conjectured (partly justifiably) that these opponents represented a great and sinister conspiracy, developed or employed theories of caesaristic identification, and consistently proceeded to extirpate the opponent wherever opportunity offered. The Huguenot pamphleteer Francois Hotman in his Tiger saw in the Cardinal Guise “a detestable monster,” whose aim it was to ruin France, to assassinate the King, and to conspire with the assistance of the women near the King and the High Constable of France against “the crown of France, the good of widows and orphans, the blood of the poor and innocent.” Calvin’s theory of the secular redeemer sent by God to overthrow tyrants—in the seventeenth century the basis of Cromwell’s leadership—became the Protestant theory of Caesarism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The Catholics—with a longer tradition of tyrannicide—developed a pseudo-democratic theory of identification, above all in the writings of the Leaguist preachers and Jesuits. In these inflammatory pamphlets whose demagogy even surpasses that of the Huguenots, the theory of democracy is fitted out with theocratic traits, the masses of the people are integrated through the social contract, in order to be identified with Henry of Guise with the assistance of the theocratic element. Whoever takes the trouble to study the eighth religious war (the War of the 3 Henrys) and the Parisian uprising, will find there all the elements which I consider decisive: appeal to anxiety, personification of evils, first with Henry III, then with Henry of Navarre, identification of the masses with Henry of Guise. Both positions, the Catholic and the Huguenot, are similarly regressive, while that of the Politiques, Jean Bodin, consists in this: he saw the economic problems of France clearly; he understood the false concreteness of the view of history of both parties. If he championed absolute monarchy—that is, the identification of the people with the monarch—he did so because he was to place himself above the religions that were fighting each other and to ally himself with the households of the third estate in order to save France. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Despite the absolute submission to the prince which is demanded of the people, this identification contains the two rational elements which I mentioned before: loyalty becomes transferable, for instance, the office is separated from the officeholder; and the relation between citizen and the state becomes rational. Thus Bodin has a certain justification in calling his theory a theory f the constitutional state (droit gouvernement) despite his absolutionism. I believe that the French religious wars of the sixteenth century make my thesis a little clearer: that the non-affective identification with an institution (state) is less regressive than identification with a leader. Naturally I cannot here discuss all similar situation. The religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are full of such historical constructions. One need only read, for example, the terrible Calvinist fanatic John Knox in his famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and we will find there: “We se our countrie set further for a pra to foreine nations, we heare the blood of our breathren, the members of Christ Iesus most cruell women…we knowe to be the onlie occasions of all these miseries.” The rule of the Catholic Catherine de Medici, of Marie of Lorraine (the predecessor of Mary Stuart), and of Mary Tudor appears here not only as a violation of divine commandment (because God has subjected women to men) but as a genuine conspiracy against the true religion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Unfortunately, John Knox had the ill luck of seeing Prtestantism restored in England by a woman, and he apologized to Elizabeth in a Second Blast for his first attack. Instead of continuing with this survey, it may perhaps be more useful to discuss five fundamental models of conspiracy theories, all of which show this sequence: intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, false concreteness. They are: the Jesuit conspiracy, the Freemason conspiracy, the Communist conspiracy, the Capitalist conspiracy, and the Jewish conspiracy. The Jesuit order is indeed defined by many as a conspiracy, the Monita Secreta of 1614, composed by a Polish ex-Jesuit, fulfills the need for a secret plan of operations with the help of which one can hold the order responsible for every crime and every misfortune and can stir up the masses. This has always been relatively simple in times of crisis. St. Bartholomew’s Night, the assassination of Henry III by Jacques Clement, the attempt on the life of Henry IV by Barriere and Chastel as well as his assassination by Ravaignac, the English Gunpowerder plot of 1605, the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, to say nothing of innumerable less important crimes and misfortunes, were ascribed to the Jesuits. That these tales should have been believed, is naturally connected with the significance of false concreteness in politics. There is some truth in many of these accusations. It is precisely in this element of truth that the danger of these views of history is possessed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The denunciation of the freemasons is similar matter. Thus, the English believed the Jacobite conspiracies to be the work of freemasons; the French Revolution was ascribed to a mysterious group of Bavarian Illuminati ha been founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in order to combat the influence of the Jesuits. Again these assertions have some truth in them. Most of the Encyclopedists were freemasons and more than half of the members of the Estates General belonged to freemasonic lodges. However, surely no detailed discussion is needed to show that the conspiracy theory represents a blurring of history. The theory of the Communist conspiracy follows the same model and serves the same purposes. Thus the Russian October Revolution is explained solely as a Blanquist conspiracy, embodied in Trotsky’s military revolutionary committee; the German Revolution of 1918 is laid to the charge of the devilish Lenin; the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in the satellite states is traced back to the sinister conspiracies in the Kremlin, and generally the relation of Bolsheviks to the World is equated with that of a conspiracy of a small group against the welfare of humanity. Again, this is partly true. The October Revolution was a conspiracy—but in a definite historical situation and with an ideology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The Bolsheviks would gladly have manipulated the German Revolution of 1918—but they had neither the means nor the intelligence to do it, nor could they, even if cleverer, have prevailed in the concrete situation. The Communists in the satellite states naturally conspired—but they could come to power only because the Red Army stood behind them and because the objective situation favored them. No conspiracy, no matter how clever, would have been of any use and was of any use in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory is believed not only by the masses, but even by serious writers who, strongly under the influence of Pareto’s simplistic antithesis between elite and masses, generally tend to see in politics nothing but the manipulation of the masses by the elites, and for whom psychology and political science are nothing but techniques of manipulation. The purpose of the theory is clear: potential anxiety—whose concrete significance still needs to be clarified—is actualized by reference to the devilish conspirators: family, property, morality, religion are threatened by the conspiracy. Anxiety easily becomes neurotic persecutory anxiety, which in turn can, under certain circumstances, lead to a totalitarian mass movement. We could cite a great many more cases in which history was viewed with false concreteness. Especially American history is full of examples of such movements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

There is, for instance, the Know-Nothing Party of 1854-55 with its hatred of the Irish Catholics and the German immigrants. It originate in the secret “Order of the Star-Spangled-Banner” which was founded by native-born Protestants; they mistreated Catholics and when asked about the Order they would answer, “I know nothing.” The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is better known. Fear of status loss on the parts of the Whites, especially of the poor Whites, vis-à-vis the Blacks and fear of the Pope and the Catholics were the basic factors which made this secret society into a terroristic organization, from its foundation in 1867 to the present day. The Populist Party (1892), on the other hand, was born out of an agrarian depression, as a protest against the rule of the railway, industrial, and credit monopolies, and against the gold standard. One of its leaders developed a genuine theory of conspiracy: According to my views of the subject the conspiracy which seems to have been formed here and in Europe to destroy from three-sevenths to one-half of the metallic money of the World, is the most gigantic crimes of this or any other age. The democratic conspiracy is to reduce boarder security and push the green initiative to raise taxes and sale electric cars, but doing nothing to protect the people or provide homes for the homeless is another movement that is being fueled by media propaganda. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Violence and suffering are critical in a democratic society, in heightening antipathy for violations of democratic values and in heightening sympathy for the victims of such violations. Violence is like the sudden chemical change that occurs when, following a relatively placid period, water break into a boil. If we do not see the burner underneath that has been heating the water, we mistake the violence for a discrete happenstance. We fail to see that violence is an entirely understandable outcome of personalities fighting against odds in a repressive culture that does not help them. Violence often follows quiet periods, like that of the silent generation of students of the fifties. Only later were we to see, to our sorrow, how explosive were the forces underlying this apathy. In its typical simple form, violence is an eruption of pent-up passion. When a person (or a group of people) has been denied over a period of time what one feels are one’s legitimate rights, when one is continuously burdened with feelings of impotence which corrode any remaining self-esteem, violence is the predicable end result. Violence is an explosion of the drive go destroy that which is interpreted as the barrier to one’s self-esteem, movement, and growth. This desire to destroy may so completely take over the person that any object that gets in the way is destroyed. Hence the person strikes out blindly, often destroying those for whom one cares and even one’s self in the process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Violence is largely a physical event. However, this physical event occurs in a psychological context. Either because of the period of unseen build-up or the suddenness of the stimulus, the impulse to strike out comes so fast we are unable to think, and we control it only with effort. If someone suddenly gives one a hard shove on the lightrail, one “see red” and have an immediate urge to punch him or her in return, while some others may take that person who assaulted them to small claims court. However, one knows, when one calms down, that if one makes a practice of punching men or women on the lightrail, their early doom is assured, and that is why small claims court may be a better option. A football player may control his or her urges to wreak violence by reminding one’s self that he or she will have a chance to express one’s power in the next play; but for the rest of us, bystanders in most activities in our civilized life with muscular expressions prohibited us, the control and direction of our violent urges are much more difficult. Most people would subscribe to the proposition that there is no value judgment involved in deciding how to build an atomic bomb, but would reject the proposition that there is none involved in deciding to build one. The most significant difference here may be that the scientific practices which guide the designer of the bomb are clear, while those which guide the designer of the culture which builds the bomb are not. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

We cannot predict the success or failure of a cultural invention with the same accuracy as we do that of a physical invention. It is for this reason that we are said to resort to value judgments in the second case. What we resort to is guessing. It is only in this sense that value judgments take up where science leaves off. When we can design small social interactions and, possibly, whole cultures with confidence we bring to physical technology, the question of value will be raised. According to Skinner, the main point is that there is really no essential difference between the lack of value judgment in the technical problem of designing the bomb and the decision to build one. The only difference is that the motives for building the bomb are not clear. Maybe they are not clear to Professor Skinner, but they are clear to many students of history. In fact there as more than one reason for the decision to build the atomic bomb (and similarly for the hydrogen bomb): the fear of Hitler’s building the bomb; perhaps the wish to have a superior weapon against the Soviet Union for possible later conflicts (this holds true especially for the hydrogen bomb); the logic of a system that is forced to increase its armaments to support its struggle with competing systems. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Quite aside from these military, strategic, and political reasons, there is, I believe, another one which is equally important. I refer to the maxim that is one of the axiomatic norms of cybernetic society: “something ought to be done because it is technically possible to do it.” Even if they might destroy us all, if it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built. If it is possible to travel to the Moon or to the planets, it must be done, even if at the expense of many unfulfilled needs here on Earth. This principle means the negation of all humanistic values, but it nevertheless represents a value, maybe the supreme norm of technotronic society. Dr, Michael Maccoby has drawn my attention to some results of his study of the management of highly developed industries, which indicate that the principle “can implies ought” is more valid in industries which produce for the military establishment than for the remaining, more competitive industry. However, even if this argument is correct, two factors must be considered: first, the size of the industry which works directly or indirectly for the armed forced; second, that the principle had taken hold of the minds of many people who are not directly related to industrial production. A good example was the initial enthusiasm for space flights; another example is the tendency in medicine to construct and use gadgets regardless of their real importance for a specific case. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Skinner does not care to examine the reasons for building the bomb, and he asks us to wait for further development of behaviorism to solve the mystery. In his views on social processes he shows the same inability to understand hidden, nonverbalized motives as he does in his treatment of psychical processes. Since most of what people say about their motivation in political as well as in personal life is notoriously fictitious, the reliance on what is verbalized blocks the understanding of social and psychical processes. In every individual there is an original, mysterious, and incalculable element, because one’s past history and one’s prenatal ancestry in other lives on Earth have inevitably been different at certain points from those of other individuals. One’s World-outlook may seem the same as theirs, but there will always be subtle variations. There is no single path which can be presented to suit the multitudinous members of the human species. There is no one unalterable approach to this experience for all beings. Each as to find one’s own way, to travel forward by the guidance of one’s own present understanding and past experience—and each in the end really does so despite all appearances to the contrary. For each being passes through a different set of life-experiences. One’s past history and present circumstances have constituted an individual being who is unique, who possesses something entirely one’s own. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

It is partly through the lessons, reflections, institutions, traits, characteristics, and capacities engendered by such experiences that one is able to find one’s way to truth. Therefore one is forced not only to work out one’s own salvation but also to work it out in one’s own unique way. Every description of a mystical path must consequently be understood in a general sense. If its expounder delimits it to constitute a precise path for all alike, one exaggerates. Although there is so much in life which the aspirant shares with other beings, there is always a residue which imparts a stamp of individuality that is different from and unshareable with the individualities of all others. Consequently, the inner path which one must follow cannot be precisely the same as theirs. In the end, after profiting by all the help which one may gain from advanced guides and fellow-pilgrims, after all one’s attempts to imitate or follow them, one is forced to find or make a way for one’s self, a way which will be peculiarly one’s own. In the end one must work out one’s own unique means to salvation and depend on one’s self for further enlightenment and strength. Taught by one’s own intelligence and instructed by one’s own intuition, one must find one’s own unique path toward enlightenment. Each case is different, because each person is different heredity, temperament, character, environment, and living habits. Therefore, these general principles must be adapted to, and fitted in with, that person’s particular condition. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Just as there is not a single radius only from the centre of a circle to its circumference but countless ones, so there is not a single path only from beings to God but as many paths as there are beings. Each has to find the way most appropriate to one, to the meaning and experience of truth. There are as many ways to union with the Overself as there are human beings. The orthodox, the conventional, and the traditional ways can claim exclusive or monopoly only by imperiling truth. I think it oftener happens that a meal brings forth a cold than that Nature produces a sage. The existence of the sage as a type is hard to prove simply because the existence of the sage as an individual is hard to confirm. One is always unique on this planet. One is, for practical purposes, an Ideal rather than an ACTUALITY. It is an unnecessary self-limitation to believe that there is only a single path to enlightenment, only a single teaching worth following. Persons who believe or feel themselves to be unable to understand subtle metaphysic can turn to a simple devotional path. “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. There is no one particular type of aspirant to mystical or philosophical enlightment. Taken as a whole, aspirants are a mixed and varied lot in their starting points, personalities, motives, and allegiances. They vary in individuality very widely, have different needs, circumstances, opportunities, outlooks, and possibilities. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

There is an Abyss which No Human Can Cross, a Mystery which Remains Utterly Impenetrable to One—This is Transcendent Godhead!

September 24, 2019 12:56 am

No, this is something you will never do, I thought. You will not take someone so vital out of the World. You will not disturb the destiny of one who has given others so much to love and enjoy. We have to establish the logical connection between alienation and anxiety. This is extremely difficult because the discussion of the problem of anxiety has by no means reached the clarity which would make it possible for an outsider—like myself to adopt an unambiguous position toward the various opinions. Nevertheless it seems to me that the differences in the conception of the origin of anxiety do not have a decisive significance for my analysis, although they are, of course, highly relevant in other contexts. Dr. Freud himself had originally derived anxiety from the repression of libidinous impulses, and thus has seen it as an automatic transformation of instinctual energy. This view he later modified. Others claim, on the other hand, that there is a single inborn faculty for being afraid. Dr. Rank, in his famous work, derives anxiety from the trauma of birth. And a number of analysts have tried, more or less successfully, to combine the various theories in many ways. The following propositions seem to me more or less acceptable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

One must distinguish between true anxiety (Realangst) and neurotic anxiety. The difference is of considerable consequence especially for the understanding of the political importance of anxiety. The first—true anxiety—thus appears as a reaction to concrete danger situations; the second—neurotic anxiety—is produced by the ego, in order to avoid in advance even the remotest threat of danger. True anxiety is thus produced through the threat of an external object; neurotic anxiety, which may have a real basis, on the other hand is produced from within, through the ego. Since anxiety is produced by the ego, the seat of anxiety is in the ego, not in the id—the structure of instincts. However, from the analysis of the problem of psychological alienation it follows necessarily that anxiety, feelings of guilt, and the need for self-punishment are responses to internal threats to basic instinctual demands so that anxiety exists as a permanent condition. The external dangers which threaten a being meet the inner anxiety and are thus frequently experienced as even more dangerous than they really are. At the same time, these same external dangers intensify the inner anxiety. The painful tension which is evoked by the combination of inner anxiety and external danger can express itself in either two forms: in depressive or in persecutory anxiety. The differentiation is important because it helps us to evaluate the political function of anxiety more correctly. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

In the history of the individual there are certain typical dangers which produce anxiety. For the child, the withdrawal of love is of decisive importance. On this point there seems to be no doubt among psychologists. From the numerous phobias we may learn a great deal about the relation between anxiety and the renunciation of instinctual gratification. For inhibitions are a functional restraint of the ego; the ego renounces many activities in order to avoid a conflict with the id and the conscience. We know that the phobic symptoms are a substitute for gratifications of the instincts that have been denied or are unattainable. In other words, the ego creates anxiety through repression. If I have correctly reproduced the most important results of analytical theory concerning the origin of anxiety, several important consequences for the analysis of political behavior seem to follow immediately. Anxiety can play very different roles in the life of beings; that is, the activation of a state of anxiety through a danger can have a beneficial as well as destructive effect. We may perhaps distinguish three different consequences: Anxiety can play a warning role, a kind of mentor role, for beings. Affective anxiety may allow a presentiment of external dangers. Thus, anxiety also contains a protective function for it permits beings to take precaution in order to ward off the danger. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Anxiety can have a destructive effect, especially when the neurotic element is strongly present; that is, it can make being incapable of collecting themselves either to escape the danger or to fight against it; it can paralyze beings and degenerate into panicky anxiety. Finally, anxiety can have a cathartic effect; beings can be strengthened inwardly when one has successfully avoided a danger or when one has prevailed against it. One may perhaps even say (although I cannot prove this) that the being who has conquered anxiety in coming to terms with a danger, may be more capable of making decisions in freedom than the one who never had to seriously wrestle with danger. This may be an important qualification of the proposition that anxiety can make free decision impossible. Our analysis of the relation of alienation to anxiety does not yet permit us to understand the political significance of these phenomena, because it is still in the realm of individual psychology. How does it happen that masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the beings have who accept leaders? #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, the question concerning the essence of identification of masses and a leader stands in the center of group-psychological analysis. Without it the problem of the integration or collectivization of the individual in a mass cannot be understood. I assume that the history of the theories of group psychology is familiar. The extraordinary difficulty in the comprehension of group-psychological phenomena is possessed first of all in our own prejudices; for the experiences of the last decades have instilled in us all more or less strong prejudices against the masses, and we associate with masses the epithet mob, a group of beings who are capable of every atrocity. In fact the science group psychology began with this aristocratic prejudice in the work of the Italian, Scipio Sighele; and Le Bon’s famous book is completely in this tradition. His these are familiar. Beings in the mass descends; one is, as it were, hypnotized by the leader (operateur) and in this condition is capable of committing acts which one would never commit as an individual. As the slave of the unconscious—for instance, for Le Bon, regressive—sentiments, beings in the mass are degraded into a barbarian: “Isolated, one may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, one is a barbarian—that is a creature acting by instinct. One possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Critics of Le Bon, among them Dr. Freud, have pointed out that his theory, which rests on Sighele and Tarde, is inadequate in two aspects: the answer to the question, What hold the masses together? is inadequate, for the existence of a radical soul is unproved. In addition, in Le Bon the decisive problem—the role of the leader—hypnotist—remains unclarified. As is frequently true in social-psychological studies, the descriptions of psychological states are adequate, the theoretical analyses, the answers to “Why?,” are inadequate. From the outset, Dr. Freud sees the problem in the way which we have put it, namely, as that of the identification of masses with a leader—an identification which becomes of decisive significance particularly in an anxiety situation. And he sees in the libido the cement which holds leader and masses together, whereby, as is known, the concept of libido is to be taken in a very broad sense, to include the instinctual activities which in relations between the genders force their way toward the union in pleasures of the flesh, as well as those which in other circumstances are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longings for proximity, and self-sacrifice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The cement which holds the mass together bonds them to the leader is thus a sum of instincts that are inhibited in their aims. In this manner, I believe, the logical connection between alienation and mass behavior has been established. Since the identification of masses with the leader is an alienation of the individual member, identification always constitutes a regression, and a twofold one. On the one hand, the history of a being is the history of one’s emergency from the primal horde and of one’s progressive individualization; thus the identification with a leader in a mass is a kind of a historical regression. This identification is also a substitute for a libidinal object bond, thus a psychological regression, a damaging of the ego, perhaps even the loss of the ego. However, this judgment is valid only for the libido-charged, for instance, affective, identification of an individual in a mass with a leader; and not as a matter of course (and perhaps not all) for that of lovers and of small groups. Non-affective identification too, cannot be simply considered as regressive. For identification with organizations (church, army) is not always libidinally charged. MacDougall’s emphasis on the significance of organization must therefore be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

It is thus necessary to make distinctions. There are non-affective identifications, in which coercion or common material interest play an essential role, either in bureaucratic-hierarchic, or in cooperative form. It seems to me to be incorrect, above all for recent history, to see in the identification of the soldier with the army, for instance, in the loyalty to an organization, an actual identification of the soldier with the commander-in-chief. Surely these are example of this: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Wallenstien, Napoleon. However, the commander-in-chief of the twenty first century is much more the technician of war than the leader of beings, and the libidinal bond of the soldier is, if I may coin the phrase, essentially cooperative, namely, with the smallest groups of comrades with whom one shares dangers. Thus I would like to establish two fundamental types of identification: a libido-charged (affective) and a libido-free (non-affective); and maintain generally (as it follows from MacDougall’s psychology) that non-affective identification with organization is less regressive than the affective identification with a leader. Non-affective loyalty is transferable; personal loyalty, on the other hand, is not. The former always contains strong rationalist elements, elements of calculability between organizations and individual, and thus prevents the total extinction of the ego. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

However, I believe that one must also distinguish two types within affective identification. One may call them cooperative and caesaristic. It is conceivable (and it has probably happened in short periods in history) that many equals identify themselves cooperatively with one another in such a manner that their egos are merged in the collective ego. However, this cooperative form is rare, limited to short periods or in any case operative only for small groups. The decisive affective identification is that of masses with leaders. It is—as I have said—the most regressive form, for it is built upon a nearly total ego-shrinkage. It is the form which is od decisive significance for us. We call it caesaristic identiciation. Caesaristic identification may play a role in history when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger become neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. From this follows, first of all, that not every situation dangerous to masses must lead to a caesartic movement; it allows, further, that not every mass movement is based on anxiety, and thus not every mass movement need be caesaristic. Thus it is a question of determining the historical conditions in which a regressive movement under a Caesar tried to win political power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, before we describe these historical situations, I may perhaps point to a clue which will frequently permit us an early diagnosis of the regressive character of such a mass movement. This clue is the view of history which the masses and the leaders employ. It may be called the conspiracy theory of history, a theory of history characterized by false concreteness. The connection between Caesarism and this view of history is quite evident. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress into the World through a conspiracy. The historical process is personified in this manner. Hated, resentment, dread created by great upheavals, are concentrated on certain persons who are denounced as devilish conspirators. Nothing would be more incorrect than to characterize the enemies as scapegoats (as often happens in the literature), for they appear as genuine enemies who one must extirpate and not as substitutes whom one only needs to send into the wilderness. It is a false concreteness and therefore an especially dangerous view of history. Indeed, the danger consists in the fact that this view of history is never completely false, but always contains a kernel of truth and, indeed, must contain it, if it is to have a convincing effect. The truer it is one might say, the less regressive the movement; the falser, the more regressive. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

It is my thesis that whatever affective (for instance, caesaristic) leader-identifications occur in politics, masses and leaders have this view of history: that the distress which has befallen the masses has been brought about exclusively by a conspiracy of certain persons or groups against the people. With this view of history, true anxiety, which had been produced by war, want, hunger, anarchy, is to be transformed into neurotic anxiety and is to be overcome by means of identification with the leader-demagogue through total ego-renunciation, to the advantage of the leader and one’s clique, whose true interests do not necessarily have to correspond to those of the masses. Of course, I cannot provide conclusive proof, but I believe that by pointing to certain historical events I can make clear the connection between this view of history and Caesarism. What being will set out on a task which one can never hope to accomplish? It is too much to expect the average seeker to become a President Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr. We portray the nature of this quest not because we hold such vain expectation but because we believe in the value of right direction and in the creative power of the Ideal. The general direction of one’s thoughts and deeds—rather than those thoughts and deeds themselves—as well as the ideal one mist habitually contemplates, is what is most important and most significant in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

One first need is to choose a general goal, not necessarily an exact point but enough to orient oneself, to give one a direction. An ideal helps to hold a being back from one’s weaknesses, a standard gives one indirectly a kind of support as well as, directly, guidance. Let us not pretend to the Perfect or the hope of its attainment. However, we can have the Ideal and follow it. It is a truth which one must bring to life by one’s own personal experience. If there were no possibility of finding one’s way from this body-prisoned, time-encased condition, then no one would ever have become self-realized, and all preaching of religion and teaching of philosophy would have been futile. However, we know from history and biography that such achievement has been experienced in all parts of the World and in all centuries, so that no should give up hope. Are the quest’s goals worth what one has to pay for them? It is even worth embarking on if one remembers how few seem to reach those goals? Time alone can show one that no price is too high and that right direction is itself sufficient reward. The ultimate goal is for us to live from the Overself not from the ego. When Glenn gray went back to Europe in 1955 to interview his comrades-in-arms and his friends in the resistance of fifteen years ago, a French woman living in her comfortable bourgeois home with her husband and son, confessed earnestly: “My life is so unutterably boring nowadays! Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have no felt before or since.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Relating to the experience of listening to a German comrade-in-arms, Gray continues: Overweight, and with an expensive cigar in his mouth, he spoke of our earlier days together at the close of the way when he was shivering and hungry and harried with anxieties about keeping his wife and children from too great wants. “Sometimes I think that those were happier times for us than these.” And there was something like despair in his eyes. Neither one of these people was longing for the old day in sentimental nostalgia; they were confessing their disillusionment with a sterile present. Peace exposed a void in them that war’s excitement has enabled them to keep covered up. This void is that from which the ecstasy of violence is an escape. Some of the sterility is due to the inescapable conditions of civilized existence that remove much of the risk and challenge from life—risk and challenge that seem to be more important for many, if not most, people, than out much touted affluence. Violence puts the risk and challenge back, whatever we may think about its destructiveness; and no longer is life empty. We are going to have upheavals of violence for as long as experiences of significance are denied people. Everyone has a need for some sense of significance; and if we cannot make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary. Thinking which is fact-grounded, experience-based, and correct; living which is wise, balanced, and good; prayer which goes deeper and deeper—these are some of our basic needs. Peace of mind can be enjoyed in this World: there is no need to wait for passage to the next one. Different terms can be used to label this unique attainment. It is insight, awakening, enlightenment. It is Being, Truth, Consciousness. It is Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen. It is awareness of That Which Is. It is the Practice of the Presence of God. It is the Discovery of Timelessness. All these words tell us something but they all fall short and do not tell us enough. In fact they are only hints for farther they cannot go: it is not on their level at all since it is the Touch of the Untouchable. However, nevermind; just pay with such ideas if you care too. Ruminate and move among them. Out your heart as well as head into the game. Who knows one day what may happen? Perhaps if you become still enough you too may know—as the Bible suggests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

That life will reach some higher end and thus justify all the fret and toil is more than a comforting belief: it is also an offering of the highest Reason, the revelation of highest experience. A surgeon we know once wrote us that the goals seemed so distant, the way so long, the labour so arduous, that he felt inclined to abandon the quest altogether as something beyond ordinary human reach. Our reply to him was that because a position could not be capture in its entirety that was no reason for hesitating to make a start to capture some of it. ”And it came to pass that there was not one soul, except it were little children, who had entered the covenant (with God to keep his commandments) and had taken upon them the name of Christ,” reports Mosiah 6.2. It is a blessed historic fact that divine life and light came to the World through living beings. However, not what is more important is that it shall come to us today. Great historic prophets, sages, and teachers were not the first discoverers of this secret consciousness, nor will they be the last. Such a circle, with its esoteric doctrines and exclusive membership, cannot be understood properly by those who stand outside it and who therefore do not know its informing spirit. This is the wordless and pictureless discovery that insight reveals and intelligence confirms. This is the beautiful source of all life and unfailing sustainer of all beings. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

The Miracles of Genius Breed Doubt as Well as Faith so that We Feel Uplifted from the World!

September 23, 2019 12:56 am

At first reality appears mere sensuous indulgence, a kind of poetic luxury—ripe strawberries, almond blossoms, and white-shouldered nymphs still more or less imaginary. However, we must bid these joys farewell for a nobler life, a more heroic kind of story, involving the agonies, the strife of human hearts. One becomes a lonely voyager across a perilous sea—it is an inescapable part of every being’s soul-making. Through feeling and suffering in a thousand diverse ways, the merely intelligent or sentient being is fortified and altered, and the spirit becomes aware of its own nature and part in the World, and thus achieves an identity or soul. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had time I would have made myself remembered. The life of self-creation, of soul-making, is not complete. I have no identity because I have not made up my mind about everything. To show beauty in the face of death, with eternal lids apart with planetary eyes, in the age-long suffering of humankind grants one passage to part the veils, a face—a scene which strangely evokes the terror of this boy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

When I awake, I lay quiet for an hour, weak and keenly in pain, I had been sleeping like a fallen angel on the red taffeta. So bad was the pain, in fact, that sleep seem preferable to wakefulness, and I dreamt of things long ago, times when Meghan and I had been together and when it had not seemed possible that we would ever part. What finally jarred me from my uneasy slumber was the sounds of Aaliyah screaming. Over and over in terror she screamed. I rose, somewhat stronger than the night before, and then once I was certain that I had my gloves and mask in place, I crouched beside her body and called out to her. At first she could not hear me, so loud were her frantic screams. However, at last, she grew quiet in her desperation. And there it was, an open face of Heaven, returning home at evening with an ear catching the notes of “Rock the Boat,”—and eye watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career. We mourned that day so soon as it was glided by evening with the passage of an angel’s tear that falls through the clear ether silently. I gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free as though the fanning wing of Mercury had played upon my heels: I was light-hearted, and many pleasures to my vision started. “And behold, the Holy Spirit of God did come down from Heaven, and did enter into their hearts, and they were filled as if with the fire, and they could speak forth marvelous words,” reports Helaman 5.45. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The air was cooling, and so very still, and caught from the early sobbing of the morn with solemn sound—“Aaliyah,” I said, “You will be remembered for making pleasing music, and not wild uproar.” She replied, “It is my soul’s pleasure; and it must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.” What then has the Christian message to say about human’s predicament in this World? The eighth Psalm, written hundreds of years before the beginning of the Christian era, raises the same question with full clarity and great beauty. It points, on the one hand, to the infinite smallness of beings as compared to the Universe of Heavens and stars, and, on the other hand, to the astonishing greatness of beings, one’s glory and honor, one’s power over all created things, and one’s likeness to God Himself. Such thoughts are not frequently in the Bible. However, when we come across them, they sound as though they had been written today. Ever since the opening of the Universe by modern science, and the reduction of the great Earth to a small planet in an ocean of Heavenly bodies, beings have felt real vertigo in relation to infinite space. One has felt as though one had been pushed out of the center of the Universe into an insignificant corner in it, and has asked anxiously—what about the high destiny claimed by beings in past ages? #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

What about the idea that the divine image is impressed in one’s nature? What about one’s history that Christianity always considered to be the point at which salvation for all beings took place? What about the Christ, who in the New Testament, is called the Lord of the Universe? What about the end of history, described in Biblical language as a cosmic catastrophe, in which the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars are perhaps soon to fall down upon the Earth? What remains, in our present view of reality, of the importance of the Earth and the glory of beings? Further, since it seems possible that other beings exist on other Heavenly bodies, in whom the divine image is also manifest, and of whom God is mindful, and also whom He has crowned with glory and honor, what is the meaning of the Christian view of human history and its center, the appearance of the Christ? These questions are not merely theoretical. They are crucial to every being’s understanding of one’s self as a being placed upon this star, in an unimaginably vast Universe of stars. And they are disturbing not only to people who feel grasped by the Christian message, but also to those who reject it but who share with Christianity a belief in the meaning of history and the ultimate significance of human life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Again, the eighth Psalm spears as though it had been conceived today—“Thou hast made him little less than God; thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands.” It gives, as an example, being’s dominion over the animals; but only since modern technology subjected all the spheres of nature to being’s control has the phrase “little less than God” revealed its full meaning. The conquest of time and space has loosened the ties that kept beings in bondage to one’s finitude. What was once imagined as a prerogative of the gods has become a reality of daily life, accessible to human technical power. No wonder that we of today feel with the psalmist that beings are little less than God, and that some of us feel even equal with God, and further that others would not hesitate to state publicly that humankind, as a collective mind, has replaced God. We therefore have to deal with an astonishing fact: the same events that pushed beings from their place in the center of the World, and reduced one to insignificance, also elevated one to a God-like position both on Earth and beyond! It there an answer to this contradiction? Listen to the psalmist: one foes not say that humans have dominion over all things or that beings are little less than God; he says—“Thou hast given one dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast made one a little less than God.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

This means that neither being’s smallness nor one’s greatness emanates from oneself, but that there is something above this contrast. Being, together with all things, comes from God Who has put all things under being’s feet. Beings are rooted in the same Ground in which the Universe with all its galaxies is rooted. It is this Ground that gives greatness to everything, however small it may be, to atoms as well as planets and animals; and it is this that makes all things small, however great—the Stars as well as beings. It gives significance to the apparently insignificant. It gives significance to each individual being, and to humankind as a whole. This answer quiets our anxiety about our smallness, and it quells the pride of our greatness. It is not a Biblical answer only, nor Christian only, nor only religious. Its truth is felt by all of us, as we become conscious of our predicament—namely, that we are not of ourselves, that our presence upon the Earth is not of our own doing. We are brought into existence and formed by the same power that bears up the Universe and the Earth and everything upon it, a power compared to which we are infinitely small, but also one which, because we are conscious of it, makes us great among creatures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Primitives were frank about power, and in a spiritual cosmology power is relatively undisguised: it comes from the pool of ancestors and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thoughtlessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power—until, as said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator, a telephone line. Then you see our religious anxiety come out. Power is the life pulse that sustains beings in every epoch, and unless the student understands power figures and power sources one can understand nothing vital about social history. The history of man’s fall into stratified society can be traced around the figures of one’s heroes, to whom one is beholden for the power one wants most—to persevere as an organism, to continue experiencing. Again we pick up the thread from the very beginning of our argument and see how intricately it is interwoven in being’s career on this planet. If primitive being was not in bondage to the authority of living persons, one at least had some heroes somewhere, and these—as said—were the spirit powers, usually of the departed dead, the ancestors. The idea seems very strange to most of us today, but for the primitive it was often the dead who has the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a helper of life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

For many primitives death is the final promotion to the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible World from their new abode. This, however, is not universal among primitives by any means. Some tribes fear the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then they are thought to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits who represent unfinished and unfulfilled life, spirits of persons who died prematurely and would be envious of the living, and so on. The dead are feared because they cannot be controlled as well as when they are alive. Many people have argued that primitives do not fear death as much as we do; but we know that this equanimity is due to the fact that the primitive was usually securely immersed in one’s particular cultural ideology, which was in essence an ideology of life, of how to continue on and to triumph over death. It is easy to see the significance of power for the human animal; it is really the basic category of one’s existence, as the organism’s whole World is structed in terms of power. No wonder that that Thomas Hobbes could say that man was characterized by “a general inclination, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power one has and how much exits in others and in the World. Only if one learns this can one be sure of surviving; one has to learn very minutely what powers one can count on to facilitate one’s life and what powers one has to fear and avoid in order to protect it. So power becomes the basic category of being for which one has, so to speak, a natural respect: if you are wrong about power, you do not get a chance to be right about anything else; and the things that happen when the organism loses its powers are a decrease of vitality and death. Little wonder, then, that primitive beings had a right away to conceptualize and live according to hierarchies of power and give them one’s most intense respect. Anthropology discovered that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana and taboo, which we can translate simply as power and danger or watch out (because of power). The study of life, people, and the World, then, broke down into an alertness for distributions of power. The more mana you could find to tap, the more taboo you could avoid, the better. However, power is an invisible mystery. It erupts out of nature in storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and it returns into nature as ashes, winter, and death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The only way we know is it there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the supernatural, can only by spotted in the usual, the surpassing, the excellent, that which transcends what is necessary or expected. From the very beginning, the child experiences the awesomeness of life and one’s problems of survival and well-being in other people; and so persons comes to be the most intimate place where one looks to be delighted by the specialness of mysterious life, or where one fears to be overwhelmed by powers that one cannot understand or cope with. It is natural, then, that the most immediate place to look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power or mana. They earned respect and special privileges and had to be handled gently because they were both an asset and a danger: in their very persons they were an open fount between two Worlds, the visible and invisible, and power passed through them as through an electric circuit. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wig could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.” However, those times are past; and we of the twenty first century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character one can be an adequate expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifferences,–a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral Universe. To such a harlot we own no allegiance; with one as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealing with one several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of the prudence in coming to terms with such of one particular features as will help us to our private ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

If there be a divine Spirit of the Universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to beings. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this World, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other World. I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated mind. In fact, if I am to express my personal unreservedly, I should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the Universe is the act of rebellion against the idea that such a God exists. Such a rebellion essentially, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it! And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base fear away from me forever. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No has said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;” to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” From that hour I began to be a man. Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be my miserable self than He, than He who formed such creatures to his own disgrace. The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou from whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! Abhorred, malignant and implacable! I vow that not for all Thy power furled and unfurled, for all the temples to Thy glory built, would I assume the ignominious guilt of having made such beings in such a World. There is no democratic equality here. If such a being speaks, others are entitled only to whisper! There never yet has been a time, however thinned out their ranks may be, when those who know have faded out from this World—and there never will be such a time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

For it is an inexorable duty laid upon them to hand down to us from the light to posterity. And thus a chain of teacher and taught has been flung down to us from the dimmest epochs of antiquity right into this noisy, muddled twenty first century of ours. Through such illumined beings there has been constant expression of truth, and through this individual expression it has been able to survive socially. Those who are out of centre, eccentric and different from others because they are unbalanced mentally and uncontrolled emotionally, will not heed what conventional society demands from them. However, there exists a second group of persons who are likewise different and heedless of conventions, although often in other ways. This group is what it is by reason of its being a pioneer one which has advanced farther along the road of evolution than the herd behind. From it are drawn the great reformers and their followers, those who stand firmly by moral principle and factual truth. It is they who try to lift up society and put right its abuses and cruelties, its wrongs and superstitions. They are daring champions who do not stop to count the cost of their service but, enduring ridicule, persecution, or even crucifixion, go ahead unfalteringly where others draw back. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Whoever will take the trouble to search for them, as I once did, may find that several records have been left behind for posterity by beings who successfully penetrated to the inside of Truth and made themselves at home there. The lands in which they lived were wide apart and included continents all over the globe. For such beings Truth was not a theory but a living experience. There has not yet manifested itself one outstanding personality who merges the simple mystic in the wise sage, who speaks the mind of truth for our time, and who is willing to enlighten or lead us without reference to local or traditional beliefs. Such a being will certainly be heard; one may even be heeded. If the fullest degree of perfection seems so far off as to depress one, the first degree is often so near that it should cheer one. Few imagine their capacity extends to such a lofty attainment and so few seek it. Most of those who engage on this quest have a modest desire—to get somewhere along the way where they have more control over their mind and life than their unsatisfactory present condition affords. If one knew at the beginning that it was so far and so long, and so troubled a journey, would one have embarked on a quest at all? That depends on the nature of the being oneself, on the nature of one’s impelling motive, and on the strength behind it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The attitude of greediness, with all its variations and subsequent inhibitions, is called an oral attitude and as such has been well described in analytical literature. While the theoretical preconceptions underlying this terminology have been valuable, in so far as they have permitted the integration of hitherto isolated trends into syndromes, the preconception that all these trends originate in oral sensations and wishes is dubitable. It is based on the valid observation that greediness frequently finds its expression in demands for food and in manners of eating, as well as in dreams, which may express the same tendencies in a more primitive way, as for example in cannibalistic dreams. These phenomena do not prove, however, that we have here to do with originally and essentially oral desires. It seems therefore a more tenable assumption that as a rule eating is merely the most accessible means of satisfying the feeling of greediness, whatever its source, just as in dreams eating is the most concrete and primitive symbol for expressing insatiable desires. The assumption that the oral desires or attitudes are libidinal in character also needs substantiation. There is no doubt that an attitude of greediness may appear in the sphere of pleasures of the flesh, in actual instability of pleasures of the flesh as well as in dreams that identify pleasures of the flesh with swallowing or biting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

However, it appears just as well in acquisitiveness concerning money or clothes, or in the pursuit of ambition and prestige. All that can be said in favor of the libidinal assumption is that the passionate intensity of greediness is similar to that of drives in the pleasures of the flesh. Unless one assumes, however, that every passionate drive is libidinal, it still remains necessary to prove that greediness as such is a pleasure of the flesh—pregenital—drive. The problem of greediness is complex and still unsolved. Like compulsiveness it is definitely promoted by anxiety. The fact that greediness is conditioned by anxiety may be fairly evident, as is frequently the case, for example, in excessive masturbation or excessive eating. The connection between the two may also be shown by the fact that greediness may diminish or vanish as soon as the person feels reassured in some way: feeling loved, having a success, doing constructive work. A feeling of being loved, for instance, may suddenly reduce the strength of a compulsive wish to buy. A girl who had been looking forward to each meal with undisguised greediness forgot hunger and mealtime altogether as soon as she started designing dresses, an occupation which she greatly enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

On the other hand, greediness may appear or become reinforced as soon as hostility or anxiety is heightened; a person may feel compelled to go shopping before a dreaded performance, or compelled to eat greedily after feeling rejected. There are many persons, however, who have anxiety and yet do not develop greediness, a fact which indicates that there are still some special factors involved. Of these factors all that can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that greedy persons distrust their capacity to create anything of their own, and thus have to rely on the outside World for the fulfillment of the needs; but they believe that no one is willing to grant them anything. Those neurotic persons who are insatiable in their need for affection usually show the same greediness in reference to material things, such as sacrifices of time or money, factual advice in concrete situations, factual help in difficulties, presents, information, and gratifications of pleasures of the flesh. In some cases these desires definitely reveal a wish for proofs of affection; in others, however, that explanation is not convincing. In the latter case one has the impression that the neurotic person merely wants to get something, affection or no affection, and that a craving for affection, if present at all, is only a camouflage for the extortion of certain tangible favors or profits. “Peace, peace by unto you, because of your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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An Ideal Helps to Hold a Being Back from One’s Weaknesses, a Standard Gives One Indirectly a Kind of Support, as Well as, Directly, Guidance!

September 21, 2019 1:57 am

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories—points in time which itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems. Humans portray themselves and what a form is presented in the drama of the modern age! Barrenness here, license there; the two extremes of human decay, and both untied in a single period. It is a culture itself which inflicted this wound on modern humanity. And this wound was inflicted on beings by the division of labor: Gratification is separated from labor, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment of the whole, beings fashion themselves only as a fragment. This indictment of modern society reaches it climax in the characterization of love: So jealous is the state for the sole possession of its servants that it would sooner agree (and who could blame it?) to share them with a Venus Cythera than with a Venus Urania. Theses are the two forms of the goddess of love in Plato’s Symposium and thus it identifies Venus Cytherea with venal but Urania with genuine love. What I am describing so impressively is what Hegel and Marx characterized as alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

By contrasting the polypus nature of the Greek states, where each individual enjoyed an independent existence and, if necessary, could become whole, with modern society which is one of hierarchical division of labor, one can see how modern society produces a fragmentation not only of social functions but of the beings themselves who, as it were, keeps their different faculties in different pigeonholes—love, labor, leisure, culture—that are somehow held together by an externally operating mechanism that is neither comprehended nor comprehensible. Nonetheless, one may consider this analysis of the Greek state as strongly unrealistic and one may, perhaps, even see certain dangers in the glorification of Greece; nevertheless, this analysis of modern beings, points far beyond our age, remains valid and it is perhaps only today that we have become fully conscious of how true this analysis is. If someone tells you that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Love is defined as the whole, as a feeling, but not a single feeling. In it, life finds itself as a duplication of its self and as its unity. However, this love is frequently shattered by the resistance of the outside World, the social World of property, a World indeed which beings have created through their own labor and knowledge but which has become an alien, a dead World through property. Beings are alienated from themselves. Since we are here not Hegelian concept of alienation, which recognizes that the experience of alienation may be an undesirable aspect of consciousness’s existence, we may pass over the development of his concept. It is equally unnecessary for us here to develop fully Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx it is the commodity that determines human activity, that is, the objects which are supposed to serve beings become the tyrant of the being. For according to Marx, humans are a universal being. If they recognize themselves in a World one has themselves made, then they are free. However, that does not happen. Since alienating labor alienates beings from nature, alienates one from themselves, one’s own active function, one’s life’s activity, it alienated one from one’s own species. The separation or labor from the object is thus for one a threefold one: beings are alienated from external nature, from one’s self, and from one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The relationships of beings to one another are reified: personal relations appear as objective relations between things (commodities). Jesus said that the way to eternal life is straight and narrow. He could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standards are set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist this attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. We must take care not to fall into the depressing belief that this is too be attained by masters only and that we cannot attain it. Beings, (not only the workers, since the process of alienation affects society as a whole) is thus a mutilated being. However, these theories of alienation are not adequate. While the principles developed by Hegel and Marx must be given up, these theories need supplementation and deepening. Their inadequacy consists in this, that they oppose universal or nearly universal beings to the mutilated beings of the modern World. However, there is no historical form of society in which beings have ever existed as universal beings; for slavery is not compatible with universality. If I distinguish three strata of alienation, my meaning may become clearer. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In alienation, the stratum of psychology; that of society; and that of politics are the three strata. Only if we start with a clean separation of the three strata and concepts, in order to bring them together again, we can get at the problem of alienation, and this of anxiety in politics. Neither alienation nor anxiety is to be found only in modern society and only in modern beings, although the different structures of society and the state modify the forms of expression which alienation and anxiety take. The modifications are hard to determine, and I shall not attempt here to undertake a systematic analysis. However, I shall try to point up the problem and to make the theory somewhat more concrete by means of (more or less arbitrary) examples. Dr. Freud’s thesis in his Civilization and its Discontents is this: “The foal toward which the pleasure-principle impels us—of becoming happy—is not attainable”; because for Dr. Freud suffering springs from three sources: external nature, which we can never dominate completely, the susceptibility to illness and the mortality of the body, and social institutions. However, the statement that society prevents happiness, and consequently that every sociopolitical institution is repressive, does not lead to hostility toward civilization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

For the limitation, which is imposed upon the libidinal as well as the destructive instincts, creates conflicts, inescapable conflicts, which are the very motors of progress in history. However, conflicts deepen with the progress of civilization, for Dr. Freud states that increasing technical progress, which in itself ought to make possible a greater measure of instinct gratification fails to do so. There arises here a psychological lag that grows ever wider—a formulation that I should like to borrow from the cultural lag of American sociology. Thus, every society is built upon the renunciation of instinctual gratifications. Dr. Freud fins that it is “not easy to understand how it can become possible to withhold satisfaction from an instinct. Nor is it by any means without risk to do so; if the deprivation is not made good economically.” To be sure, according to Dr. Freud it is conceivable “that a civilized community could consist of pairs of individuals (who love each other) libidinally satisfied in each other, and linked to all the others by work and common interests. If this were so, culture would not need to levy energy from sexuality.” However, the opposite is true and always has been true. For at bottom Dr. Freud does not believe in this conceivable ideal.” The differences between the different forms of society—which are decisive for us—do not play a decisive role for one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The renunciation of instinctual gratification and the cultural tendency toward the limitation of love operate at all levels of society. It is these renunciation and limitations which we characterize as psychological alienation of beings, or perhaps even better as alienation of the ego from the dynamics of instinct. It is unhelpful to put this goal on some Everest-like peak far beyond human climbing. If many are called but few are chosen, it is their own weakness which defers the time of being chosen. In the end, and with much patience, they too will find the way beyond the struggle into peace. It is not enough to find an ideal to help one’s course in life: it should also be based on truth, not fancy. The aspiration must not only be a desirable one, it must also be attainable. There is always a valid reason for disparity between the sought-for objective and the actual performance. Those who begin hopefully and enthusiastically but find themselves disappointed and without results, ought to look first to their understanding of the Quest and correct it, to their picture of the Goal and redraw it. If you want to find out why so many fail to reach the Quest’s objective and so few succeed in doing so, first find out what the Quest really is. Then you will understand that the failures are not failures at all; that so large a project to change human nature and human consciousness cannot be finished in a little time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is only of limited help to the modern being, living under very different conditions as one is, to offer one the saint as a type of imitate or to quote the pastor as an example to follow. One will not waste time in seeking the unattainable or striving for the impossible. For truth, not self-deception, is one’s goal; humility, not arrogance, is one’s guide. That the Overself not only is, but is attainable, is the premise and promise of true philosophy. If the goal is really unattainable, then the Quest is futile. If it is no more than approachable then surely the Quest is well worthwhile. However, in fact the foal is both attainable and approachable. Every being may awaken to the presence of Christ-consciousness within one’s self and thus step out of the merely animal and nominally human existence. It will then be a divinely human one. Immediately after the hanging of Billy Budd, in the cinema version of Melville’s novella, the sailors on this British man-of-war suddenly see a French warship coming around the promontory several miles to port. They all cheer. Why the cheer? These men know that they are going into battle, into the grime and cruelty and death that war represents, yet they cheer. True, a minor part of the cause can be seen as an outlet for the pent-up emotions that have been engendered silently and oppressively as the sailors experienced the hanging of their favorite comrade. However, there is more basic a reason. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We turn, then, to another area, the most difficult of all with which to come to terms, that of the violence in war. On the rational level practically everyone rejects and abhors war. When I was in college before World War II, I recall how take aback I was when a professor of English literature remarked that he was fairly sure there would be more wars. If ever such existed, this professor was a soften-spoken, sensitive, unwarlike type; but I silently looked at him as though he were a pariah. How could a man entertain such a thought? Was not it clear that we must refrain from thinking of or believing in war—and certainly from predicting it—if we were to ever attain peace? Several other hundred thousand fellow collegians and I, who were pacifists, were under the illusion that if we only believed in peace strongly enough, we could that much more insure international peace. We have no idea of how close our attitude came to superstition—do not think of the devil or her will already be in your midst. We are so engrossed in blotting war out of everybody’s mind that we completely ignored the points in William James’s provocative essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Written because of his detestation of our “squalid war with Spain,” William James delivered this as a lecture in 1907. It still presents the central problem penetratingly, even if its answers are no longer cogent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

“In my remarks, pacifist though I am,” says James, “I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice by many writers).” He cautions then against the belief that describing the horrors of war will act as a deterrent: “Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect. The horrors make the fascination. When [it is a] question of getting the extremest and supremist out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.” Now for all our opposition to war, we cannot escape the obvious fact that we have been notoriously unsuccessful in our efforts to curtail it. I believe our lack of success is due, at least in part, to our having ignored the central phenomenon: “the horrors make the fascination.” In this century—which began arrogantly as a “century of peace”—we have seen the steady change from a state of relative tranquility to that of revolutions and violence. At this moment we find half a dozen wars going on around the globe, including that war in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the American army has changed from a draft to a volunteer army. Why have we, who are opposed to war, been so ineffectual? It is not time to inquire whether there is something wrong in our approach to this ultimate form of aggression and violence? I propose that we ask directly: What is the allure, the fascination, the attraction of war? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle even under the altered conditions of modern war, has been a high point in their lives which they would not want to have missed. For anyone who has not experienced it one’s self, the feeling is hard to comprehend, and for the participant, hard to explain to anyone else. Millions of men and some times children (who change their age to participate) in or day—like millions before us—have learned to live in war’s strange element and have discovered in it a powerful fascination. The Emotional environment of war has always been compelling; it has drawn most beings under its spell. Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it. When the signs of peace were visible, the purgative force of danger which makes beings coarser but perhaps more human will soon be lost and the first months of peace will make some of us yearn for the old days of conflict. What are the sources of war’s allure? One is the attraction of the extreme situation—that is, the risking all in battle. This is the same element that catches people beyond desires. A second is the strengthening effect of being part of a tremendous organization, which relieves a person of individual responsibility and guilt. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The declaration of war is thus important as a moral statement, as a moral justification, and enables the soldier to give over one’s moral responsibility to one’s outfit. This point is generally cited in criticism of the war machine; and no one can have the slightest doubt that war does erode individua responsibility and the autonomy of conscience. The My Lai massacre and the Lt. William Calley case prove this in a horrible way. However, what is generally overlooked is that a being has a desire to avoid freedom as well as to seek it; that freedom and choice are also a burden—as Dostoevsky and countless others have known throughout history; and that to give one’s conscious over to the group, as one does in war time, is also a source of great comfort. This is why the great determinism of history—such as Calvinism and Marxism—have also demonstrated great power not only to form people into ranks but to inspire in the degree of active devotion that other movements may not find available. Closely related to this is the feeling of comradeship in the feeling of comradeship in the ranks—that I am accepted not because of any individual merit on my part, but because I am a fellow in the ranks. I can trust my fellow soldier to cover my retreat or my attack because of the role given to me. My merit is the role, and the limits the role places on me give me a species of freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The breaking down of this capacity to feel as if one were part of the larger whole is the explanation of how soldiers overcome fear. Indeed, physical courage in whatever scene—judging from my experience in psychotherapy–seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel one is fighting for others as well as one’s self, assuming a bond with one’s fellow, which means one will come to their assistance as they will to one’s. The source of this physical courage appears to be possessed originally in the relationship between the infant and its mother, specifically one’s trust in one’s solidarity with her and, consequently, with the World. Physical cowardice, on the other hand, even in avoiding physical fights as a child, seems to come from an early rejection, and early feeling that the mother will not support her child and may even turn against one in one’s fights; so that henceforth every effort the youngest makes, one makes on one’s own. Such a person finds it inconceivable that others would support one and that one is also fighting for them, and it takes a conscious decision for one to take up their part. This latter type of person may have great moral courage, which one has developed as a loner; but what one lacks is physical courage or courage in the group. There is in ecstasy of violence, furthermore, the lust for destruction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Remember there was a man named Mark, recall his comment: “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a BMW.” There seems to be a delight in destruction in beings, the atavistic urge to break things and to kill. This is increased in neurotics and others in despair; but it is an increase of a trait that is there anyway, and centuries of the veneer of civilization cannot hide it. It could also be that soldiers know that in their death, they could be saving the lives of others. Anyone who has watched people on the battlefield at work with artillery, or looked into the eyes of the veteran killers fresh from slaughter, or studied the descriptions of bombardiers’ feelings while smashing their targets, find it hard to escape the conclusion that there is a delight in destruction. This evil appears to surpass mere human evil, and to demand explanation in cosmological and religions terms. In this sense, human beings can be devilish in a way animals can never be. In this lust for destruction, the soldier’s ego temporarily deserts one, and one is absurd in what one experiences. It is a deprivation of self for a union with objects that were hitherto foreign. This is technical language for what is referred to in the mystic experience of ecstasy: the ego is dissolved, and the mystic experiences a union with the “Whole,” be it called light or truth or God. Through violence we overcome self-centeredness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

All of these are elements in the ecstasy of violence. There is a joy in violence that takes the individual out of one’s self and pushes one toward something deeper and more powerful than one has previously experiences. The individual “I” passes insensibly into a “we”; “my” becomes “our.” I give myself to it, let myself go; as I feel my old self slipping away, lo and behold, a new consciousness, a higher degree of awareness, becomes present, a new self, more extensive than the first. Now when we consider contemporary beings—insignificant, lonely, more isolated as mass communication becomes vaster, one’s ears and sensitivities dulled by ever-present transistor radios and by thousands of word hurled at one by TV and newspapers, aware of one’s identity only to the extent that one has lot it, yearning for community but feeling awkward and helpless as one finds it—when we consider this modern being, who will be surprised that one yearns for ecstasy even of the kind that violence and war may bring? We must also face the fact that, to most people, violence is fun. We watch it on television and in the movies regularly. The barroom fight in a western movie is almost always a matter of comedy or semicomedy. Football players are armored and padded like medieval knights so that they can provide violence with the least damage to themselves. Wrestling, the acting out of violence, commands a wide audience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The rollerderbies attract fanatic follwers who look on, not to watch expert rollerskating, but to exult in the fights and near-fights, the elbowing and the falls. Ice hockey is a game in which we simply conceded that fights are a part of the sport. Conflict is a problem that faces not only psychologist, but ever human being everywhere. It is one thing to proclaim, as some psychologist do, that violence is not instinctive in human nature. It is another to demonstrate ways in which aggression can be controlled and eliminated and replaced by cooperation. Consider this being in society—living year after year in the anonymous anxiety that something might happen; aware of enemy countries that one can destroy in one’s imagination, a fantasy to which one resorts when one is fed up with one’s day-to-day life; existing with a dread that one feels somehow ought to be translated into action but hanging in abeyance, lured on by secret promises of ecstasy and violence, feeling that continuing the vague dread is worse than giving in to the allure, fascination, and attraction of action—is it any wonder that this being goes along with a declaration of war in apparent sheeplike fashion? For the first time in my life I can now, for example, understand the American Legon. That organization has always been, for me, a negative conscience—whatever it was for, I was against, and whatever I was for, it was against. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

When I did not have time to figure out on which side justice was, this worked quite well as a pro tempore device. However, I never could understand the motives of the legionnaries or other veterans’ organizations in their saberrattling and their stretching the hunting-under-every-bed-for-Communists to absurd lengths. Now, however, I see that these groups had originally been, by large, young men and women who had held insignificant jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Fords, and Chevrolets when they were called to war. In France they became heroes, the pride of the women; flowers were strewn in their paths, every honor thrust upon them. They were significant, possibly for the first time in their lives. Returning to this country, some could find only the same jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, and those who found better jobs may have experienced a similar despair in the empty life of peacetime. No wonder they hand together, out of their ennui, to recreate the closest experience to that of the war, such as the “search and destroy” anti-communist mission. They hark back in their yearning to find something that will give their lives a significance it intrinsically lacks. That wonderful time when one can look straight into one’s self, through ego to Overself, awaits one’s endeavours. The goal is far-off, it is true; but nevertheless it is reachable by those who will make the requisite effort to overcome self. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Despite all setbacks, the outcome of this endeavour can be only the fulfilment of hope. For that is God’s will. Even if the goal seems too far off, the attainment too high up for their limited capacities, even if it seems that one would have to be far better than ordinary to have any chance at all, that does not mean they should not embark on this quest. For even if they are able to travel only a modest part of the way the efforts involved are still well worthwhile. “And may the Lord bless your soul, and receive you at the last day into his kingdom, to sit down in peace,” reports Alma 38.15. The history of the Universe is a history of cycles: of birth, development, disintegration, death, and rest endlessly repeated on higher and higher levels. The energy impulses which rise from the Void and accumulate as electrons, only to disperse later, reproduce the same cycles through which the entire Universe itself passes. Do as or as little as you can to advance. If you lack the strength to go all the way then go some of the way. Your spiritual longings and labors will influence your afterlife. Nothing will be lost. If you deserve them, higher capacities and more favorable circumstances will then be yours. Every virtue deliberately cultivated leads to a pleasanter rebirth. Every weakness remedied leads to the cancellation of an unpleasant one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Randolph Harris II International Institute