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Why Does He Have to Weep to Have His Love? Why Can He Not Enjoy His Love?
Deep drifts of snow lay everywhere. The streets were clearly impassable to traffic, and there were times when I fell on my knees again, arms going deep into the snow, and Nacho liked my face as though he were trying to keep me warm. But I continued, struggling uphill, whatever my state of mind and body, until at last I turned the corner, and saw the lights of the familiar Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House ahead. In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to increase the price of bread. The pâtissiers sent in support a complete description of a bakery and of its weekly costs. Thirteen people there were in such an establishment: the baker and his wife, four paid employees who were called journeymen, two maid-servants, two apprentices, and the baker’s three children. Food cost more than anything else, more than raw materials, and nearly four times as much as wages. Clothing was charged up, too, not only for man, wife, and children but for the apprentices as well. Even school fees were included in the cost of baking bread for sale. A London bakery was undoubtedly what we should called a commercial or industrial undertaking, turning out loaves by the thousand. Yet it was carried on in the house of the baker himself, an ordinary house with a few extra sheds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
All these people, moreover, took their meals in the house, every meal of the day. They even slept there at night; indeed they were obliged to do so, expect for the journeymen. In short, universal custom and law of the land obliged these thirteen people to live together as a family. They only word ever used at that time to describe such a group of people was the word “family.” The man at the head of the group, the man we should call the entrepreneur, or the employer or the manager, was then known as the master, or head of the family. He was father in fact to some of its member, in place of father to the rest. There was no distinction between his domestic and his economic functions. His wife was both his partner and his subordinate, a partner because she ran the family, took charge of the food and managed the women servants, a subordinate because she was woman and wife, mother and in place of mother to the rest. The paid servants had their specified and familiar position in the family, as much part of it as the children, but not quite in the position of the children. The apprentices were well fed, obliged to obedience and forbidden to marry, unpaid and absolutely dependent until the age of twenty-one. And if apprentices were workers who were also children, the children themselves, the sons and daughters of the master and mistress, were workers too. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
At the end of the century John Locke laid it down that when they reached three, the children of the poor must begin work for some part of the day. We may see at once, therefore, that the World we have lost, as I have called it, was no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance, and loving-kindness. It is so important that I should not be misunderstood on this point that I will say at once that in my view the coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation with it. It was there already. The patriarchal arrangements which I have begun to describe were not new in the England of Shakespeare and of Elizabeth. These arrangements were as old as the Greeks, as old as European history, and they abused and enslaved people quite as remorselessly as the economic arrangements which had replaced them in the England of Blake and Victoria. However, there were differences in the manner of oppressing and exploiting. The ancient order of society which gave way before the coming of industry was felt by those who supposed, enjoyed, and endured it to be eternal and unchangeable. There was no expectation of reform. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
When economic relationships were domestic relationships, and domestic relationships were rigidly regulated by the social system, by the content of Christianity itself, how could there be expectation of reform? This is in sharp contrast with social expectations in Victorian England, and in all industrial society since. Since the coming of industry, societies have been far less table than their predecessors. They lack the extraordinary influence for cohesiveness which familiar relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. You have noticed that the roles we have allotted to all the members of the extended family of the master baker of London in 1619 are all, emotionally, highly symbolic and highly satisfactory. In a whole society organized like this, everyone belongs, everyone has one’s circle of affection, every relationship can be seen as a love relationship. It may indeed well be a love relationship. Not so with us. Even if he were a bully and a beater, a usurer and a hypocrite, who could love the name of a limited company as an apprentice could love one’s superbly satisfactory father-figure master? However, if a family is a circle of affection, it can also be the scene of hatred. The true tyrants among beings, the villains and the murderers, are jealous husbands and resentful wives, tyrannical fathers, deprived children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Concerning aggression, I mean, in contradistinction to the attitudes of self-assertion, acts of going against someone, attacking, disparaging, encroaching, or any form of hostile behavior—disturbances of this kind show themselves in two entirely different ways. One way is a propensity to be aggressive, domineering, over-exacting, to boss, cheat or find fault. Occasionally persons who have these attitudes are aware of being aggressive; more often they are not in the least aware of it and are convinced subjectively that they are just being honest or merely expressing an opinion, or even being modest in their demands, although in reality they are offensive and imposing. In others, however, these disturbances show themselves in the opposite way. One finds on the surface an attitude of easily feeling cheated, dominated, scolded, imposed on or humiliated. These persons, too, are frequently not aware that this is their own attitude, but believe sadly that the whole World is down on them, imposing on them. Peculiarities of another kind, those in the pleasures of the flesh sphere, may be classified roughly as either a compulsive need for activities to please the flesh or inhibitions toward such activities. Inhibitions may appear at any step leading to satisfaction of the flesh. They may set in at the approach of persons of the other gender, in wooing, in the functions of the pleasures of the flesh themselves or in the enjoyment. All the peculiarities describe in the preceding groups will appear also in the attitudes dealing with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
In the traditional patriarchal society of Europe, which I am trying to describe, where everyone lived one’s whole life in a family, often in the same family, such tension must have been incessant and unrelieved, incapable of release except in crisis. Men, women, and children have to be very close together and for a very long time indeed to generate the emotional power which can give rise to a tragedy of Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Racine. Conflict then was between individual people, on the personal scale. Clashes between whole groups, such as those which go to make our twenty-first century society the scene of perpetual revolution as we call it, could arise far less often then. This can only have been so if the little knot of thirteen people making bread was indeed the typical social unit of the old World, typical in size, in scale, in composition. In fact we can take the bakery to be the limiting case for the family which was sovereign in the society of our ancestors, the society of these days before the industrial revolution. We shall see in a moment what form the family took over the great expanse of society which lived on the land. However, our chosen example has other things to tell us. We may notice, for one thing, that our folk-memory of the World we have lost is in much these terms, rather than in rural terms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
We still talk to children about apprentices who marry their master’s daughter, of bakers who really bake, in their houses, in their homes, of spinster who really sit by the fire and spin. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales preserve the language pretty well unaltered. In fact a reliable guide to the subject in hands is Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even Walt Disney. Which means that it is already half known to the historian before one starts, known by rote and not by understanding. Therefore one has neglected it, and neglecting it has failed to set up the correct contrast with the social order which has now succeeded. Without contrast there cannot be understanding, and I submit that we are unable to comprehend our industrial society because the historian whose job it is has not told us what society was like without industry. However, we do know that being a housewife is the true oldest profession in the World, it dates all the way back to the very first human beings, Adam and Eve. The working family of the London baker vividly illustrates the scale of life under the antiquated social order: no group of persons larger than a family, fifteen or twenty at most; no object larger than the London Bridge or St. Paul’s Cathedral; no workaday building larger than an ordinary house. Everything physical was on the human scale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The death of the head of a family in the World of commerce and industry which we have been describing was almost certainly the end to its existence. The hope was that a son would succeed, or, if there was no son, an apprentice instead, which was why I was important that he should marry the master’s own kin. Often, surprisingly often, the widow would herself carry on, though it could not be for long. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire paints accurate picture of what it was like in the eighteenth century for women, when Lestat kills the Freniere boy who was master of the plantation. With the death of Freniere, the plantation would collapse because it was a fragile economy, a life of splendor based on the perennial mortgaging of next year’s crop, and it was in his hands alone. After the death of the Freniere boy, the five Freniere sisters were agonizing. However, another Vampire called Louis convinces Babbette that she can save the plantation as long as she was confident. He told her, “Stop at nothing until you have the answers. And take my visitations to you to be your courage whenever you waver. You must take the reins of your own life. Your brother is dead.” However, later on Babette became the scandal of the neighborhood because she chose to run the plantation on her on. She had scandalized the coast by remaining alone on the plantation without a man in the house, without even an older woman. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Babette’s greatest problem was that she might succeed financially only to suffer the isolation of social ostracism. She has such a sensibility that wealth itself meant nothing to her; family, a long…this meant something to Babette. Though she was able to old the plantation together, the scandal was wearing on her. She was giving up inside. However, as you know jealous people will use your life as if it were oil for a lamp. This, then, was not simply a World without factories; it was a World without firms, a World without economic continuity. Since every activity was limited by what could be organized within a family, and within the lifetime of a family, there as an unending struggle to manufacture continuity, to provide an expectation for the future. “One hundred and twenty family uprising and downlying, whereof you may take out six or seven, and all the rest were servants and retainers”: this was the household of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke in the years before the Civil War, and it illustrates the symbolic function of the aristocratic family—to defy the limitation on size, to build big, to raise up a line which should remain forever. However, what do these words mean? Who was England in, say the year 1650? Not every single person living then within our boundaries no one with historical sense would claim that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, only a recognition that people came no in individuals but in clots, in families of the sort I have described, only that recognition makes clear that England in its final definition meant only those grown males who were heads of households, who were literate and who had some degree of individuality. This at once excludes all women, all those under the age of nearly thirty, for all these persons were caught up, so to speak—subsumed is the ugly word I shall use—in the personalities of the heads of the families to which they belonged. England, in fact, meant a far, far smaller number off persons even than this would imply. Historians have not, it seems to me, tended to talk about important qualifications as to the use of the word. However, they seem, of recent years anyway, to be fairly confident that they know what it was that transformed this patriarchal World into the World we live in now. Capitalism did a great deal of it, they say, and it is capitalism which we must contrast with the patriarchal society: capitalism with its new spirit, whatever that dangerous word may be doing in the historian’s vocabulary, was the great disruptive force which broke up the World we have lost and dethroned the family from its sovereignty in society. However, by the seventeenth century capitalism was at least 300 years old, and perhaps much older. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
We have seen, in the example of the way in which the putting-out system of industry came to the rescue of the laborer on the land, that capitalism was perfectly compatible with family economic arrangements. Capitalism, we shall conclude, is an incomplete description: it simply cannot do the historian’s work which has been thrust upon it. The historical distortions which have risen from the word capitalism are a result, I believe, in some degree to a faulty sense of proportion, which we can only bow begin to correct. With the “capitalism-changed-the-World” way of thinking goes a division of history into the ancient feudal, and bourgeois eras or stages. I think that the contrast which we have been trying to draw here between the World we have lost and the World we now inhabit makes all other divisions into subdivisions. European society is of the patriarchal type, and with some variations, of which perhaps the feudal variation went furthest, it was patriarchal in its institutions right up to the coming of the factories, the offices, and the rest. It is now patriarchal no longer, except in a vestigial way, and in its emotional predisposition. It is now time that we divided up history up again in accordance with what is really important. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The word alienation is part of the cant of the twenty-first century, and it began as an attempt to describe the separation of the worker from a World of work. We need not accept all that this expression has come to convey in order to recognize that it does point us the way to realizing something of the first importance to us all in relation to our past. Time was, and it was all time up to 260 years ago, when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. However, there still remains a therapeutic problem; many people possess a sense of emptiness that some clients feel—even when they are convinced that they are full. What they are actually full of are false highs, dreams with no substance, hypomanic reactions, and an array of compulsions. These extravagances lead inexorably to collapse—and the cycle repeats once again. Client need to pause over their emptiness, to explore it, in order to break their dysfunctional cycle. They may be less affluent than other, or deprives or deflated, but they do not have to collapse or overreach. One can find possibilities within their restrictedness, to wonder, for example, and to consciously transcend their despair. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Many beings believe that they can recreate themselves, deny their parentage and their roots and build a new identity. In their imaginations, some have never really accepted their parents as their parents because they are ashamed of where they come from. The heart of the problem this generation faces is that they are haunted by a sense of Sin and Fall, and assume all the weakness and depravity of human nature. While it is important to accept your roots and where you come from as apart of your identity, have complete faith, in typical American fashion, that you can transform your dreams into action. Acknowledging your roots will help to fortify this foundation, and makes it easier to transform dreams into action. Let people see that there is something gorgeous about you, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. It is important to gave an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as no one has never found in any other person and which they know they likely shall never find again. Believe unconditionally in the powerful American myth of the Green Light, a symbol that represents dreams, hopes, and desires. It means we have the clearance to reach our goals. The Green Light is like a symbol from God that he has blessed the path we are on. Everything is ahead; we make anything we choose of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The Green Light beckons us onward and upward with a promise of bigger and better things in higher and higher skyscrapers, interminably rising into infinity. The Green Light turns into our greatest illusion, covering over our difficulties, permitting us to depend on the Light and Power which is there and which, with enough patience, will be found there. Many beings believe that the important thing in the American Dreams has been to get rich, and then those very riches give a sanction to your situation. The fact of your being successful is supposedly proof that God smiles on you and that you are among the saved. It is not hard to see how this, in true Calvinistic tradition, drifted into getting rich as the eleventh commandment. The success and the money may flesh out the vast dream which many hold in its thrall and they take that as the reality of life. Money can buy the vast parties, the glitter of mansions, the freely flowing spirits, the smooth jazz music which floats from the orchestras as the hundred of people flock to the lights like moths at night. These things are important to some because sooner or later these accoutrements of Babylon will draw in true love. Yet we must also keep purity of heart in mind. We must be people who possess complete integrity. Preserving one’s fundamental integrity, one’s spiritual intactness is an essential part, maybe even the very key to life. Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. We are created in the image of God and are given something of that Godliness, but under the most serious and sacred of restrictions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
The only control placed on us is self-control—self-control born of respect for the divine sacramental power this gift God has given us represents. Do not be deceived and do not be destroyed. Unless such powers are controlled and commandments kept, your future may be burned; your World could go up in flames. Penalty may not come on the precise day of transgression, but it comes surely and certainly enough. And unless there is true repentance and obedience to a merciful Go, then someday, somewhere, the morally cavalier and unclean will pray like the rich man who wished Lazarus to “dip my finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” Our bodies are therefore and extension of our spirit and eternal existence and is something to be kept pure and holy. Do not be afraid of soiling its hands to do honest labor. This is not just the Age of Information that we are feeling, but we do not want to lose the old warm World, and pay a high price for living too long with a single dream. Achieving the American Dream takes time and it make mean to progress our lives seem to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in a perpetual monotonous toil and sweat. But that is the crucial meaning, we are in control of our fate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
With many a weary step, and many a groan, up the high hill we heave a huge round stone: the huge round stone, resulting with a bound, thunders impetus down. Nothing can be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the Sun. For we face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. However, out of this repetitiveness of breathing many have formed their life plan and found a way of achieving their goals. We then become a model of a hero who always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; one who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such a capacity to confront despair we would not have Beethoven, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Dante, Goethe, William and Sarah Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Harriet Tubman, Richard Aoki, Joan Baez, Tawakkol Karman, Anne Rice, Chris Rice, Reese Witherspoon, Aaliyah, Meghan Markle, and Tee Grizzly or any others of the great figures in the development of culture. This is why we are taught the imagination, the purpose of human faiths which we construct, as it gives us courage to move beyond the rock, beyond the monotony of day-to-day experience. If you reply on an external teacher you rely on something which you may have to drop tomorrow or on somebody you may have to change the day after. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
This brings us to the most important kind of courage of all. Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols new patterns on which a new society can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these profession and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing. However, those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists—the dramatists, the musicians, the painter, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images—poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations. The symbols only dreamt about my most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists. But in our appreciation of the created work—let us say a Mozart quintet—we also are performing a creative act. When we engage a painting, which we have to do especially with modern art if we are authentically to see it, we are experiencing some new moment of sensibility. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. This is why appreciation of the music or painting or other works of the creation person is also a creative act on our part. If these symbols are to be understood by us, we must identity with them as we perceive them. In Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, there are no intellectual discussions of the failure of communication in out time; the failure is simply presented there on the stage. We see it most vividly, for example, when Lucky, who, at his master’s order to “Think,” can only sputter out a long speech that has all the pomposity of a philosophical discourse but is actually pure gibberish. As we involve ourselves more and more in the drama, we see represented on stage, larger than life, our general human failure to communicate authentically. We see on the stage in, Beckett’s play, the lone, bare, tree, symbolic of the lone, bare relationship the two men have as they wait together for a Godot who never appears; and it elicits from us a similar sense of the alienation that we and multitudes of others experience. The fact that most people have no clear awareness of their alienation only makes this condition more powerful. In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there are no explicit discussions of the disintegration of our society; it is shown as a reality in the drama. The nobility of the human species is not talked about, but is presented as a vacuum on the stage. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Because this nobility is such a vivid absence, an emptiness that fills the play, you leave the theater with a profound sense of the importance of being human, as you do after have seen Macbeth or King Lear and after have reading Interview with the Vampire and Tales of the Body Thief by Anne Rice. O’Neill’s capacity to communicate that experience places him among the significant tragedians of history. Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or on canvas because they express the collective unconscious. This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses. Thus the artists—in which term I hereafter include the poets, musicians, dramatists, plastic artists, as well as saints—are a dew line; they give us a distant early warning of what is happening to our culture. In the art of our day we see symbols galore of alienation and anxiety. However, at the same time there is form amid discord, beauty amid ugliness, some human love in the midst of hatred—a love that temporarily triumphs over death but always loses out in the long run. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The artists thus expresses the spiritual meaning of their culture. Our problem is: Can we read their meaning aright? The teaching of a higher individual needs to be correctly understood. It is not that a separate one exists for each physical body. The consciousness which normally identifies itself with the body—that is, the ego—when looking upward in highest devotion or inward in deepest mediation, comes to the point of contact with universal beings, World-Mind. This is its own higher self, the divine deputy within its own being. However, if devotion or prayer is carried still further, to the very utmost possible stretch of consciousness, the point itself merges into its source. At this moment the being is one’s source. However, “Man shall not see My face and live!” One returns eventually to Earth-consciousness, where one must follow out its requirements. Yet the knowledge of what one is in essence remains the presence of the deputy is always there meanwhile, always felt It may fittingly be called one’s higher individuality. The uniqueness of each person, one’s difference from every other person, may be metaphysically explained as due to the effort of Infinite Mind to express itself infinitely within the finite limitations of time and space, form and appearance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Take Giotto, as a creator to further illustrate this point, in what is called the “little Renaissance” which burgeoned in the fourteenth century. In contrast to the two-dimensional medieval mosaics, Giotto presents a new way of seeing life and nature: gives his paintings three dimensions, and we know see human being and animals expressing and calling forth from us such specific human emotions as care, or pity, or grief, or joy. In the previous, two-dimensional mosaics in the churches of the Middle Age, we feel no human being is necessary to see them—they have their own relationship to God. However, in Giotto, a human being viewing the picture is required; and this human being must take one’s stance as an individual in relation to the picture. Thus the new humanism and the new relation to nature that were to become central in the Renaissance are here born, a hundred years before the Renaissance proper. In our endeavor to grasp these symbols of art, we find ourselves in a realm that beggars our usual conscious thinking. Our task is quite beyond the reach of logic. It brings us to an area in which there are many paradoxes. Take the idea expressed in Shakespeare’s four lines at the end of Sonnet 64: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose, but weep to have that which it fears to lose. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
If you have been trained to accept the logic of our society, you will ask: “Why does he have to weep to have his love? Why can he not enjoy his love?” Thus our logic pushes us always toward adjustment—and adjustment to a crazy World and to a crazy life. And worse yet, we cut ourselves off from understanding the profound depths of experience that Shakespeare is here expressing. We have all had such experiences, but we tend to cover them over. We may look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness. The craven thought then creep into our consciousness that it would have been better not to have seen the tree at all or not to have heard the music. Then we would not be faced with this uncomfortable paradox—knowing that time will come and take my love away, that everything we love will die. However, the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
That we yearn to stretch the brief moment, to postpone our death a year or so is surely understandable. However, such postponement is bound to be a frustrating and ultimately a losing battle. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death. Exploitative power is the simplest and, humanly speaking, most destructive kind of power. It is subjecting persons to whatever use they may have to the one who holds the power. Slavery is, of course, the obvious example—when one person has the power over the bodies and, indeed, over the whole organisms of many persons. Exploitative power identifies power with force. In pioneer America the use of bullets to transform others into lifeless hulks, as well as most other example of physical force, fall into this category. In this sense the use of firearms, when employed at the whim of the person who happens to possess a gun, is a form of exploitative power. In everyday life this kind of power is exercised by those who have been radially rejected, whose lies are so barren that they know no way of relating to other people except exploitation. It is sometimes rationalized as the masculine way of dealing with women during pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
It is interesting that courtly love in the Middle Ages guarded against this kind of power—which would otherwise have been rampant in the society of knights and maidens—by the rule that force was never to be used in love. Exploitative power always presupposes violence or the threat of violence. In this kind of power there is, strictly speaking, no choice or spontaneity at all on the part of the victims. It is true that the subject in consciousness cannot make an object of itself, cannot perceive itself, but there is a being another self which knows the subject, is aware of the subject although the subject is not aware of it. However, there is an important difference to be noted here. First, the transcendental self does not know in the same way that the thinking self knows (by thinking self I mean the subject) for its knowledge is immediate, swifter than the swiftest computing machine. Secondly, it is part of the universal mind, the World Mind, yet mysteriously connected with a limited human mind. Union wit the Overself is not the ultimate end but a penultimate one. What we look up to as the Overself looks up in its own turn to another higher entity. God will strengthen you when you waver. He will be your light when it seems most dark. He will take your hand and be your hope when hope seems to have left. God’s compassion and mercy, with all their cleansing and healing powers, are freely given to all who truly wish to complete forgiveness and will take the steps that lead to it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
What Do You think Really? Inside of You? Is there a God or a Devil? I Mean Truly, What do You Believe?
I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
My Heart Turned to a Small, Tight Knot Inside Me, but His Manner Became Completely Authoritative and Commanding at Once!
And of course, this deepening knowledge of him made me ache for him all the more. I considered again that in my dark preternatural youth, I had made companions for myself who could never really be companions—Gabrielle, who had no need of me; Nicolas, who had gone mad; Louis, who could not forgive me for having seduced him into the realm of the mysterious, even though he had wanted the secrets himself. There is one psychoanalytic term that has gained wide popularity and in popular use has changed its meaning. Such popular use always indicates a significant fact about a society and therefore deserves our attention. I refer to the term “ego.” People say that something is good or bad for their “ego.” They mean by this that their self-feeling—in the sense of the status which they accord themselves—rises when something is good and falls when something is bad for their ego. In this usage ego is only part of the person. My “ego” is not identical with “I” or “self.” It is not identical with the I who is well or ill, who sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, who acts, walks, sits, stands, lies, who is moved by others, by what is seen and experienced. Moreover, what is “good” or “bad” for my who is not at all necessarily good or bad for me, although I may be inclined to think so. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The popular “ego” gains from success, winning in competition, status, being admired, flattered, loved; it does not gain from facing the truth, from loving somebody else, from humility. It behaves like a stock or a piece of merchandise endowed with self-awareness: if it is much in demand it rises, is blown up, feels important; if not, it falls, shrinks, feels it is nothing. Thus, it I an alienated part of the self. Alienation can be like a psychic accident. Like when the soul of a dead person takes over a living body; a spirit possessing a human being; it has to be persuaded to let go. However, while it is only part of the self, it has the tendency to become the focal point of the feeling of identity and to dominate the whole life of the people who ae involved with their “ego” to a significant degree. Their mood fluctuates with their ego. They are haunted by their “ego” and preoccupied with its enhancement and downfall so much so that the vibration and the constriction coming from egotistical individuals may make others sense that they are being forced quite literally out of their physical self. These individuals may feel that they have a life apart from their “ego,” but they stand or fall with it. The “ego” has become their identity and at the same time the main object of their worry, ambition, and preoccupation, crowding out any real concern with themselves and with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The popular ego can serve as the most important model of an alienated concept of identity, even though it may be surpassed in rigidity and fixedness by some other examples of such concepts, to which we shall turn now. There once was a man named Pavel Smerdyakov who, on trial for the murder of his father, suffers his worst misery when the prosecutors asked him to take off his socks. They were very dirty and now everyone could see it. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed. The accidental, unchangeable appearance of his feet, of the nail of his right big toe, here becomes the focal point of his identity. It is on this that Pavel feels the less affluent who stand around him and look at him will judge him and that he judges himself. Very often real or imagined physical attributes, parts of the body image or the entire body image, become focal points of identity. Many beings build around such a negative identity the feeling that this particular feature unalterably determines the course of their lives, and that they are thereby doomed to unhappiness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The idea of escaping alienation is much like how Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt dreams of becoming human again in The Tale of the Body Thief, “I rose from the table, struggling, in my excitement, to move like a human. Ah, move like a human. Think of it, to be inside a human body. To see the Sun, really see it, a tiny blazing ball in a blue sky!” Usually, in these cases, qualities such as attractiveness and beauty are no longer felt to be based on the alive expression and flux of human feelings, but have become fixed and dead features, or a series of poses, as so many Hollywood stars or fashion models These features are cut off from the center of the person and worn like a mask. Unattractiveness is experienced as not possessing this mask. In the same way, other real or imagined attributes, or the ack of them, become focal points for a reified, alienated, negative identity. For example: feeling not sufficiently masculine or feminine, being born on the wrong side of the river, being a member of an underrepresented group or gender against which racial or religious prejudices are directed, and, in the most general form, feeling intrinsically inadequate or bad. I do not imply, of course, that in our society the accident circumstance of being born as the member of one social, national, or religious group or class rather than another does not result in very real, objective difficulties, disadvantages or privileges. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
I am concerned here only with the attitude which the person takes toward such handicaps or advantages or privileges, which is important for one’s ability to deal them. In this attitude the structure of the sense of identity and the way in which such factors as the social background and innate advantages or handicaps are incorporated in the sense of identity play a decisive role. What are the dynamics of such alienated concepts of identity? Sometimes they crystallize around repeated parental remarks which, rather than referring to a particular act of the child, say or imply that the child is or lacks, by its very nature, such and such; that Tom is a lazy good-for-noting or that he is “just like Uncle Harry,” who happens the be the troublemaker in the family. Frequently they develop from an ego-ideal that is alien to the child’s own personality, but about which one has come to feel that, unless one is such and such, one is nothing. Whatever their genetic origin, I shall consider here mainly the phenomenological structure of alienated identity concepts and the dynamics of this structure which tend to perpetuate self-alienation. By making some quality or circumstance, real or exaggerated or imagined, the focal point of a reified identity, I look upon myself as though I were a thing (res) and the quality or circumstance were a fixed attribute of this thing or object. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, the “I” that feels that I am this or that, in doing so, distances itself from the very same reified object attribute which it experiences as determining its identity and very often as a bane on its life. In feeling that I am not such and such, I distinguish between the unfortunate I and the presumably unalterable quality or lack which, for all time, condemns me to have this negative identity. I do not feel that I am doing this or that or failing to do it, but that there is a something in me or about me, or that I lack something and that this, once and for all, makes me this or that, fixes my identity. The person who has this attitude toward oneself usually is unaware of its being a particular attitude with concrete and far-reaching implications. One takes one’s attitude for granted as a natural, inevitable one and is aware only of the painful self-consciousness and self-preoccupation it involves. One cannot imagine how anyone with one’s fate could have any other attitude. The two most significant implications of this attitude to oneself are: the severance from the living I of the reified attribute which is experiences as a fixed, unchangeable quality, and the severance of this reified attribute from its dynamic and structural connection with other qualities, needs, acts, and experiences of the person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In other words, the reified attribute is cut off from the living, developing, fluctuating I in time, since it is experienced as immutable. However, it is also cut off from being experiences as an integral part of the living personality, connected with the totality of the person’s strivings, attitudes, perceptions, feelings, with one’s acting and failing to act. In reality, of course, we can observe that certain actions, moods, and experiences cause changes in the role of the negative identity in the conscious feelings and thoughts of the person. However, one usually does not experience the reified attribute which forms the core of one’s negative self-feeling as something connected with, and due to, one’s own actions and attitudes, but as something fixed on which one has no influence. Furthermore, just as the person’s feeling about oneself may fluctuate with the ups and downs of one’s “ego,” so it also varies with the intensity of the negative self-feeling based on some reified attribute which, at times, may disappear altogether from the conscious thoughts of the person. However, when it reappears it is recognized as the same unfortunate quality that throughout the past has tainted—and will forever taint—the person’s life. Thus, in spite of such fluctuations, the alienated attribute is experienced as a “something” that basically does not and cannot change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To be saddled with a reified, negative identity seems, on the face of it, noting but a painful burden. Yet one often can see people cling to such negative self-images with a great deal of stubbornness and in the face of contradictory evidence. In psychoanalytic therapy, it is often seen that the patient who comes for help tries to convince the therapist that nothing can be done for one, since one is born with such and such a handicap or without such and such an advantage. On closer scrutiny, one may find that such insistence by the patient on the hopelessness of the situation has a way of occurring at a point when the patient is afraid to face an issue, or when one wants to be pitied rather than helped. Thus, the reified identity concept often provides a protection against an anxiety-arousing challenge, a way out of a feared situation, and thereby a certain relief. This relief is dynamically similar to the relief observable in certain hypochondriacal and paranoid patients. It sounds paradoxical to speak of relief in the case of patients who are obviously beset by worry, suffering, and fear as the hypochondriac and the paranoid. However, the hypochondriacal patient who is preoccupied with imagined, anticipated, or real ailments sees oneself as the “customarily handicapped” one and thereby avoids the anxiety-provoking prospect of facing and dealing with one’s real problems. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
One’s hypochondriacal preoccupation get the patient off the sport with oneself—namely, off the spot where one would have to deal with one’s realistic personality problems. There are neuroses which may occur in individuals whose personality is otherwise intact and undistorted, developing as a reaction to an external situation which is filled with conflicts. Character neuroses is a condition in which—through the symptomatic picture may be exactly like that of a situation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformations of the character. They are the result of an insidious chronic process, starting as a rule in childhood and involving greater or lesser intensity. Seen from the surface a character neurosis, too, may result from an actual situation conflict, but a carefully collected history of the person may show that difficult character traits were present long before any confusing situation arose, that the momentary predicament is itself to a large extent due to previously existing personal difficulties, and furthermore that the person reacts neurotically to a life situation which for the average healthy individual does not imply any conflict at all. The situation merely reveals the presence of a neurosis which may have existed for some time. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
In the second place, we are not so much interested in the symptomatic picture of the neurosis. Our interest is possessed predominantly in the character disturbances themselves, because deformations of the personality are the ever-recurring picture in neuroses, whereas symptoms in the clinical sense may vary or be entirely lacking. Also from a cultural viewpoint character formation is more important than symptoms, because it is character, not symptoms, that influences human behavior. With greater knowledge of the structure of neuroses and with the realization that the cure of a symptom does not necessarily mean the cure of a neurosis, psychoanalysts in general have shifted their interest and given more attention to character deformations that to symptoms. Speaking figuratively we may say that the neurotic symptoms are not the volcano itself but rather its eruptions, while the pathogenic conflict, like the volcano, is hidden deep down in the individual, unknown to oneself. These restrictions granted we may rise the question whether neurotic persons today have traits in common which are so essential that we may speak of a neurotic personality of our time. As to the character deformations which accompany different types of neuroses, we are struck by their differences rather than by their similarities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The hysterical character, for instance, is decidedly different from the compulsive character. The differences which strike our attention, however, are differences of mechanisms or, in more general terms, differences in the way the two disturbances manifest themselves and in the ways in which they are solved, such as the great role of projection in the hysterical type as compared with the intellectualization of conflicts in the compulsive type. On the other hand, the similarities which I have in mind to do not concern the manifestations or the ways in which they have brought about, but they concern the content of the conflict itself. To be more exact, the similarities are not so much in the experience which have genetically prompted the disturbance but in the conflicts which are actually moving the person. In Tales of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, Lestat was in Paris, France with his mother Gabrielle at a café on the Left Bank. It was a lovely spring day and a grand time to be in Paris, as all the songs say. He was drinking a beer, reading the English papers, and realized that he was overhearing a conversation. He drifted away again. And Lestat realized that he was overhearing this strange conversation and it was not in English and it was not in French. Gradually he came to know that it was not in any language really, and yet it was fully understandable to him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Lestat then put down his paper, and began to concentrate. On and on it went. It was a sort of argument. He looked down and slowly turned around and there were two beings, seated at the table talking to each other, and just for a moment, it seemed normal—two men in conversation. He started to feel like he was fading out and realized that the two individuals were not human beings. It was painfully clear that there were illusory. They simply were not of the same fabric as everything else. They were not being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source. Like the light in Rembrandt. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. The whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its detail. God and Satan pretended not to see Lestat, but they allowed him to hear their discussion. The devil said he feels for humankind in their wretchedness, and humans have become more bestial than any beast because they have reasons. The Lord agreed that human beings too easily become lax; they need vigilance, even though beings ever errs the while one strives. God proposed that the human beings should be ever active, ever live creation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
God told the Devil that he must go on doing his job. And the Devil did not want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said the he understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he could not simply shirk his duties, it was not that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was amicable. This conversation tells us that it is crucial for us to take action, strive, and put in effort. Forever the active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence. In the beginning in Genesis, when it is declared, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” this may be to intellectualistic. Perhaps sensibility will do, in the beginning was the Sense. In the beginning there was the Deed. The Big Bang was when the cells of God began to divide. One may well be a bit suspicious of offers and guarantees, of salvation by a guru. How this can be done without thwarting Nature’s intent to develop us fully on all sides is difficult to see. If we are granted absolution from such effort, we shall be robbed of the important values implicit in self-effort. This is why people consider human beings to be an experiment. We are supposed to see what we are made of and overcome our destructive nature and heal, love and create. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The searcher who is undeceived by fine phrases and knows when to look for the self-interest behind them, will know also when emphasis on the need of a master is cunningly or emotionally turned into exaggeration of the need. I will be the most deferential of beings before the teaching and in the presence of a truly illuminated being. However, I will stubbornly resist, and stand firm on my ground, when I am asked to surrender my intellectual freedom and become one’s bonded disciple, open no longer to the teaching or influence of any other being. One has to detach oneself—or to let oneself become detached by book or teacher—from false ideas, conventional fallacies, or blind leadership. The statement of high truth made by any prophet or sage will always remain an individual interpretation—this is a point that is too often unnoticed or unknown or unacceptable. All history authenticates it. The highest authority by which any mystic can speak is really one’s higher self’s. One revelation and communication cannot therefore be valid for, or binding upon, other beings. If, however, they do accept one’s pronouncements as such, they do so as a venture of faith. When a mystic takes one’s inner voice to be nothing less than God’s, one’s inner experience to be nothing else than the uttermost union with God, and then proceeds to use them as justification for imposing one’s commands on other mortals, one is no longer a true mystic. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
One has introduced an “other.” One no longer touched the perfect unity of one’s own innermost being but has returned to the World of duality. And because no finite being can really become the infinite God, that “other” reduces itself to being a figment of one’s imagination at best or a lying, possessing spirit at worst. Full enlightenment is not attainable, expect the exuberant emotional fancy of over-enthused followers, for the gulf between being and God is too deep and too wide to be crossed. However, partial enlightenment is attainable, for something like godlike has been reflected into the human being’s heart. However, if it is impossible to become a part of God, it is possible to become a Child of God—that is, a being inspired and guided by God. In time one’s relation to the higher self becomes more intimae than any Earthly friendship, closer than any human union could ever be. Yet it always remains a relation, never becomes an absorption; always a nearness, never a merger. We never become God. We only become a channel for part of God’s light, wisdom, and power. If perfect union, is not attainable, what is attainable is the intimate presence of, and mental communion with, God in our heart, which brings peace and truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. The first is called life fear. This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves—which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear of self-actualization. The opposite fear is called death fear. This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy, the fear of having one’s independence taken away. This is the fear most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate. Both kind of fear have to be confronted, in varying proportions to be sure, by both men and women. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. However, if we are to move to self-realization, the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Power was originally a sociological term, a category used chiefly to describe the actions of nations and armies. However, as students of the problem have increasingly realized that power depends upon emotions, attitudes, and motives, they have turned to psychology for the needed clarification. In psychology, power means the ability to affect, to influence, and to change other persons. Each person exists in an interpersonal web, analogous to magnetic fields of force; and each one propels, repels, connects, identifies with others. Thus such considerations as status, authority, and prestige are central to the problem of power. I have used the phrase “sense of significance” to refer to a person’s conviction that one counts for something, that one has an effect on others, and that one can get recognition from one’s fellows. What is the relationship between power and force? Certainly force, the lowest common denominator of power, has been widely identified with power in America; it is the automatic first association with power of most people in this country. This is the chief reason power has been scorned and disparaged as a dirty word. Power is the coercive force in the middle ground between power as energy and power as violence. Not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
In Loving Memory of Jill Harris’ Grandmother “Boomba.”
My Heart Turned to a Small, Tight Knot Inside Me, but His Manner Became Completely Authoritative and Commanding at Once!
And of course, this deepening knowledge of him made me ache for him all the more. I considered again that in my dark preternatural youth, I had made companions for myself who could never really be companions—Gabrielle, who had no need of me; Nicolas, who had gone mad; Louis, who could not forgive me for having seduced him into the realm of the mysterious, even though he had wanted the secrets himself. There is one psychoanalytic term that has gained wide popularity and in popular use has changed its meaning. Such popular use always indicates a significant fact about a society and therefore deserves our attention. I refer to the term “ego.” People say that something is good or bad for their “ego.” They mean by this that their self-feeling—in the sense of the status which they accord themselves—rises when something is good and falls when something is bad for their ego. In this usage ego is only part of the person. My “ego” is not identical with “I” or “self.” It is not identical with the I who is well or ill, who sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, who acts, walks, sits, stands, lies, who is moved by others, by what is seen and experienced. Moreover, what is “good” or “bad” for my who is not at all necessarily good or bad for me, although I may be inclined to think so. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The popular “ego” gains from success, winning in competition, status, being admired, flattered, loved; it does not gain from facing the truth, from loving somebody else, from humility. It behaves like a stock or a piece of merchandise endowed with self-awareness: if it is much in demand it rises, is blown up, feels important; if not, it falls, shrinks, feels it is nothing. Thus, it I an alienated part of the self. Alienation can be like a psychic accident. Like when the soul of a dead person takes over a living body; a spirit possessing a human being; it has to be persuaded to let go. However, while it is only part of the self, it has the tendency to become the focal point of the feeling of identity and to dominate the whole life of the people who ae involved with their “ego” to a significant degree. Their mood fluctuates with their ego. They are haunted by their “ego” and preoccupied with its enhancement and downfall so much so that the vibration and the constriction coming from egotistical individuals may make others sense that they are being forced quite literally out of their physical self. These individuals may feel that they have a life apart from their “ego,” but they stand or fall with it. The “ego” has become their identity and at the same time the main object of their worry, ambition, and preoccupation, crowding out any real concern with themselves and with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The popular ego can serve as the most important model of an alienated concept of identity, even though it may be surpassed in rigidity and fixedness by some other examples of such concepts, to which we shall turn now. There once was a man named Pavel Smerdyakov who, on trial for the murder of his father, suffers his worst misery when the prosecutors asked him to take off his socks. They were very dirty and now everyone could see it. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed. The accidental, unchangeable appearance of his feet, of the nail of his right big toe, here becomes the focal point of his identity. It is on this that Pavel feels the less affluent who stand around him and look at him will judge him and that he judges himself. Very often real or imagined physical attributes, parts of the body image or the entire body image, become focal points of identity. Many beings build around such a negative identity the feeling that this particular feature unalterably determines the course of their lives, and that they are thereby doomed to unhappiness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The idea of escaping alienation is much like how Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt dreams of becoming human again in The Tale of the Body Thief, “I rose from the table, struggling, in my excitement, to move like a human. Ah, move like a human. Think of it, to be inside a human body. To see the Sun, really see it, a tiny blazing ball in a blue sky!” Usually, in these cases, qualities such as attractiveness and beauty are no longer felt to be based on the alive expression and flux of human feelings, but have become fixed and dead features, or a series of poses, as so many Hollywood stars or fashion models These features are cut off from the center of the person and worn like a mask. Unattractiveness is experienced as not possessing this mask. In the same way, other real or imagined attributes, or the ack of them, become focal points for a reified, alienated, negative identity. For example: feeling not sufficiently masculine or feminine, being born on the wrong side of the river, being a member of an underrepresented group or gender against which racial or religious prejudices are directed, and, in the most general form, feeling intrinsically inadequate or bad. I do not imply, of course, that in our society the accident circumstance of being born as the member of one social, national, or religious group or class rather than another does not result in very real, objective difficulties, disadvantages or privileges. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
I am concerned here only with the attitude which the person takes toward such handicaps or advantages or privileges, which is important for one’s ability to deal them. In this attitude the structure of the sense of identity and the way in which such factors as the social background and innate advantages or handicaps are incorporated in the sense of identity play a decisive role. What are the dynamics of such alienated concepts of identity? Sometimes they crystallize around repeated parental remarks which, rather than referring to a particular act of the child, say or imply that the child is or lacks, by its very nature, such and such; that Tom is a lazy good-for-noting or that he is “just like Uncle Harry,” who happens the be the troublemaker in the family. Frequently they develop from an ego-ideal that is alien to the child’s own personality, but about which one has come to feel that, unless one is such and such, one is nothing. Whatever their genetic origin, I shall consider here mainly the phenomenological structure of alienated identity concepts and the dynamics of this structure which tend to perpetuate self-alienation. By making some quality or circumstance, real or exaggerated or imagined, the focal point of a reified identity, I look upon myself as though I were a thing (res) and the quality or circumstance were a fixed attribute of this thing or object. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, the “I” that feels that I am this or that, in doing so, distances itself from the very same reified object attribute which it experiences as determining its identity and very often as a bane on its life. In feeling that I am not such and such, I distinguish between the unfortunate I and the presumably unalterable quality or lack which, for all time, condemns me to have this negative identity. I do not feel that I am doing this or that or failing to do it, but that there is a something in me or about me, or that I lack something and that this, once and for all, makes me this or that, fixes my identity. The person who has this attitude toward oneself usually is unaware of its being a particular attitude with concrete and far-reaching implications. One takes one’s attitude for granted as a natural, inevitable one and is aware only of the painful self-consciousness and self-preoccupation it involves. One cannot imagine how anyone with one’s fate could have any other attitude. The two most significant implications of this attitude to oneself are: the severance from the living I of the reified attribute which is experiences as a fixed, unchangeable quality, and the severance of this reified attribute from its dynamic and structural connection with other qualities, needs, acts, and experiences of the person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In other words, the reified attribute is cut off from the living, developing, fluctuating I in time, since it is experienced as immutable. However, it is also cut off from being experiences as an integral part of the living personality, connected with the totality of the person’s strivings, attitudes, perceptions, feelings, with one’s acting and failing to act. In reality, of course, we can observe that certain actions, moods, and experiences cause changes in the role of the negative identity in the conscious feelings and thoughts of the person. However, one usually does not experience the reified attribute which forms the core of one’s negative self-feeling as something connected with, and due to, one’s own actions and attitudes, but as something fixed on which one has no influence. Furthermore, just as the person’s feeling about oneself may fluctuate with the ups and downs of one’s “ego,” so it also varies with the intensity of the negative self-feeling based on some reified attribute which, at times, may disappear altogether from the conscious thoughts of the person. However, when it reappears it is recognized as the same unfortunate quality that throughout the past has tainted—and will forever taint—the person’s life. Thus, in spite of such fluctuations, the alienated attribute is experienced as a “something” that basically does not and cannot change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To be saddled with a reified, negative identity seems, on the face of it, noting but a painful burden. Yet one often can see people cling to such negative self-images with a great deal of stubbornness and in the face of contradictory evidence. In psychoanalytic therapy, it is often seen that the patient who comes for help tries to convince the therapist that nothing can be done for one, since one is born with such and such a handicap or without such and such an advantage. On closer scrutiny, one may find that such insistence by the patient on the hopelessness of the situation has a way of occurring at a point when the patient is afraid to face an issue, or when one wants to be pitied rather than helped. Thus, the reified identity concept often provides a protection against an anxiety-arousing challenge, a way out of a feared situation, and thereby a certain relief. This relief is dynamically similar to the relief observable in certain hypochondriacal and paranoid patients. It sounds paradoxical to speak of relief in the case of patients who are obviously beset by worry, suffering, and fear as the hypochondriac and the paranoid. However, the hypochondriacal patient who is preoccupied with imagined, anticipated, or real ailments sees oneself as the “customarily handicapped” one and thereby avoids the anxiety-provoking prospect of facing and dealing with one’s real problems. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
One’s hypochondriacal preoccupation get the patient off the sport with oneself—namely, off the spot where one would have to deal with one’s realistic personality problems. There are neuroses which may occur in individuals whose personality is otherwise intact and undistorted, developing as a reaction to an external situation which is filled with conflicts. Character neuroses is a condition in which—through the symptomatic picture may be exactly like that of a situation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformations of the character. They are the result of an insidious chronic process, starting as a rule in childhood and involving greater or lesser intensity. Seen from the surface a character neurosis, too, may result from an actual situation conflict, but a carefully collected history of the person may show that difficult character traits were present long before any confusing situation arose, that the momentary predicament is itself to a large extent due to previously existing personal difficulties, and furthermore that the person reacts neurotically to a life situation which for the average healthy individual does not imply any conflict at all. The situation merely reveals the presence of a neurosis which may have existed for some time. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
In the second place, we are not so much interested in the symptomatic picture of the neurosis. Our interest is possessed predominantly in the character disturbances themselves, because deformations of the personality are the ever-recurring picture in neuroses, whereas symptoms in the clinical sense may vary or be entirely lacking. Also from a cultural viewpoint character formation is more important than symptoms, because it is character, not symptoms, that influences human behavior. With greater knowledge of the structure of neuroses and with the realization that the cure of a symptom does not necessarily mean the cure of a neurosis, psychoanalysts in general have shifted their interest and given more attention to character deformations that to symptoms. Speaking figuratively we may say that the neurotic symptoms are not the volcano itself but rather its eruptions, while the pathogenic conflict, like the volcano, is hidden deep down in the individual, unknown to oneself. These restrictions granted we may rise the question whether neurotic persons today have traits in common which are so essential that we may speak of a neurotic personality of our time. As to the character deformations which accompany different types of neuroses, we are struck by their differences rather than by their similarities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The hysterical character, for instance, is decidedly different from the compulsive character. The differences which strike our attention, however, are differences of mechanisms or, in more general terms, differences in the way the two disturbances manifest themselves and in the ways in which they are solved, such as the great role of projection in the hysterical type as compared with the intellectualization of conflicts in the compulsive type. On the other hand, the similarities which I have in mind to do not concern the manifestations or the ways in which they have brought about, but they concern the content of the conflict itself. To be more exact, the similarities are not so much in the experience which have genetically prompted the disturbance but in the conflicts which are actually moving the person. In Tales of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, Lestat was in Paris, France with his mother Gabrielle at a café on the Left Bank. It was a lovely spring day and a grand time to be in Paris, as all the songs say. He was drinking a beer, reading the English papers, and realized that he was overhearing a conversation. He drifted away again. And Lestat realized that he was overhearing this strange conversation and it was not in English and it was not in French. Gradually he came to know that it was not in any language really, and yet it was fully understandable to him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Lestat then put down his paper, and began to concentrate. On and on it went. It was a sort of argument. He looked down and slowly turned around and there were two beings, seated at the table talking to each other, and just for a moment, it seemed normal—two men in conversation. He started to feel like he was fading out and realized that the two individuals were not human beings. It was painfully clear that there were illusory. They simply were not of the same fabric as everything else. They were not being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source. Like the light in Rembrandt. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. The whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its detail. God and Satan pretended not to see Lestat, but they allowed him to hear their discussion. The devil said he feels for humankind in their wretchedness, and humans have become more bestial than any beast because they have reasons. The Lord agreed that human beings too easily become lax; they need vigilance, even though beings ever errs the while one strives. God proposed that the human beings should be ever active, ever live creation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
God told the Devil that he must go on doing his job. And the Devil did not want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said the he understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he could not simply shirk his duties, it was not that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was amicable. This conversation tells us that it is crucial for us to take action, strive, and put in effort. Forever the active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence. In the beginning in Genesis, when it is declared, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” this may be to intellectualistic. Perhaps sensibility will do, in the beginning was the Sense. In the beginning there was the Deed. The Big Bang was when the cells of God began to divide. One may well be a bit suspicious of offers and guarantees, of salvation by a guru. How this can be done without thwarting Nature’s intent to develop us fully on all sides is difficult to see. If we are granted absolution from such effort, we shall be robbed of the important values implicit in self-effort. This is why people consider human beings to be an experiment. We are supposed to see what we are made of and overcome our destructive nature and heal, love and create. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The searcher who is undeceived by fine phrases and knows when to look for the self-interest behind them, will know also when emphasis on the need of a master is cunningly or emotionally turned into exaggeration of the need. I will be the most deferential of beings before the teaching and in the presence of a truly illuminated being. However, I will stubbornly resist, and stand firm on my ground, when I am asked to surrender my intellectual freedom and become one’s bonded disciple, open no longer to the teaching or influence of any other being. One has to detach oneself—or to let oneself become detached by book or teacher—from false ideas, conventional fallacies, or blind leadership. The statement of high truth made by any prophet or sage will always remain an individual interpretation—this is a point that is too often unnoticed or unknown or unacceptable. All history authenticates it. The highest authority by which any mystic can speak is really one’s higher self’s. One revelation and communication cannot therefore be valid for, or binding upon, other beings. If, however, they do accept one’s pronouncements as such, they do so as a venture of faith. When a mystic takes one’s inner voice to be nothing less than God’s, one’s inner experience to be nothing else than the uttermost union with God, and then proceeds to use them as justification for imposing one’s commands on other mortals, one is no longer a true mystic. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
One has introduced an “other.” One no longer touched the perfect unity of one’s own innermost being but has returned to the World of duality. And because no finite being can really become the infinite God, that “other” reduces itself to being a figment of one’s imagination at best or a lying, possessing spirit at worst. Full enlightenment is not attainable, expect the exuberant emotional fancy of over-enthused followers, for the gulf between being and God is too deep and too wide to be crossed. However, partial enlightenment is attainable, for something like godlike has been reflected into the human being’s heart. However, if it is impossible to become a part of God, it is possible to become a Child of God—that is, a being inspired and guided by God. In time one’s relation to the higher self becomes more intimae than any Earthly friendship, closer than any human union could ever be. Yet it always remains a relation, never becomes an absorption; always a nearness, never a merger. We never become God. We only become a channel for part of God’s light, wisdom, and power. If perfect union, is not attainable, what is attainable is the intimate presence of, and mental communion with, God in our heart, which brings peace and truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. The first is called life fear. This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves—which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear of self-actualization. The opposite fear is called death fear. This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy, the fear of having one’s independence taken away. This is the fear most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate. Both kind of fear have to be confronted, in varying proportions to be sure, by both men and women. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. However, if we are to move to self-realization, the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Power was originally a sociological term, a category used chiefly to describe the actions of nations and armies. However, as students of the problem have increasingly realized that power depends upon emotions, attitudes, and motives, they have turned to psychology for the needed clarification. In psychology, power means the ability to affect, to influence, and to change other persons. Each person exists in an interpersonal web, analogous to magnetic fields of force; and each one propels, repels, connects, identifies with others. Thus such considerations as status, authority, and prestige are central to the problem of power. I have used the phrase “sense of significance” to refer to a person’s conviction that one counts for something, that one has an effect on others, and that one can get recognition from one’s fellows. What is the relationship between power and force? Certainly force, the lowest common denominator of power, has been widely identified with power in America; it is the automatic first association with power of most people in this country. This is the chief reason power has been scorned and disparaged as a dirty word. Power is the coercive force in the middle ground between power as energy and power as violence. Not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
In Loving Memory of Jill Harris’ Grandmother “Boomba.”
My Heart Turned to a Small, Tight Knot Inside Me, but His Manner Became Completely Authoritative and Commanding at Once!
And of course, this deepening knowledge of him made me ache for him all the more. I considered again that in my dark preternatural youth, I had made companions for myself who could never really be companions—Gabrielle, who had no need of me; Nicolas, who had gone mad; Louis, who could not forgive me for having seduced him into the realm of the mysterious, even though he had wanted the secrets himself. There is one psychoanalytic term that has gained wide popularity and in popular use has changed its meaning. Such popular use always indicates a significant fact about a society and therefore deserves our attention. I refer to the term “ego.” People say that something is good or bad for their “ego.” They mean by this that their self-feeling—in the sense of the status which they accord themselves—rises when something is good and falls when something is bad for their ego. In this usage ego is only part of the person. My “ego” is not identical with “I” or “self.” It is not identical with the I who is well or ill, who sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, who acts, walks, sits, stands, lies, who is moved by others, by what is seen and experienced. Moreover, what is “good” or “bad” for my who is not at all necessarily good or bad for me, although I may be inclined to think so. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The popular “ego” gains from success, winning in competition, status, being admired, flattered, loved; it does not gain from facing the truth, from loving somebody else, from humility. It behaves like a stock or a piece of merchandise endowed with self-awareness: if it is much in demand it rises, is blown up, feels important; if not, it falls, shrinks, feels it is nothing. Thus, it I an alienated part of the self. Alienation can be like a psychic accident. Like when the soul of a dead person takes over a living body; a spirit possessing a human being; it has to be persuaded to let go. However, while it is only part of the self, it has the tendency to become the focal point of the feeling of identity and to dominate the whole life of the people who ae involved with their “ego” to a significant degree. Their mood fluctuates with their ego. They are haunted by their “ego” and preoccupied with its enhancement and downfall so much so that the vibration and the constriction coming from egotistical individuals may make others sense that they are being forced quite literally out of their physical self. These individuals may feel that they have a life apart from their “ego,” but they stand or fall with it. The “ego” has become their identity and at the same time the main object of their worry, ambition, and preoccupation, crowding out any real concern with themselves and with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The popular ego can serve as the most important model of an alienated concept of identity, even though it may be surpassed in rigidity and fixedness by some other examples of such concepts, to which we shall turn now. There once was a man named Pavel Smerdyakov who, on trial for the murder of his father, suffers his worst misery when the prosecutors asked him to take off his socks. They were very dirty and now everyone could see it. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed. The accidental, unchangeable appearance of his feet, of the nail of his right big toe, here becomes the focal point of his identity. It is on this that Pavel feels the less affluent who stand around him and look at him will judge him and that he judges himself. Very often real or imagined physical attributes, parts of the body image or the entire body image, become focal points of identity. Many beings build around such a negative identity the feeling that this particular feature unalterably determines the course of their lives, and that they are thereby doomed to unhappiness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The idea of escaping alienation is much like how Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt dreams of becoming human again in The Tale of the Body Thief, “I rose from the table, struggling, in my excitement, to move like a human. Ah, move like a human. Think of it, to be inside a human body. To see the Sun, really see it, a tiny blazing ball in a blue sky!” Usually, in these cases, qualities such as attractiveness and beauty are no longer felt to be based on the alive expression and flux of human feelings, but have become fixed and dead features, or a series of poses, as so many Hollywood stars or fashion models These features are cut off from the center of the person and worn like a mask. Unattractiveness is experienced as not possessing this mask. In the same way, other real or imagined attributes, or the ack of them, become focal points for a reified, alienated, negative identity. For example: feeling not sufficiently masculine or feminine, being born on the wrong side of the river, being a member of an underrepresented group or gender against which racial or religious prejudices are directed, and, in the most general form, feeling intrinsically inadequate or bad. I do not imply, of course, that in our society the accident circumstance of being born as the member of one social, national, or religious group or class rather than another does not result in very real, objective difficulties, disadvantages or privileges. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
I am concerned here only with the attitude which the person takes toward such handicaps or advantages or privileges, which is important for one’s ability to deal them. In this attitude the structure of the sense of identity and the way in which such factors as the social background and innate advantages or handicaps are incorporated in the sense of identity play a decisive role. What are the dynamics of such alienated concepts of identity? Sometimes they crystallize around repeated parental remarks which, rather than referring to a particular act of the child, say or imply that the child is or lacks, by its very nature, such and such; that Tom is a lazy good-for-noting or that he is “just like Uncle Harry,” who happens the be the troublemaker in the family. Frequently they develop from an ego-ideal that is alien to the child’s own personality, but about which one has come to feel that, unless one is such and such, one is nothing. Whatever their genetic origin, I shall consider here mainly the phenomenological structure of alienated identity concepts and the dynamics of this structure which tend to perpetuate self-alienation. By making some quality or circumstance, real or exaggerated or imagined, the focal point of a reified identity, I look upon myself as though I were a thing (res) and the quality or circumstance were a fixed attribute of this thing or object. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, the “I” that feels that I am this or that, in doing so, distances itself from the very same reified object attribute which it experiences as determining its identity and very often as a bane on its life. In feeling that I am not such and such, I distinguish between the unfortunate I and the presumably unalterable quality or lack which, for all time, condemns me to have this negative identity. I do not feel that I am doing this or that or failing to do it, but that there is a something in me or about me, or that I lack something and that this, once and for all, makes me this or that, fixes my identity. The person who has this attitude toward oneself usually is unaware of its being a particular attitude with concrete and far-reaching implications. One takes one’s attitude for granted as a natural, inevitable one and is aware only of the painful self-consciousness and self-preoccupation it involves. One cannot imagine how anyone with one’s fate could have any other attitude. The two most significant implications of this attitude to oneself are: the severance from the living I of the reified attribute which is experiences as a fixed, unchangeable quality, and the severance of this reified attribute from its dynamic and structural connection with other qualities, needs, acts, and experiences of the person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In other words, the reified attribute is cut off from the living, developing, fluctuating I in time, since it is experienced as immutable. However, it is also cut off from being experiences as an integral part of the living personality, connected with the totality of the person’s strivings, attitudes, perceptions, feelings, with one’s acting and failing to act. In reality, of course, we can observe that certain actions, moods, and experiences cause changes in the role of the negative identity in the conscious feelings and thoughts of the person. However, one usually does not experience the reified attribute which forms the core of one’s negative self-feeling as something connected with, and due to, one’s own actions and attitudes, but as something fixed on which one has no influence. Furthermore, just as the person’s feeling about oneself may fluctuate with the ups and downs of one’s “ego,” so it also varies with the intensity of the negative self-feeling based on some reified attribute which, at times, may disappear altogether from the conscious thoughts of the person. However, when it reappears it is recognized as the same unfortunate quality that throughout the past has tainted—and will forever taint—the person’s life. Thus, in spite of such fluctuations, the alienated attribute is experienced as a “something” that basically does not and cannot change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To be saddled with a reified, negative identity seems, on the face of it, noting but a painful burden. Yet one often can see people cling to such negative self-images with a great deal of stubbornness and in the face of contradictory evidence. In psychoanalytic therapy, it is often seen that the patient who comes for help tries to convince the therapist that nothing can be done for one, since one is born with such and such a handicap or without such and such an advantage. On closer scrutiny, one may find that such insistence by the patient on the hopelessness of the situation has a way of occurring at a point when the patient is afraid to face an issue, or when one wants to be pitied rather than helped. Thus, the reified identity concept often provides a protection against an anxiety-arousing challenge, a way out of a feared situation, and thereby a certain relief. This relief is dynamically similar to the relief observable in certain hypochondriacal and paranoid patients. It sounds paradoxical to speak of relief in the case of patients who are obviously beset by worry, suffering, and fear as the hypochondriac and the paranoid. However, the hypochondriacal patient who is preoccupied with imagined, anticipated, or real ailments sees oneself as the “customarily handicapped” one and thereby avoids the anxiety-provoking prospect of facing and dealing with one’s real problems. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
One’s hypochondriacal preoccupation get the patient off the sport with oneself—namely, off the spot where one would have to deal with one’s realistic personality problems. There are neuroses which may occur in individuals whose personality is otherwise intact and undistorted, developing as a reaction to an external situation which is filled with conflicts. Character neuroses is a condition in which—through the symptomatic picture may be exactly like that of a situation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformations of the character. They are the result of an insidious chronic process, starting as a rule in childhood and involving greater or lesser intensity. Seen from the surface a character neurosis, too, may result from an actual situation conflict, but a carefully collected history of the person may show that difficult character traits were present long before any confusing situation arose, that the momentary predicament is itself to a large extent due to previously existing personal difficulties, and furthermore that the person reacts neurotically to a life situation which for the average healthy individual does not imply any conflict at all. The situation merely reveals the presence of a neurosis which may have existed for some time. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
In the second place, we are not so much interested in the symptomatic picture of the neurosis. Our interest is possessed predominantly in the character disturbances themselves, because deformations of the personality are the ever-recurring picture in neuroses, whereas symptoms in the clinical sense may vary or be entirely lacking. Also from a cultural viewpoint character formation is more important than symptoms, because it is character, not symptoms, that influences human behavior. With greater knowledge of the structure of neuroses and with the realization that the cure of a symptom does not necessarily mean the cure of a neurosis, psychoanalysts in general have shifted their interest and given more attention to character deformations that to symptoms. Speaking figuratively we may say that the neurotic symptoms are not the volcano itself but rather its eruptions, while the pathogenic conflict, like the volcano, is hidden deep down in the individual, unknown to oneself. These restrictions granted we may rise the question whether neurotic persons today have traits in common which are so essential that we may speak of a neurotic personality of our time. As to the character deformations which accompany different types of neuroses, we are struck by their differences rather than by their similarities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The hysterical character, for instance, is decidedly different from the compulsive character. The differences which strike our attention, however, are differences of mechanisms or, in more general terms, differences in the way the two disturbances manifest themselves and in the ways in which they are solved, such as the great role of projection in the hysterical type as compared with the intellectualization of conflicts in the compulsive type. On the other hand, the similarities which I have in mind to do not concern the manifestations or the ways in which they have brought about, but they concern the content of the conflict itself. To be more exact, the similarities are not so much in the experience which have genetically prompted the disturbance but in the conflicts which are actually moving the person. In Tales of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, Lestat was in Paris, France with his mother Gabrielle at a café on the Left Bank. It was a lovely spring day and a grand time to be in Paris, as all the songs say. He was drinking a beer, reading the English papers, and realized that he was overhearing a conversation. He drifted away again. And Lestat realized that he was overhearing this strange conversation and it was not in English and it was not in French. Gradually he came to know that it was not in any language really, and yet it was fully understandable to him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Lestat then put down his paper, and began to concentrate. On and on it went. It was a sort of argument. He looked down and slowly turned around and there were two beings, seated at the table talking to each other, and just for a moment, it seemed normal—two men in conversation. He started to feel like he was fading out and realized that the two individuals were not human beings. It was painfully clear that there were illusory. They simply were not of the same fabric as everything else. They were not being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source. Like the light in Rembrandt. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. The whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its detail. God and Satan pretended not to see Lestat, but they allowed him to hear their discussion. The devil said he feels for humankind in their wretchedness, and humans have become more bestial than any beast because they have reasons. The Lord agreed that human beings too easily become lax; they need vigilance, even though beings ever errs the while one strives. God proposed that the human beings should be ever active, ever live creation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
God told the Devil that he must go on doing his job. And the Devil did not want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said the he understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he could not simply shirk his duties, it was not that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was amicable. This conversation tells us that it is crucial for us to take action, strive, and put in effort. Forever the active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence. In the beginning in Genesis, when it is declared, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” this may be to intellectualistic. Perhaps sensibility will do, in the beginning was the Sense. In the beginning there was the Deed. The Big Bang was when the cells of God began to divide. One may well be a bit suspicious of offers and guarantees, of salvation by a guru. How this can be done without thwarting Nature’s intent to develop us fully on all sides is difficult to see. If we are granted absolution from such effort, we shall be robbed of the important values implicit in self-effort. This is why people consider human beings to be an experiment. We are supposed to see what we are made of and overcome our destructive nature and heal, love and create. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The searcher who is undeceived by fine phrases and knows when to look for the self-interest behind them, will know also when emphasis on the need of a master is cunningly or emotionally turned into exaggeration of the need. I will be the most deferential of beings before the teaching and in the presence of a truly illuminated being. However, I will stubbornly resist, and stand firm on my ground, when I am asked to surrender my intellectual freedom and become one’s bonded disciple, open no longer to the teaching or influence of any other being. One has to detach oneself—or to let oneself become detached by book or teacher—from false ideas, conventional fallacies, or blind leadership. The statement of high truth made by any prophet or sage will always remain an individual interpretation—this is a point that is too often unnoticed or unknown or unacceptable. All history authenticates it. The highest authority by which any mystic can speak is really one’s higher self’s. One revelation and communication cannot therefore be valid for, or binding upon, other beings. If, however, they do accept one’s pronouncements as such, they do so as a venture of faith. When a mystic takes one’s inner voice to be nothing less than God’s, one’s inner experience to be nothing else than the uttermost union with God, and then proceeds to use them as justification for imposing one’s commands on other mortals, one is no longer a true mystic. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
One has introduced an “other.” One no longer touched the perfect unity of one’s own innermost being but has returned to the World of duality. And because no finite being can really become the infinite God, that “other” reduces itself to being a figment of one’s imagination at best or a lying, possessing spirit at worst. Full enlightenment is not attainable, expect the exuberant emotional fancy of over-enthused followers, for the gulf between being and God is too deep and too wide to be crossed. However, partial enlightenment is attainable, for something like godlike has been reflected into the human being’s heart. However, if it is impossible to become a part of God, it is possible to become a Child of God—that is, a being inspired and guided by God. In time one’s relation to the higher self becomes more intimae than any Earthly friendship, closer than any human union could ever be. Yet it always remains a relation, never becomes an absorption; always a nearness, never a merger. We never become God. We only become a channel for part of God’s light, wisdom, and power. If perfect union, is not attainable, what is attainable is the intimate presence of, and mental communion with, God in our heart, which brings peace and truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. The first is called life fear. This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves—which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear of self-actualization. The opposite fear is called death fear. This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy, the fear of having one’s independence taken away. This is the fear most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate. Both kind of fear have to be confronted, in varying proportions to be sure, by both men and women. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. However, if we are to move to self-realization, the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Power was originally a sociological term, a category used chiefly to describe the actions of nations and armies. However, as students of the problem have increasingly realized that power depends upon emotions, attitudes, and motives, they have turned to psychology for the needed clarification. In psychology, power means the ability to affect, to influence, and to change other persons. Each person exists in an interpersonal web, analogous to magnetic fields of force; and each one propels, repels, connects, identifies with others. Thus such considerations as status, authority, and prestige are central to the problem of power. I have used the phrase “sense of significance” to refer to a person’s conviction that one counts for something, that one has an effect on others, and that one can get recognition from one’s fellows. What is the relationship between power and force? Certainly force, the lowest common denominator of power, has been widely identified with power in America; it is the automatic first association with power of most people in this country. This is the chief reason power has been scorned and disparaged as a dirty word. Power is the coercive force in the middle ground between power as energy and power as violence. Not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
In Loving Memory of Jill Harris’ Grandmother “Boomba.”
The Self-Conscious Preoccupation with this Wished-form Magic Object Called Personality Interfere with the Actual Experience for Living
I told you. Such stories always come into our hands. Satanism, vampirism, voodoo, witchcraft, sightings of werewolves; it all comes across my desk. Most of it goes into the trash, obviously. However, Godsmack produced a great song called “Voodoo,” which is about Resurrection. I know the grain of truth when I see it. In daily life the question of identity arises when we want to claim something from the post office, or when we want to pay by check in a store where we are not known, or in crossing a border. On such occasions we are asked: “Who are you, so that I can know for sure that it is you and nobody else?” And we establish our identity by showing a driver’s license or a passport or some similar document which tells our name, our address, the date of our birth, and perhaps some physical characteristics. Together, these will tell us apart from anybody else and will also establish that we are the same person that was born on such and such a date. We have papers to establish our identity, and this paper-identity is something fixed and definite. This is also the meaning of the word “identity,” as applied to people, for the average person. Such paper-identity seems far removed, at first glance, from the current concern of psychoanalysts, philosophers, and other students of the contemporary scene, with a being’s search for and doubt in one’s identity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
However, actually paper-identity is quite central for a person’s search of oneself. It is a telling symbol of alienated identity. It is a kind of identity which is the product of bureaucratic needs of commerce or administration. It is most gruesome and tragic manifestations occurred in our time when being’s identities were reduced to numbers on plantations and or in the penal system, and when countless people fleeing from the terror of the totalitarian states were shunned from country to country because they did not have the right paper-identities. In the case of paper-identities, the person who demands and examines one’s papers is the one who, in one’s role as an official, is alienated from the other person as a human being. Similarly, the guards on the plantations were alienated from their victims. However, many of these victims systematically robbed of any meaningful purpose and dignity in their lives, succumbed to their tormentors and lost their sense of identity long before they lost their lives. In our own and many other societies the loss of identity takes place without the terror of the plantation in more insidious ways. Many beings in our time tend to think of their lives as though they were answering the kind of questionnaire that one has to fill out when, for example, applying for a passport. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Most beings tend to accept the paper-identity as their real identity. It is tempting to do so because it is something fixed and definite and does not require the person be really in touch with oneself. The paper-identity corresponds to the logical propositions concerning identity: A = A, and A is not non-A. However, beings are not a logical proposition, and the paper-identity does not answer the question who this person, identified by some scrap of paper, is as a person. This question is not simple to answer. It has haunted many people increasingly in the last hundred and seventy years. They no longer feel certain who they are because in modern industrial society, they are alienated from nature, alienated from others and from the World around us. The problem of identity and alienation from the self came to the attention of psychoanalysts in the last one hundred years when they observed its role in an increasing number of patients. Many beings suffer in one form or another from the lack of a sense of identity. This may take the form of feeling like an imposter—in their work or in relation to their background, their past, or to some part of themselves that they repress or consciously want to hide because they feel ashamed or guilty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Or else some feel that they ought to have something they ought to have something they lack or imagine they lack, such as material possession, prestige, or certain personal qualities or traits; or they feel that a different husband or wife, or friends different from those they have, would give them the status they want and thereby, miraculously, transform them into full-blown persons. When the lack of a sense of identity becomes conscious, it is often experienced—probably always—as a feeling that compared with others one is not fully a person. Among adults one can observe two frequent reactions to the conscious or unconscious feeling of not being fully a being, of not having found an identity acceptable to oneself. One is an anxious retreat or depressive resignation, or a mixture of these. The other is a more or less conscious effort at disguise, at playing a role, at presenting an artificial façade to the World. These reactions are not mutually exclusive. They usually occur together, one of them being more emphasized or closer to consciousness than the other. The fear or exposure is present in both, but especially strong in people who rely on a façade. They tend to feel that they travel with a forged passport, under an assumed identity. When their disguise and the reasons for it have been analyzed, the sense of a lack of identity often comes to the fore as strongly as in those who, to begin with, have been aware of and suffered from the feeling of not really or fully being a person with a meaningful place in life. Both then to feel that they do not really know who they are, what they want, or how they feel about other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When these people consult an analyst, they often expect, implicitly or explicitly, that one will tell them who they are or who they should be. Their wish and search is for a definite, fixed identity. They want to be a personality. Often these are people who suffer from over-adaptation to whatever situation they are in, and to whomever they are dealing with at the moment. They have been described pointedly in several pays and stories by Pirandelio. They long for a definite, fixed, circumscribed personality. Having such a personality, as one has a possession, they hope will solve their dilemma. Having such a personality, they feel, is good; not having it, bad. Their wish is to possess a definite identity does not and cannot solve the problem of their alienation from themselves, because it actually is the continuation of alienation. They want to substitute a fixed, reified personality for the on-going process of living, feeling, acting, and thinking in which alone they could find themselves. They search for a definite, stable shell called personality to which they want to cling. Their quest is self-defeating, because what they search for is an alienated concept of a thing, rather than a living, developing person. Their wish is a symptom, not a cure. In this symptom, however, both the malady of alienation and the longing for more meaningful life find expression, even thought in a way which perpetuates the ill form which they seek to escape. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The self-conscious preoccupation with this wished-form magic object called personality interfere with the actual experience for living. In calling the object of these people’s search an alienated concept of identity, I do not mean a scientific or even an explicit concept. I am describing an implicit concept, which becomes apparent only in the analysis of the underlying, often not conscious, assumptions that direct this kind of search. This applies equally to the following examples of alienated concepts of identity. Talking of fears and defenses, I am afraid that by this time many being will have become impatient about such an extensive discussion of so simple a question as what constitutes a neurosis. In defending myself I may point out the psychic phenomena are always intricate, that while there are seemingly simple questions there is never a simple answer, that the predicament we meet here at the beginning is no exceptional one, but will accompany us throughout the essay, whatever problems we shall tackle, The particular difficulty in the description of a neurosis is possessed in the fact that a satisfactory answer can be given neither with psychological nor with sociological tools alone, but that they must be taken up alternately, first one and then the other, as in fact we have done. If we should regard a neurosis only from the point of view of its dynamics and psychic structure we should hypostatize a normal human being: one does not exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
We run into more difficulties as soon as we pass the borderline of our own country or of countries with a culture similar to our own. And if we regard a neurosis only from the sociological point of view as a mere deviation from the behavior pattern common to a certain society, we neglect grossly all we know about the psychological characteristics of a neurosis, and no psychiatrist of any school or country would recognize the results as what one is accustomed to designate a neurosis. The reconcilement of the two approaches is possessed in a method of observation that considers the deviation both in the manifest picture of the neurosis and in the dynamics of the psychic processes, but without considering either deviation as the primary and decisive one. The two must be combined. This in general is the way we have gone in pointing out that fear and defenses are one of the dynamic centers of a neurosis, but constitutes a neurosis only when deviating in quantity or quality from the fears and defenses patterned in the same culture. We have to go one step father in the same direction. There is still another essential characteristic of a neurosis and that is the presence of conflicting tendencies of the existence of which, or at least of the precise content of which, the neurotic oneself is unaware, and for which one automatically tires to reach certain compromise solutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is this latter characteristic which in various forms Dr. Freud has stressed as an indispensable constituent of neuroses. What distinguishes the neurotic conflict from those commonly existing in a culture is neither their content nor the fact that they are essentially unconscious—in both respects the common cultural conflicts may be identical—but the fact that in the neurotic the conflicts are sharper and more accentuated. The neurotic person attempts and arrives at compromises solutions—not inopportunely classified as neurotic—and these solutions are less satisfactory than those of the average individual and are achieved at great expense to the whole personality. Reviewing all these considerations, we are not yet able to give a well-rounded definition of a neurosis, but we can arrive at a description: a neurosis is a psychic disturbance brought about by fear and defenses against these fears, and by attempts to find compromise solutions for conflicting tendencies. For practical reasons only if it deviates from the pattern common to the particular culture, then is it advisable to call this disturbance a neurosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Some perceive their World as boring and their stature as lowly, and these beings long to break away from their predicament, to soar—but in the quickest, most inexpensive way. The devil can provide beings with a mirror on this longing and immerses one in its consequences. Some of these consequences are delightful—as they are for most overachievers—but many of them disastrous. In the end, most are able to reassess their expansiveness, appreciate the value of one’s limitations, and thus become a more enriched and deliberate person. One must think of what life can be—its temptations, its catastrophes, and its joys. What is life and what are damnation and salvation? What does it mean to be a human being? God is the occult of the Universe. God created humans in his own image and likeness. I suspect that is the key. Nobody knows what it really means, you know. God is a creative force. And so are we. He told Adam to “Increase and multiply.” That is what the first organic cells did, increased and multiplied. Not merely changed shape but replicated themselves. God is a creative force. He made the whole Universe out of himself through cell division. That is why the devils are so fully of envy—the bad Angels, I mean. They are not creative creatures; they have no bodies, no cells, they are spirit. And I suspect it was not envy so much as a form of suspicion—that God was making a mistake in making another engine of creativity in Adam, so like himself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The Angels probably felt the physical Universe was bad enough, with all these replicating cells, but thinking, talking beings who could increase and multiply? They were probably outraged by the whole experiment. That was their sin. God has a body and always did. The secret of cell dividing life lies within God. And all living cells have a tiny part of God’s spirits in them, that is the missing piece as to what makes life happen in the first place, what separates it from nonlife. It is exactly like Anne Rice’s vampiric genesis. The first spirit of Amel—one evil entity—infused the bodies of all the vampires. Well, the humans share in the spirit of God in the same way. People yearn to believe that the God of progress—our great machines, our vast technology, our supernational corporations, now even our nuclear weapons—all these, we yearn to believe, will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring us vast gains to humanity. It is indeed thrilling to realize that out of the same milieu of strive, intense activity, even cruelty, came our political proclamation: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We now living in a person when vast numbers of people are dedicated to interpreting evil in such a way that it will eventuate in good. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Power is the ability to cause or prevent change. It has two dimensions. One is power as potentiality, or latent power. This is power that has not yet been fully developed; it is the ability to cause a change at some future time. We speak of this future change as possibility, a word which comes directly from the same root as power, namely posse, “to be able.” The other dimension is power as actuality. It is to this aspect of power I shall be referring in this chapter. Ancient Greek philosophers define power as being—that is to say, there is no being without power. And since power is the ability to chance, being is in continual flux. This definition has come down the mainstream and tributaries of philosophy through the ages to contemporary ontological thinkers like Paul Tillich, who describes power similarly as “the power of being.” The philosopher of life, such as Nietzsche with his will to power emphasize the element of power in all living things. Power is for them an expression of life. No teaching can be a final complete and exhaustive one. The Universe may yield its secret but being’s minds are not the World-Mind; it cannot put into finite words what is greater than itself. When we attempt to identify power with the life process itself, there can be danger. This would lead us astray. There are many things in the life process—such as consciousness, desire, curiosity—which may be allied with power but are not to be identified with it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
If a being claims to know what God is in the same way that God knows it, one is talking nonsense, and falling into the sin of spiritual pride. No one can penetrate this irreducible mystery expect in one’s own imagination, speculation, or psychic fantasy. No human effort can plumb the depth of the ultimate power. No human being has found the truth in all its angles, nor uttered the last word upon it. Whatever knowledge a mystic may acquire through trance or intuition, it will always be limited. The World-Mind’s knowledge is always absolute. The circumferences of these two circles can never coincide. Power and love can be allied, but they also can be contrasted; the distinction between them must be kept clear. Power can be identified only with the original power of being itself, from which beings gets its start. Beware of professionalism in this field, of the professional expounder of truth and the professional seeker of it. Both Way and Goa are far simpler than most of them seem to think it is, and markedly unlike the impression left by many writings and lectures, books and teachings, whether ancient or modern. First at the beginning of the Long Path, and again at the beginning of the Short Path a master, a spiritual guide, is really required. However, outside of these two occasions an aspirant had better walk alone. The teacher oneself has to go to this inner source for one’s own enlightenment, why not go to it directly yourself? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
It may be slower but it will be much safer, present-day conditions being what they are, to teach oneself and liberate oneself. Something more is needed than what books or even gurus can give one. This can only be found within oneself. The courage needed for such a standpoint must also be found, and can be, within oneself. For curious reason we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence people short-circuit the more dangerous building of a relationship by leaping immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated mechanically. However, intimacy that begins and remains on the physical level tends to become inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality simultaneously. Only by doing this one can overcome personal alienation. No wonder the meeting of new persons brings a throb of anxiety as well as the joy of expectation; and as we go deeper into the relationship each new depth is marked by some new joy and new anxiety. Each meeting can be a harbinger of an unknown fate in store for us but also a stimulus toward the exciting pleasure of authentically knowing another person. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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You Really think Angels Will Come in the End and Take Us Away– Human Beings can Reach Heaven Only through Hell?!
I did not know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him in some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts. I myself has this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere—in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them—and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt’s paintings would have us to believe. We find in every culture the conflict between routine and the attempt to get back to the fundamental realities of existence. To help in this attempt has been one of the functions of art and of religion, even though religion itself has eventually become a new form of routine. Even the most primitive history of beings shows us an attempt to get in touch with the essence of reality by artistic creations. Primitive beings are not satisfied with the practical function of their tools and weapon, but strives to adorn and beautify them, transcending their utilitarian function. This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Aside from art, the most significant way of breaking through the surface of routine and of getting in touch with the ultimate realities of life is to be found in what may be called by the general term of “ritual.” I am referring here to ritual in the broad sense of the word, as we find it in the performance of a Greek drama, for instance, and not only to rituals in the narrower religious sense. What was the function of the Greek drama? Fundamental problems of human existence were presented in an artistic and dramatic form, and participating in the dramatic performance, the spectator—though not as a spectator in our modern sense of the consumer—was carried away from the sphere of daily routine and brought in touch with oneself as a being, with roots of one’s existence. I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt’s soul in the end. Rembrandt touched ground with his feet, and in this process gained strength by which he was brought back to himself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good? He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of beings. Many hardly ever get out of the realm of human-made conventions and things, and hardly ever break through the surface of one’s routine, aside from grotesque attempts to satisfy the need for a ritual as we see it practiced in lodges and fraternities. The only phenomenon approaching the meaning of a ritual, is the participation of the spectator in competitive sports; here at least, one fundamental problem of human existence is dealt with: the fight between beings and the vicarious experience of victory and defeat. However, what a primitive and restricted aspect of human existence, reducing the richness of human life to one partial aspect! If there is a fire, or a car collision in a big city, scores of people will gather and watch. Millions of people are fascinated daily by reporting of crimes and by detective stories and artificial news. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Many religiously go to movies in which crime and passion are the two central themes. All this interest and fascination is not simply an expression of bad taste and sensationalism, but of a deep longing for a dramatization of ultimate phenomena of human existence, life and death, crime and punishment, the battle between beings and nature. However, while Greek drama dealt with these problems on a high artistic and metaphysical level, our modern drama and ritual are crude and do not produce any cathartic effect. All this fascination with competitive sports, crime and passion, shows the need for breaking through the routine surface, but the way of its satisfaction shows the extreme poverty of our solution. The marketing orientation is closely related to the fact that the need to exchange has become a paramount drive in modern beings. It is, of course, true that even in a primitive economy based on a rudimentary form of division of labor, beings exchange goods with each other within the tribe or among neighboring tribes. The being who produces cloth exchanges it for grain which one’s neighbor may have produced, or for sickles or knives made by the blacksmith. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
With increasing division of labor, there is increasing exchange of good, but normally the exchange of goods is nothing but a means to an economic end. In the capitalistic society exchanging has become an end in itself. The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of the sense of dignity which is so characteristic of beings even in most primitive cultures. One must lose almost all sense of self, of oneself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and being who have become things have no self. Rembrandt’s skills were great—and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with—that not only could he see that goodness in beings, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole. One cannot fully appreciate the nature of alienation without considering one specific aspect of modern life: its routinization, and the repression of the awareness of the basic problems of human existence. We touch here upon a universal problem of life. Beings have to earn their daily bread, and this is always a more or less absorbing task. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
One has to take care of the many time- and energy-consuming tasks of daily life, and one is enmeshed in a certain routine necessary for the fulfillment of these tasks. One builds a social order, conventions, habits and ideas, which help one to perform what is necessary, and to live with one’s fellow beings with a minimum of friction. It is characteristic of all culture that it builds human-made, artificial World, superimposed on the natural World in which a being lives. However, only if one remains in touch with the fundamental facts of one’s existence, if one can experience the exaltation of love and solidarity, as well as the tragic fact of one’s aloneness and of the fragmentary character of one’s existence, then beings cannot fulfill themselves. If one is completely enmeshed in the routine and in the artifacts of life, if one cannot see anything but human-made, commonsense appearance of the World, one loses one’s touch and the grasp of oneself and the World. However, with each portrait Rembrandt understood the grace and goodness of humankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and wisdom which resides in every soul. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
As a result of the harmony Rembrandt possessed, his skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person oneself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work. He taught in many places, said on many occasions, “No one saves us but ourselves; no one can and no one may. Each alone must tread the path.” We can hear and see the echoes of these beliefs that Rembrandt expressed in the faces he painted. They were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become. If we cannot find a genuine indication of the presence of God-consciousness in a person by some fleeting or permanent reflection in the mirror of our own internal experience, then we must perforce abandon our would-be discipleship to the care of the divinity that is possessed hidden somewhere at the back of our minds. This is why the merchants of the Drapers’ Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God’s saints. However, nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. “This is my vision,” said Rembrandt to God. In the absence of a master let one follow a lone path, welcoming whatever one can learn from competent authorities but attaching oneself to none. The ways of success are still open to aspirants. Nobody should overrate the help which a spiritual guide is able to give and underrate one’s own resources. The quest is a work whose continuity goes on for a whole lifetime, whereas the personal contact which is needed to make a guide’s help effective can only be gotten occasionally at most and then only for limited periods of time. I give the warning because I know from several of my correspondents that this is a common tendency among beginners and even among those who ought to know better. The importance of a teacher is somewhat overrated. If one continues one’s program of study, prayer, community service, and if one appeals to one’s own higher self for guidance, one will certainly continue to progress. Earthly responsibilities will not interfere, for the time spent away from prayer is also part of the spiritual life. Towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, the Devil grew suspicious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The Devil did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He had believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore Worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other being in the cosmos—they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire. Although Rembrandt knew his discovery of being born out of, and that he still remained rooted in the Infinite Mind of God, it was a tremendous revelation but it did not make him identical with God. It made the mystical channel only for the cosmic mind, not one with it. He touched the cosmic and did not become entirely transformed into it. Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbreestraat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Human beings can only hope to realize the Overself which is a ray or intermediary, but not the World-Mind itself. For the latter is too vast and infinite and remote. Hence when mystics talk of knowing God or feeling God, this is only partly true for they can never know or feel God in his fullness. The soul is as close as we can approach to that Mind, but surely it is enough. For it reflects something of the Mind’s nature. No being we know of can come to know God as God is in himself, for that is impossible, but all beings can come to know God as God is in relation to us. This is because the Overself is all being’s contact-point with the World-Mind. We are not God but rather an emanation from God. We are still beings but there is something Godlike in the centre of our being. The Deity is inaccessible but that centre is not. Finally, as Rembrandt lay on his deathbed the Devil pranced about, gleefully, ready to snatch Rembrandt’s soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. However, the Angels and saints cried to God to intervene. “In all the World, who knows more about goodness?” they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. “Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
When it is said that the Infinite Being cannot be known by the finite mind it is not meant that the Infinite Being is forever unknowable by human beings. For there is in everyone of us a link between the two, and if a being is willing to let go of one’s Worldly concerns long enough to find one’s way to that link—whether by reflection or by prayer—one will discover that this link—intuition can lead one into the Infinite Presence. At that sacred moment one becomes IT because one forgets the personal self. It exists whether one exists or not, but one exists only in dependence upon it. If the very interesting question be asked, “How did the first mortal come to discover this Presence?” I suggest that we may draw near to the holy of Holies yet never enter it, feel its eternal atmosphere yet never understand it. God alone knows why this manifestation should be. Even the mystic never attains God in its fullness but only that ray of God within oneself, which is the soul. Although such an attainment is imperfect in the conventional mystic, the philosophic one can hope to attain perfection. However, neither can cross the Overself’s farthest boundary—but that is another matter. That which one finds deep within oneself is, one understands intuitively, a reflected ray from that which exists behind the whole Universe but it is still only a ray. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage. Well, he would burry the life of Rembrandt in obscurity. He would see to it that all the man’s personal possessions and records were swallowed by the great flow of time. And that is of course why we know almost nothing of Rembrandt’s true life, or what sort of person he was. Beings may know the soul but not God. They may not see the face, or understand the nature, of the final essential reality—and live. One who claims such experience practices self-deception and is caught in illusion. Nonetheless, the Devil could not control the fate of the paintings. Try as he might, he could not make people burn them, throw them away, nor set them aside for the newer, more fashionable artist. In fact, a curious thing happened, seemingly without a marked beginning. Rembrandt became the most admired of all painters who had ever lived; Rembrandt became the greatest painter of all time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
I took a trip to San Jose, California, the Silicone Valley, to search from lost Rembrandts, before the clever flock of psychics guarding such antiquities sensed my meddlesome telepathic scanning—which they do with remarkable efficiency—and quickly cut me off. Many people wondered where the Winchester Mansion gets its money and somehow thought I knew. There once was a staggering abundance of gold and jewels in its vaults. Its investments in the great banks of Europe are legendary. It owns property in many cities, which alone could sustain it, if it did not possess anything else. And then there are its various treasures—paintings, statues, tapestries, antique furnishings and ornaments—all of which it has acquired in connection with various occult cases and upon which it places no monetary value, for the historical and scholarly value exceeds any appraisal which could be made. The Winchester once has a library alone worth a king’s ransom in any Earthly currency. There were manuscripts in all languages, indeed some from the famous old library of Alexandria burnt centuries ago, and others from the libraries of the martyred Cathars, whose culture is no more. There were texts from ancient Egypt for a glimpse of which archaeologists would have cheerfully committed murder. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
There were texts by preternatural beings of several known species, including vampires. There were letters and archives in these documents supposedly written by me, but which had been authenticated and predated my birth. Some of the documents were also drafted by Mrs. Winchester in the Blue Séance room. When they assert that they have untied with God, they have, if truly attained, united with God’s deputy, their higher self, their own divine soul—which is not the same. And if they have deceived themselves then they have untied only with their conception of God. That is, they have never gone outside the enclosing circle of their own thought. The five senses cannot perceive It and the thinking faculties cannot conceive It. It cannot be brought down to the level of humans nor can human raise themselves to its height. Whoever believes that one experiences the Absolute at any time, experiences only an imagination of one’s own brain. The Overself is so close to God, so akin to the World-Mind that no being need look farther, or aspire higher. Our finite minds cannot lift more than the smallest corner of the smallest corner of the infinite veil behind which the Ultimate Mind eludes us. No one overwhelmed by the experience of Enlightenment has yet said the last word about Absolute Truth; for no words can either exhaust it or even touch it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
I wince to think of how much time has been wasted by intelligent men and women arguing about whether psychotherapy cures and trying to fit psychotherapy into the Western twenty-first century medicine. Our task is to be a guide, friend, and interpreter to persons on their journeys through their private Hells and purgatories. Specifically, our task is to help patients get to the point where they can decide whether to they wish to remain victims—for to be a victim has real benefits in terms of power over one’s family and friends and other secondary gains—or whether they choose to leave this victim-state and venture though purgatory with the hope of achieving some sense of paradise. Our patients often, toward the end, are understandably frightened by the possibility of freely deciding for themselves whether to take their chances by completing the quest they have bravely begun. All though history it is true that only by going through Hell does one have any chance of reaching heave. The journey through Hell is part of the journey that cannot be omitted—indeed, what one learns in Hell is prerequisite to arriving at any good value thereafter. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Homer has Odysseus visit the underworld, and there—and only there—can he get the knowledge that will enable him to get safely back to Ithaca. Virgil has Aeneas go into the netherworld and there talk to his father, in which discussion he gets directions as to what to do and what not to do in the founding of the great city of Rome. How fitting it is that each of these gets a vita wisdom which is learned in the descent into Hell! Without this knowledge there is no success in finding direction by which to go, or achieving the things of paradise—purity of experience purity of heart. Dante makes the journey in person, he himself goes through Hell and then is enabled to discover paradise at the end of his journey. Dante writes his great poem to enable the rest of us also to go ultimately to paradise. Human beings can reach Heaven only through Hell. Without suffering, or without a probing of one’s fundamental aims, one cannot get to Heaven. Even a purely secular Heaven has the same requirements. The agony, the horror, the sadness, are a necessary prelude to self-realization and self-fulfillment. In Europe multitudes go to church on Good Friday to learn the triumphant experience of Easter, the resurrection. They hear testimony that Jesus is crucified, and know that the ascent to Heaven must be preceded by death on Earth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In America we seem, by our practice, to act on the wish that we could pass over the despair of mortification and know only the exaltation of ascent. We seem to believe that we can be reborn without ever dying. Such is the spiritual version of the American Dream! We also need to have the courage to relate to other beings, the capacity to risk one’s self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy. It is the courage to invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an increasing openness. Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that is we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected. A common practice in our day is to avoid working up the courage required for authentic intimacy by shifting the issue to the body, making it a matter of simple physical courage. It is easier in our society to be unclothed physically than to be exposed psychologically or spiritually—easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experiences as making us more vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
You Follow Me and I Will be Your Guide and Lead You Forth through an Eternal Place there You Shall See the Ancient Spirits!
Remember, beginnings are always hard and most are artificial. It was the best of times and the worst of times—really? When! And all happy families are not alike; even Sarah Winchester must have realized that. Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I do not believe that rescuing one poor mortal from such a fiend can conceivably save my soul. As one of the Sons of Liberty of the American Revolutionary War of 1775, I have taken life too often defending the thirteen colonies—unless one believes that the power of one good deed is infinite. I do not know whether or not I believe that. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty—eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I have done. Nevertheless I like saving those innocents from their fate. I feel an obligation to a World you love because that World for you is still intact. It is conceivable your own sensitivity might become the instrument of madness. You speak of works of art and natural beauty. I wish I had the artist’s power to bring alive for you the Vince of the fifteenth century, my master’s palace there, and the love I felt for him when I was a young boy. Oh, if I could only make those times come alive for either you or me…for only an instant! What would it be worth? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
And what a sadness it is to me that time does not dim the memory of that period, that it becomes all the richer and more magical in light of the World I see today. If you would persuade, you must appeal first to interest rather than intellect. This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this World. However, courage is not the opposite of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair. Nor is the courage required mere stubbornness—we shall surely have to create with others. Yet, if you do not open your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole. A chief characteristic of this courage is that it requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum. The emptiness within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic. When we focus our attention on the actual neurotic difficulties, we recognize that neuroses are generated not only by incidental individual experience, but also by the specific cultural conditions under which we live. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In fact the cultural conditions not only lend weight and color to the individual experiences but in the last analysis determine their particular form. It is an individual fate, for example, to have a domineering or self-sacrificing mother, but it is only under definite cultural conditions that we find domineering or self-sacrificing mothers, and it is also only because of these existing conditions that such an experience will have an influence on later life. Courage, however, is not to be confused with rashness. What masquerades as courage may turn out to be simply a bravado used to compensate for one’s unconscious fear and to prove one’s machismo, like the hot fliers in World War II. The ultimate end of such rashness is getting one’s self killed, or at least one’s head battered in with a police officer’s billy club—both of which are scarcely productive ways of exhibiting courage. When we realize the great import of cultural conditions on neuroses the biological and physiological conditions, which are considered by Dr. Freud to be their root, recede into the background. The influence of these latter factors should be considered only on the basis of well established evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes it possible for all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither aware into mere facsimiles of virtue. This orientation of mine has led to some new interpretations for a number of basic problems in neuroses. Though these interpretations refer to disparate questions such as the problem of masochism, the implications of the neurotic need for affection, the meaning of neurotic guilt feelings, they all have a common basis in an emphasis on the determining role that anxiety plays in bringing about neurotic character trends. In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. Assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality. This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of nature. The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The cute little puppy similarly becomes an intelligent and brave dog on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. However, a man or a woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. This is why courage is considered as ontological—it is essential to our being. If one believes that the essentials of psychoanalysis is possessed in certain basic trends of thought concerning the role of unconscious processes and the way in which they find expression, and in the form of therapeutic treatment that brings these processes to awareness, then what I present is psychoanalysis. If pursued one-sidedly and without foundations in the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud, even a productive insight into psychological processes can become sterile. We cannot escape the fact that all psychological problems are necessarily profoundly intricate and subtle. If there is anyone who is not willing to accept this fact one is warned not to read any further least one find oneself in a maze and be disappointed in one’s search for ready formulae. Unfortunately reading about one’s satiation will not cure one; in what one reads one may recognize others much more readily than oneself. We use the term neurotic quite freely today without always having, however, a clear conception of what it denotes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Often the term neurotic is hardly more than a slightly high-brow way of expressing disapproval: one who formerly would have been content to say lazy, sensitive, demanding or suspicious, is now likely to say instead neurotic. Yet we do have something in mind when we use the term, and without being quite aware of it we apply certain criteria to determine its choice. First of all, neurotic persons are different from the average individuals in their reactions. We should be inclined to consider neurotic, for example, a young lady who prefers to remain in the rank and file, refuses to accept and increased salary and does not wish to be identified with her superiors, or an artist who earns thirty dollars a week but could earn more if he gave me more time to his work, and who prefers instead to enjoy life as well as he can on that amount, to spend a good deal of his time in the company of women or in indulging in technical hobbies. The reason we should call such persons neurotic is that most of us are familiar, and exclusively familiar, with a behavior pattern that implies wanting to get ahead in the World, to get ahead of others, to earn more money than the bare minimum for existence. These examples show that one criterion we apply in designating a person as neurotic is whether one’s mode of living coincides with any of the recognized behavior patterns of out time. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If the girl without competitive drives, or at least without apparent competitive drives, lived in some Pueblo Indian culture, she would be considered entirely normal, or if the artist lived in a village in Southern Italy or in Mexico he, too, would be considered normal, because in these environments it is inconceivable that anyone should want to earn more money or to make any greater effort than is absolutely necessary to satisfy immediate needs. Going father back, in Greece the attitude of wanting to work more than one’s needs required would have been considered absolutely indecent. Thus the term neurotic, while originally medical, cannot be used now without its cultural implications. One can diagnose a broken leg without knowing the cultural background of the patient, but one would run a great risk in calling an Indian boy psychotic because he told us that he had visions in which he believed. In the particular culture of these Indians the experience of visions and hallucinations is regarded as a special gift, a blessing from spirits, and they are deliberately induced as conferring a certain prestige on the person who has them. With us a person would be neurotic or psychotic who talked by the hour with his deceased grandfather, whereas such communication with ancestors is a recognized pattern in some Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
A person who felt mortally offended if the name of a deceased relative were mentioned we should consider neurotic indeed, but one would be absolutely normal in the Jicarilla Apache culture. A man mortally frightened by the approach of a menstruating woman we should consider neurotic, while with many primitive tribes fear concerning menstruation is the average attitude. Another example, people who consider storming area 51 are neurotic for they do not know what dangers the government could be protecting us from. The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time. Today, for example, if a mature and independent woman were to consider herself a fallen woman, unworthy of the love of a decent man, because she had had pleasures of the flesh, she would be suspected of a neurosis, at least in many circles of society. Some one hundred and seventeen years ago, this attitude of guilt would have been considered normal. The conception of normality varies also with the different classes of society. Members of the feudal classes, for example, find it normal for a man to be lazy all the time, active only at hunting or warring, whereas a person of the small bourgeois class showing the same attitude would be considered decidedly abnormal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This variation is found also according to gender differences, as far as they exist in society, as they do in Western culture, where men and women are supposed to have different temperaments. For a woman to become obsessed with the dread of growing old as she approaches the forties is, again, normal, while a man getting jittery about age at that period of life would be neurotic. However, not necessarily in the age of information, with all the obstacles and increased competition. Nowadays, single men may worry about growing old around age forty also because their energy is fading and they never did anything they consider noteworthy to achieve the success they desire and still do not have kinds and know they are burning out. To some extent every educated person knows that there are variations in what is regarded as normal. We know that in China, many of the people have a different diet than Americans. We know that some cultures have different conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness; that the medicine-man has different ways of curing the sick from those used by the modern physician. That there are, however, variations not only in customs but also in drives and feelings, is less generally understood, though implicitly or explicitly it has been stated by anthropologists. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For good reasons every culture clings to the belief that its own feelings and drives are the one normal expressions of human nature, and psychology has not made an exception to this rule. It is also true that there is a legitimate need for more consumption as beings develop culturally and have more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, book and so forth. However, of crazing for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of beings. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give beings a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. With a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslaves beings. Many beings today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially new things. One is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The original front-porch lamp was recently restored, refurbished, and reinstalled! Looks good for over 100 years old!
To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite second. Modern beings, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest booty or department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, new ways of busting down and twerking, and oneself having plenty of money in which to buy them and make it rain. One would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of “muffins” and gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer and bigger things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than one. Significantly enough, one of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property has undergone a profound change. In the older attitude, certain sense of loving possession existed between a being and their property. It grew on one. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one had to part with Pointe du Lac mansion and plantation because it could not be used anymore. There is very little left on this sense of property today. One is ready to forget brand loyalty and throw away the BMW for a Tessela, ditch granny’s Victorian for a loft. One loves the newness of the thing bought, and ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Some are lovable because they admit to their human problems at every step and never pretend to artificial virtues. In some cases, we are aware that we have reached an impasse similar to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, a place that is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that reflects the gleams is gone, with tremulous cadence slow, and bringing the eternal note of sadness. We go astray from the straight road and awake to find ourselves alone in a dark wood. A dark World of not only sin but of ignorance. It becomes difficult to understand oneself or the purpose of one’s life and this may require some high ground, some elevation of perspective, by which to perceive the structure of one’s experience in its totality. Our sights may still be set high above the Mount Everest, the peak of joy, but we are unable to make our journey there by ourselves. In this sense, we become like a patient. On the mountainside our way is blocked by three beasts: the Lion of violence, the Leopard of malice, and the She-wolf of incontinence. And down the Lion’s track, a She-wolf drives upon us, a starved horror ravening and wasted beyond all belief. She seems a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving. Oh, the many souls she (the city of Sacramento) has brought to endless grief! #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
A person’s hell may consist of confronting the fact that his mother never loved him; or being stuck in a city where nothing but nightmares seem to happen; or it may consists of fantasies of destroying those a person loves most, like Medea destroying her children; or undergoing the hideous cruelty released in wartime when it becomes patriotic to hate and kill. The private hell of each one of us is there crying to be confronted, and we find ourselves powerless to make progress unassisted against these obstacles. Without qualified guidance, the labour of the aspirant becomes a process of trial and error, of experiment and adventure. It is inevitable, consequently, that one should sometimes make mistakes, and that these mistakes should sometimes be dramatic ones and at other times trivial ones. One should take their lessons to heart and wrest their significance from them. In that way they will contribute toward one’s growth spiritually. The duty of the aspirant to cultivate one’s moral character and to accept personal responsibility for one’s inner life cannot be evaded by given allegiance to any spiritual authority. When anyone begins to make real advance, one emerges into real need of an individual path unhampered by others, undeflected by their suggestions. The inner work must then proceed by the guidance of one’s own intuitive feeling together with the pointers given by outer circumstances as they appear. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The necessity of a teacher is much exaggerated. One’s own soul is there, ready to lead one to itself. For this, prayer, study, and right living will be enough to find its Grace. If one has sufficient faith in its reality and tries to be sensitive to its intuitive guidance one needs no external teacher. If one has sufficient inner resources from which to draw, it is not really necessary to have the guidance of an adept. For those who have such inner guidance, spiritual progress may be made quite satisfactorily. However. Each aspirant has in the end to find one’s own expressive way to one’s own individual illumination. Outside help is useful only to the extent that it does not attempt to impose an alien route upon one. Philosophy is more modest in its claim than mysticism. It makes no arrogant claim to lead beings to identify oneself with God. If the identity is a complete one, then reason alone tells us tat an absurd situation will immediately arise. If it is only a partial one, then no mystic has ever been specific enough to tell us which part of God one has become nor competent enough to distinguish the parts. The fact is that no being that we know of has ever done so, no being that we know of could ever do so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Those mystics who talk of becoming united with God have fallen into the dualistic fallacy. They talk as though God were separate and apart from themselves. The truth is that they already exist within God and do not need to become united with him. What they need is to become conscious of God—which is a different matter. Beings are not God, God is not human, but there exists and unbreakable relation between the two. The pantheist who is so intoxicated by one’s discovery of the truth that God is everywhere present and consequently in oneself too, that one does on to the pseudo-discovery that one and God are one, is simply one who is too vain to acquiesce in one’s own limitations. This danger of misinterpreting one’s own experience besets the mystic at this stage. Because one feels oneself to be in the presence of Deity, one believes the one is Deity. However, the finite can never contain the Infinite. Deity transcends human beings. The danger of being’s deifying themselves afflicts the mystic path. This mind-madness must first be frankly admitted as a danger, for then only can it be guarded against. We are only linked with the divine. We are but a small token of the greater Mind which spawned us. We are but the merest hint of That which is behind one in the present, was in the past, and shall be in the future. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The true explanation of mystical ecstasy is not union with God but union with the Soul. When consciousness is successfully turned in on its own deepest state, which is serene, impersonal, and unchanging, it receives the experience of the divine Soul, not of the Godhead. It brings us nearer to the Godhead but does not transform us into it. We discover the divine ray within, we do not become the Sun itself. The mystic attains knowledge and experience of one’s own soul. This is not the same as knowledge of the ultimate Reality. The two are akin, of course—much more closely than the little ego and the Real are skin. However, the Godhead is the Flame of which the soul is only a spark; to claim complete union with it seems blasphemous. When a being says that one has communed with God, be one a great prophet in trance or a humble person in prayer, like when Abraham says God told him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, the truth is that one as really communed with something within oneself which is so closely related to God that one may perhaps be pardoned for one’s error. However, still it is not God. It is one’s soul of the Overself. When one believes one is communing with God one is actually communing with one’s own inner reality. The enlightenment that seems to come from outside actually comes from inside oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In one’s great ecstasy one feels oneself to be a supernormal, super-powerful, super-wise, and preternatural. If one rashly declares that one is God, one is to be pardoned. The human being cannot go farther in its pilgrimage than the discover of one’s own origin, one’s Overself. The soul constitutes both the connection between beings and God and the ultimate attainment of beings. The best a being can hope for, in rising above the ego and the World, is to rise into awareness of one’s true soul. This is valuable enough but it is not the same as looking into God’s mind or becoming untied with God’s being. Those theologians who describe the mine merely show us the capacity or quality of their speculations and imaginations. Those mystics who describe the being, really describe their own souls. Sometimes people feel they are totally disregarded because of who they are. For example, Mercedes feels no one cares for her feelings or rights; they assume she simply has none. Such situations which she reflects and creates in her reality would themselves suffice to destroy any nascent individual sense of self-esteem if it were present in here. Anything she does in trying to save her life is useless; this-is-the-way-the-World-is. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Since these same kinds of thoughts occur in many people almost at the beginning of therapy, we have to ponder if these are attitudes that Mercedes is really facing in her day to day life, or if we are in someway alienating her. Mercedes seems like a nice person, docile, and a harmonizer in the community. When I first saw Mercedes, a young woman, she looked like a West Indian, striking and exotic in appearance. She explained that she was one-quarter Cherokee Indian, one-quarter Scotch, and the remaining half African American. She is married to a European professional man. She went to college—and I.Q test gave her a score of 140. At college she joined a sorority where she went through all the proper motions and emotions. However, a strange logic of injustice is present in person who are forced to accept the fact that others have all the rights and they have none. He mother not only knew what was going on—but actively abets it. Shortly after Mercedes began therapy, she became pregnant by her husband. Then I noted a tremendously interesting phenomenon. Every couple of weeks when she came in reporting that she had begun to bleed vaginally-which was in her judgment as well as medically a symptom predicting a miscarriage—she would also report a dream. She was having premonitions people were attacking and trying to kill her. The consistent simultaneity of this kind of dream and the bleeding as a harbinger of a miscarriage was what struck me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
At first I tried to draw out the anger I assumed the young woman must feel toward her assassins. She would sit there mildly agreeing with me but feeling nothing at all. It was clear that she was totally unable to muster any conscious rage toward those who were out to kill her. This, again, contradicts all logic: when someone is out to kill you, you ought to feel rage; that is what anger is for biologically—an emotional reaction to someone’s destroying your power to be. She believed that having her baby was inviting death at her hands. We were confronted with the likelihood of spontaneous abortion. Some rage had to be expressed, and I was the only other person in the room. So I decided, not wholly consciously, to express my rage in place of hers. Each time she began vaginal bleeding and brought in such an episode, I would verbally counterattack those who were trying to kill her. What did these blankety-blank people mean by trying to kill her for having a baby? That gossip bitch must have known what was going on and pushed her into it. She was continually sacrificing Mercedes on the altar of homage to her master, to keep him—or for whatever Godforsaken other exploitative reason. Mercedes had done her best to work her and be honest. And there these people still have the power to prohibit her from having the one thing she wants, a baby! #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Eventually, the baby was safely born at its appointed time, to the great joy of Mercedes and her husband. They picked out a nice family name that signifies a ne beginning in the history of the World. She and her husband were totally unconscious, so far as I could determine, of this significance. However, I thought it fitting, indeed—a new race of man was born! Like Prometheus, against all odds, they stole fire from the gods and gave it life. Our relationship in therapy was a magnetic force. Some rage was required against the destroyers. We were playing for keeps—to keep a fetus in her womb. This was not mere catharsis or abreaction in the usual sense of those words. The stakes were life itself—her baby’s. Mercedes was also fighting for the right to exist, to exist as a person with the autonomy and freedom that are inseparably bound up with being a person. She is fighting for her right to be—if I may use the verb in its full and powerful meaning—and to be, if necessary, against the whole Universe. Mercedes later stated she would not have made it without therapy—“I got my strength from you to stand against those looking to harm me”—but obviously it was her strength when she got it, and it was she who did the standing. The realization of the Overself enables us to taste something of the flavor of the World-Mind’s life. We are made in the image of God, but we are not the full measure of God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Fortune is Mistress and Foreknowledge of Nothing Sure for the God Who Threw You Down Sustain You Now!
She never loved you, you know. Not in the way that I loved you, and the way that I loved us both. I knew this! I understood it! And I believed I would gather you to me and hold you. And time would open to us, and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. However, you are dead inside to me, you are cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I am not here, beside you. And not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I do not exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. When I am near you, I shudder. I look into your eyes and my reflection is not there. A crucial problem is the distinction between experience and what the younger generation calls mere thinking or mere words. This is particularly important for us here since historically experience has also been set in opposition to innocence. A person who buys a BMW is a consumer, whereas an auto science engineer works on cars and is experienced in the mechanical function of them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Experience is set over against ideas. Existentialism, for example, is often mistaken for a denial of thinking; and new adherents are often surprised when they read Sartre and Tillich to find that these existentialists are thinkers and logicians of great power. Experience puts the accent on action, living out something, or feeling it as a person tastes apple in one’s mouth. By experiencing something, we let its meaning permeate through us on all levels: feeling, acting, thinking, and, ultimately, deciding, since decision is the act of putting one’s total self on the line. The passion for experience is an endeavor to include more of the self in the picture; one experiences as a totality. Experience is set over against any partial view of beings. Behaviorism, for example, is certainly a part of experience, but when behaviorism is turned into a total way of understanding beings and philosophy of life—which amounts to intellectual naivete—it becomes destructive. One can, and ought, to reflect on experience. This is not only gives power to thinking but also communicates being. In my education the most important and engulfing experience was the lectures of Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich, a German and a scholar of the first order, believed in lecturing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
However, Paul Tillich was a thinker of great logical ability which he did not hesitate to use. Thus every lecture was an expression of Paul Tillich’s being, and it awakened my being. It became my ideal of what a lecture out to do. It is arbitrary and confusing to say that reflection is also part of experience; we must keep the thinking function in its own right. The error is in using experience as a way to shut out thinking or in using immediate experience to evade the implications of history. The younger generation is right in its attack on mere thought, mere words, and so on; but it makes the same error when, under the guise of experiencing life, it seizes on mere feelings, mere actions, or any other partial function of being. The experience then becomes intellectual laziness, an excuse for sloppiness of execution. Culture is a result of communication between beings, a slow building process, a hard-won gain, that takes tens of thousands of years. In it, communication and conceptual thought go together: one implies and assists the other. Culture can die even though beings survive, and that is what threatens us today, because the growth, the expansion of this immense body of cumulative knowledge requires brains, books and traditions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Culture is not something that soars over being’s heads. It is living beings and spiritual beings themselves. Therefore, the noble-savage delusion can do enormous harm. This noble savage would have been a cretin at best. Young people who wish to cancel out everything and start over had best realize that this means going back before the Stone Age to Cro-Magnon beings. Traditional languages take thousands of years to evolve. Language can be lost in a few generations. In our own day it is already becoming impoverished, and, as a result, so is the faculty for logical expression. In a periods like ours, when concepts become emptied of being, there is an understandable tendency to throw out conceptual thinking. However, there is no authentic experience without a concept, and there is no vital concept without experience. The concept gives form to the experience; but the experience has to be present to give content and vitality to the concept. Written in haunting verse, the Old Testament story of Job tells of an analogous quest for solace in an unconsoling Universe. Job’s answer to this sorrowful lot is to renew his dialogue with God. However, it is not Job’s humility alone that makes this drama substantive from an existential view, it is the way in which he becomes humble; for instance, through deliberation, struggle, choice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Job’s peers, on the other hand, reveal themselves to be either prideful toward or blindly accepting of God’s demands. One of the most valuable philosophical character qualities is balance. Therefore the student should not be willing to submit oneself to complete authoritarianism and thus sacrifice one’s capacity for independent thinking, nor on the other hand should one be willing to throw away all the fruits of other being’s thought and experience and dispense with the service of a guide altogether. One should hold a wise balance between these two extremes. I will humbly bow before the revelation of a superior truth and submissively study one’s teachings, but I will not regard that as sufficient reason to abandon the free, full, and autonomous growth which I am making. For only if such growth remains as natural as a flower’s and is not artificially shaped by another being, can I fulfill the true law of my being. The young want and ought to have gurus and doctrines. The adult should learn to discriminate for themselves, collect their own doctrines from a wide field, and become their own teachers. However, in this matter of understanding life, one does not become adult and acquire a sense of responsibility precisely at twenty-one. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Authority and individuality need not content with one another in a being’s mind. What happens to the worker? In industry the person becomes an economic atom that dances to the tune of atomistic management. Your place is just here, you will sit in this fashion, your arms will move x inches in a course of y radius and the time of movement will be .000 minutes. Work is becoming more repetitive and thoughtless as the planners, the micromotionists, and the scientific managers further strip the worker of one’s right to think and move freely. Life is being denied; need to control, creativeness, curiosity, and independent thought are being baulked, and the rest, the inevitable result, is flight or fight on the part of the worker, apathy or destructiveness, psychic regression. The of the manager is also one of alienation. It is true, one manages the whole and not a part, but one too is alienated from one’s product as something concrete and useful. One’s aim is to employ profitably the capital invested by others, although in comparison with the older types of owner-manager, modern management is much less interested in the amount of profit to be paid out as dividend to the stockholder than it is in the efficient operation and expansion of the enterprise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Characteristically, within management those in charge of labor relations and of sales—that is, of human manipulation—gain, relatively speaking, an increasing importance in comparison with those in charge of the technical aspects of production. The manager, like the workers, like everybody, deals with impersonal giants: with the giant competitive enterprise; with the giant national and World market; with the giant consumer, who has to be coaxed and manipulated; with the giant unions, and the government. All of these giants have their own lives, as it were. They determine the activity of the manager and they direct the activity of the worker and clerk. The problem of the manager opens up one of the most significant phenomena in an alienated culture, that of bureaucratization. Both big business and government administrations are conducted by a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are specialists in the administration of things and of beings. Due to the bigness of the apparatus to be administered, and the resulting abstractification, the bureaucrats’ relationship to the people is one of complete alienation. They, the people to be administered, are objects whom the bureaucrats consider neither with love nor with hate, but completely impersonally; the manager-bureaucrat must not feel, as far as one’s professional activity is concerned; one must manipulate people as through they were figures, or things. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Since the vastness of the organization and the extreme division of labor prevents any single individual from seeing the whole, since there is no organic, spontaneous co-operation between the various individuals or groups within the industry, the managing bureaucrats are necessary; without them the enterprise would collapse in a short time, since nobody would know the secret which makes it function. Bureaucrats are as indispensable as the tons of paper consumed under their leadership. Just because everybody senses, with a feeling of powerlessness, the vital role of the bureaucrats, they are given an almost godlike respect. If it were not for the bureaucrats, people feel, everything would go to pieces, and we would starve. Whereas, in the medieval World, the leaders were considered representatives of a God-intended order, in modern capitalism the role of the bureaucrat is hardly less sacred—since one is necessary for the survival of the whole. The bureaucrat related oneself to the World as a mere object of one’s activity. It is interesting to note that the spirit of bureaucracy has entered not only business and government administration, but also trade unions and great democratic socialist parties in England, Germany, and France. In Russia, too, the bureaucratic managers and their alienated spirit have conquered the country. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Russia could perhaps exist without terror—if certain conditions were given—but it could not exist without the system of total bureaucratization—that is alienation. What is the attitude of the owner of the enterprise, the capitalist? The small business person seems to be in the same position as one’s predecessor a hundred years ago. One owns and directs one’s small enterprise, one is in touch with the whole commercial or industrial activity, and in personal contact with one’s employers and workers. However, living in an alienated World in all other economic and social aspects, and furthermore being more under the constant pressure of bigger competitors, one is by no means as free as one’s grandparents were in the same business. However, what matters more and more in contemporary economy is big business, the large corporation. And the attitude of the owner of the big corporation to one’s property is one of almost complete alienation. One’s ownership consists in a piece of paper, representing a certain fluctuating amount of money; one has no responsibility for the enterprise and no concrete relationship to it in anyway. Every era stages its own unique dramatization of the struggle to be free. What happens when one discovers that one is not all that one wished or hoped to be, when one discovers one’s limits, destiny, or mortality? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
When dreams fail to come true for some, they wonder around like a befuddled alcoholic. All about them their life is breaking down (the plague), any in many cases they have not a clue as to why or how. Many people have to be induced to face their (offensive) impulses, come to terms with them, and reappropriate them into something salutary in their lives, something redemptive. This is considered the last stage of therapy, and it is usually the time when people understand their sense of guilt is overblown, and that one has the ability to respond to rather than merely react against this sense of guilt, and that the guilt and their reactions to it open up new possibilities for one—to understand passion, for example or the meaning of love. The only issue that needs to be addressed is if one is willing to recognize and admit what they have done. The tragic issue is that of seeking truth about oneself; it is the tragic drama of a person’s passionate relation to truth. In many cases, the tragic flaw some beings have is their wrath against their own reality. When individuals can come to terms with reality, thereupon proceeds a gripping and powerful unfolding step by step in the process of unveiling self-knowledge, which is an unfolding often replete with rage at the truth and those who are its bearers, and all the others aspects of our struggle against recognition of our own reality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Mental blindness symbolizes the fact that one can more insightfully grasp inner reality about beings—gain insight if one is not distracted by the impingement of external details. The whole gamut of reactions like resistance and projection are usually displayed by people who are coming to terms with mistakes they have made, and generally they tend to fight more violently against the truth the closer they get to it. One, however, must still adhere to their resolve to face the truth, wherever it may lead, whatever it may lead. This can lead to a lot of anxiety, because many people fear if they admit they made or mistake, have to come to terms with their guilt that they will face ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many people symbolically castrate themselves or permit themselves to be castrated because of the fear of being exiled is one does not. They renounce their power and conform under the great threat and peril of ostracism. It would be wise to pause to contemplate one’s problems and find some meaning in these horrible experiences one has endured. Usually there is very little action in this drama, but it is recommended that people pray about their tragic suffering and what they have learned from it. By viewing the struggle, the truth about oneself, we learn we must indeed go on and reconcile the ultimate meaning in our lives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
However, best take life easily. Guilt is the difficult problem of the relation of ethical responsibility to self-consciousness. Is a being guilty if the act was unpremeditated, done unknowingly? Well, in probing these old debates, we come to recognize what is important is responsibility, not guilt. Before the law—before God—we must accept and bear our responsibility. However, the delicate and subtle interplay or conscious and unconscious factors make legalistic or pharisaic imputation of guilt inaccurate and wrong. The problem of guilt is not within the act but within the heart. “And I did cry unto this people, but it was in vain; and they did not realize that it was the Lord that had spared them, and granted unto them a chance for repentance. And behold they did harden their hearts against the Lord their God,” reports Mormon 3.3. Therefore, we must act thoroughly in accord with a mortal order which in our own experience will enable us to understand that if we do not repent that we will be punished, condemning ourselves to the merciless justice which is soon to descend. Modern existential psychotherapist emphasize that because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an acceptance of the universal human situation. We then recognize the participation of every one of us in being’s inhumanity to other living beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Another theme in our lives is the power to impart grace—now that we have suffered through our terrible experiences and come to terms with them, showing that we are endowed with grace is an advantage of your race. This will make people realize that your presence, as you say, is a great blessing. This capacity to impart grace is connected with the maturity and other emotional spiritual qualities which result from one’s courageous confronting of one’s experiences. One soul, I think, can often make atonement for any others, if it be devoted. And one word frees us of al the weight and pain of life: That is love. This does not mean at all love as the absence of aggression or the strong affects of anger. Love only those you choose to love. Compassion limits even the power of God. The love you show to others, and the love they show to you during your hardships, and blind wanderings is the kind of love God chooses to bless. However, maturity is not a renouncing of passion to come to terms with society, not a learning to live in accord with the reality of civilization. It is our reconciliation with ourselves, with the special people we love, and the with transcendent meaning of our lives. “And my heart did sorrow because of this the great calamity of my people, because of their wickedness and their abominations,” reports Mormon 2.27. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
It would be sheer arrogance were it not mere ignorance to believe that because we can go beyond the limited ego, therefore we can go beyond the divine soul and encompass the World-Mind itself in all its entirety. No mortal may penetrate the mystery of the ultimate mind in its own nature—which means in this static inactive being. The Godhead is not only beyond human conception but also beyond mystic perception. However, Mind in its active dynamic state, that is, the World-Mind, and rather its ray in us called the Overself, is within range of human perception, communion, and even union. It is this that the mystic really finds when one believes that one has found God. This condition is commonly said to be nothing less than union with God. What is really attained is the higher self, the ray of the divine Sun reflected in beings, the immortal soul in fact—God himself being forever utterly beyond being’s finite capacity to comprehend. However, the mystical experience is an authentic one and the conflict between interpretations does not dissolve its authenticity. This brings into awareness the repressed, unconscious, archaic urges, longings, dreads, and other psychic content, and reveals new goals, new ethical insights and possibilities. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The World-Mind is a breaking through of greater meaning which was not present before. It presents a way of working out problems on a higher level of integration and is a progressive function. When we access our soul, we are then able to project harmony into ethical and other forms of meaning in the outside World. The soul acts as a means of discovery, it is a procreative revealing of structure in our relation to nature and to our own existence. The soul is educative. By drawing out inner reality, it allows us to experience greater reality in the outside World. The soul also discovers for us a new reality as well. The soul is a road to universals beyond one’s concrete experience. It is only on the basis of such a faith that the individual can genuinely accept and overcome earlier infantile deprivations without continuing to harbor resentment all through one’s life. In this sense, the soul helps us accept our past, and we then find it opens before us our future. There are infinite subtleties in this casting out of remorse. Every individual, certainly every patient, needs to make the journey in his and her own unique way. An accompanying process all along the way will be the transforming of one’s neurotic guilt into normal, existential guilt. And both forms of anxiety can be used constructively as a broadening consciousness and sensitivity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This journey is made through the understanding and confronting of who we are, which is also linked with archaic, regressive stereotypes, but also connected to an integrative, normative, and progressive aspect as well. We exist always in utter dependence on the Universal Mind. Beings and God may meet and mingle in one’s periods of supreme exaltation, one may feel the sacred presence within oneself to the utmost degree, but one does not thereby abolish all the distinction between them absolutely. For one arrives at the knowledge of the timeless spaceless divine infinitude after a process of graded personal effort, whereas the World-Mind’s knowledge of itself has forever been what it was is and shall be, above all process and beyond all efforts. God, the World-Mind, knows all things is an eternal present at once. No mystic has ever claimed, no mystic has ever dared to claim, such total knowledge. Most mystics have, however, claimed union with God. If this be true, then quite clearly that have had only a fragmentary, not full union. Philosophy, being more precise in its statements, avers that they have really achieved union not with God, but with something Godlike—the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
I Love You Anyway, is it So Rare that I Have Been Sleeping with the Dead?
But, finally, when I put the papers aside and sat thinking these things over, the strangeness of it did not matter. What mattered was that I was more utterly alone in the World than I had ever been in all my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less reason to live than I had ever had, and less desire. Armand showed no concern at my facing him, and as soon as our eyes met I wished the World were not one black empty ruin of ashes and death. I wished it were fresh and beautiful, and that we were both living and had love to give each other. I wanted to lay down my soul, to find some transcendent pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me utterly forget even myself. Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The almost perfect symmetrical balance of the Claude Monet 1874, The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil—how out of the dense growth of the near bank, a train emerges, as we witness nature in the process of giving way to the forces of civilization. With eternal nature being pitted against the contemporary moment expressing how this painting captures the dawn of a new World, a World of opposition and contradiction. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
As I stood on the sidewalk before the doors of the hotel waiting for the carriage that would take me to meet Armand, I saw the people who walked there—the restless boulevard crowd of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, the hawkers of papers, the carriers of luggage, the drivers of carriages—all these in a new light. Yet, the magnificent paintings of the Louvre still were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Without love, all the beauty in the World is reduced to ashes. The principle of monotheism is that beings are infinite, that there is no partial quality in one which can be hypostatized into the whole. God, in the monotheistic concept, is unrecognizable and indefinable; God is not a thing. If beings are created in the likeness of God, one is created as the bearer of infinite qualities. In idolatry beings bows down and submits to the projection of one partial quality in oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center from which living acts of love and reason radiate. One becomes a thing, his neighbor becomes a thing, just as his gods are things. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, sliver and gold, but I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold—work of being’s hands are inferior to my Lord. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
So many people have mouths but they speak now; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; nether is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like them; so is everyone that trusts in them. “And thus they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of God. And whosoever of those who belonged to their band should reveal unto the World of their wickedness and their abominations, reports Helaman 6.23-24. Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent regressed into idolatry. Beings projects their power of love and of reason unto God; one does not feel them any more as one’s own powers, and then one prays to God to give one back some of what one, men and women, have projected unto God. In early Protestantism and Calvinism, the required religious attitude is that beings should feel oneself empty and impoverished and put one’s trust in the grace of God, that is, into the hope that God may return to one part of one’s own qualities, who one has put into God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry in this sense. What is frequently called love is often noting but this idolatrous phenomenon of alienation; only that not God or an idol, but another person is worshipped in the way. The loving person in this type of submissive relationship, projects all his or her love, strength, thought, into the other person, and experiences the loved person as a superior being, finding satisfaction in complete submission and worship. This does not only mean that one fails to experience the loved person as a human being in his or her reality, but that one does not experience one’s self in one’s full reality, as the bearer of productive human powers. Just as in the case of religious idolatry, one has projected all one’s richness into the other person, and experiences this richness not any more as something which is one’s, but as something alien from oneself, deposited in somebody else, with which one can get in touch only by submission to, or submergence in, the other person. The same phenomenon exists in the worshipping submission to a political leader, or to that state. The leader and the state actually are what they are by the consent of the governed. However, they become idols when the individual projects all one’s powers into them and worships them, hoping to regain some of one’s powers by submission and worship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
In Rousseau’s theory of the state, as in contemporary totalitarianism, the individual is supposed to abdicate one’s own rights and to project them unto the state as the only arbiter, which is the kind of behavior we are seeing from the mayor and governor of California in particular at this time. And that is the reason career politicians like Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., who served as the 34t and 39th Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and from 2011 to 2019 are dangerous because they can basically set up a dictatorships and then pass that same kind of authority on to their successor to the point the people and their votes do not matter because the state has all the power and virtually goes unchallenged. He was also mayor of Oakland, California from 1999-2007, so Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. was able to deeply embed his roots of corruption in California. Furthermore, it did not help the people that Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown Sr. also served as the 32nd Governor of California from 1959 to 1967. This allowed the Brown’s to run California as if were their family business. For instance, the twin tunnel project to ship water from the Sacramento River to Southern California was actually Pat Brown’s idea, which stated when he was in office and was supposed to take sixty years, and this was a project Jerry Brown also tried to implement. However, environmentalist believe that this $104 billion project would destroy the environment and be too expensive. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
In fascism, which we are seeing a resurgence of with the democrats having a super majority in California and with them being in bed with a low of judges, is a type of Stalinism that leads absolutely to the alienation of individuals who worship the state at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is knowns as: state, class, collective, or what else. Under Jerry Brown and his father Pat Brown an Ethnic cleansing started in San Francisco, California in 1967 and the population of Black went from about 100,000 to 40,000. The Browns red tagged many of the Victorian homes and businesses owned by Blacks and tore them down to put up project-based housing high rises and to expand the freeway. This displaced a lot of Black Americans and lead to the loss of a lot of Black wealth (millions of dollars per household) from the appreciated equity of the property. The ethnic cleansing inspired the 2019 film The Last Black man in San Francisco. Therefore, we can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human being, but one becomes a salve to one partial striving in one, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
The person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships and the projection of one isolated power in oneself, one’s greed for it. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while one is under the illusion of doing what one wants, one is driven by forces which are separated from one’s self, which work behind one’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow beings are a stranger to the individual. One experiences the other and one’s self not as what they really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the love of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization or irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own power and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalizations of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not have experience one’s self as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of a being to one’s work, to the things one consumes, to the state, to one’s fellow beings, and to oneself. Beings have created a World of things created by beings as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. One confronts oneself with one’s own forces embodied in things one has created, alienated from oneself. One is owned by one’s creation, and has lost ownership of oneself. One has built a golden calf, and says “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” However, this is a trap cunningly invented by Satan for your downfall and the body as a tomb dug for your divine soul. Holiness is not necessarily limited to hermits and spiritual teachers; it may also belong to householders. Whether it be the Long or the Short Path, both may be pracitsed in the daily routine of life. The problem is to take advantage of outside help and yet leave the student individually free. Its solution is simple. One can get this help through books written by seers, sages, and philosophers. Those who can only advance by hanging on to a teacher make only a pseudo-advance and one day their house of cards will come tumbling about their ears. However, it is equally true that those who can only progress by dispensing with a teacher, progress father into the morass of ignorance. One alone who can take a teacher’s guidance in a free spirit; who comprehends that while the teacher points out a path, it is for one to strive, toil, and adventure forth; such a being will derive much from one’s discipleship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
When one finds that one can go no farther by oneself, the time has come to look within for more grace or to look without for more guidance. One needs the one to get away from one’s own selfishness or the other to get away from one’s own darkness. There is sometimes conflict between submission to authority and obedience to conscience. The importance of language in an evolving culture is that it provides symbolic forms by means of which we can reveal ourselves and by means of which others stand revealed to us. Communication is a way of understanding each other; if there are no such ways, each of us becomes like the man who, in a dream, find oneself wandering in a foreign country where one can understand nothing of what is being said around one nor feel anything from the person next to one. One’s isolation is great, indeed. During the week end of the Moon landing, a TV reporter interviewed members of the crowd in Central Park just after the landing. One answer to his question of what they were waiting for was: “To see the extravehicular activity.” Now this phrase “extra vehicular activity” gives one pause. Its main word consists of six syllables and is highly technical; it tells, like many technical phrases, what the astronauts are not going to do (extravehicular) rather than what they are going to do. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The word “activity” may mean any act under the Sun—swimming, flying, crawling, diving, and so forth. There is no poetry in the sentence, no meaning that is not technical, nothing personal. We finally discover the polysyllabic phrase means “to walk on the Moon.” However, that is a poetic phrase. No word of over one syllable, coming straight out of our own lives (from the age of eight months when we learned to walk), a phrase associated with all the romance of the Moon. It is actually more truthful than its scientific parallel in the sense that it reveals not an abstraction but an act that will be done by human beings like you and me. The more technical we become without a parallel development in the meaningfulness of personal communication, the more alienated we also become. Communication is then replaced by communique. The breakdown of communication is a spiritual one. Words get their communicative power from the fact that they participate in symbols. Through drawing meanings together into a Gestalt, a symbol gets a numinous quality which points toward a reality greater than itself. The symbol gives the word its power to carry across to one some meaning from the emotions of another. Symbolic breakdown is, therefore, spiritual tragedy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The symbol always implies more than it states; it is essentially connotative. Thus, words, in so far as they are symbolic, point to more than they specifically can say; what counts is the afterglow, the ripples of meaning that appear like a stone being dropped in a lake, the connotative rather than the denotative aspects of the words. It is a Gestalt similar to that which the poet uses. A form emerges out of the very speaking of words—which is why people tend to become more poetic when they report something under stress. It also must be remembered that in the days before the art of writing was widely used almost all the earliest texts were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone. This entailed wonderful fears of memory which we must admire but it also entailed the possibility of conscious or unconscious alteration of the texts themselves, against which we must guard ourselves. Whether it happened or not, however, one thing was psychologically unavoidable. This was the interpretation of passages, phrases, or single words according to the unconscious complexes governing the minds and controlling the character of those who preserved and passed down the texts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
The inevitable consequence is that words which bore one meaning when they were uttered by the original author came bit by bit to receive a modified or altogether different meaning when they had passed through the mouths and pens of scribes and priests. Many fail to perceive that the real battlefield of human life is internal and not external; some who cannot comprehend the unity of Spirit and matter; beings, in short, who had yet to realize that they were virtuous or sinful primarily as their thoughts were virtuous and sinful—these are set up today as the arbiters of how we twenty-first century beings shall live in a World whose circumstances and systems are beyond their own narrow imaginations. The quest indeed has been turned into something impossibly remote from us, something only to be talked about at tea-tables because we cannot implement it. Such a situation is unacceptable to the philosophic student. Better ostracism, abuse, slander, and misunderstanding than this. All this, of course, is exactly contrary to what we have been taught. We are taught that the more specific and limited a word is, the more accurately we talk. More accurately, yes, but not more truthfully. For we tend, with this point of view, to make our language more and more technical, impersonal, objective, until we are talking in purely scientific terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
This is one legitimate way of communicating, and certainly the way that thrives in a technological age. However, it ends up with computor language; and what I really want to know about my friend as he walks besides me is in the country is as absent as though we were in two vacuum tubes. Beings are not God. There is a fundamental error in making the unity with God to be a unity of nature and not of Grace. The Godly being is untied to God, not however in virtue of one’s essences but by a process of re-creation and regeneration. The mystic who talks vaguely of being one with God must surely know that the experience has not put one in personal management of the Universe. If the mystic really attains a complete identity with the World-Mind, then all the latter’s evolutionary and dissolutionary powers and especially its all-pervading all-knowing character would become the common property of both. However, even the most fully mystic has no such powers and no such character. The frontiers between God and beings cannot be obliterated although the affinity between them can be established. If a being really appreciated one’s own finite littleness and the higher power’s sublime infinity, one would never have the impertinence to claim the attainment of “union with God.” All such talk is irresponsible babble, the careless use of words without semantic awareness of what is being said. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
No human mind can capture the One Life-Power in all its magnitude, and its understanding of itself and its Universe. All it can do is to act as a mirror, in the deepest recesses of its own being, and in its own humble way, of the attributes which it confers on the Absolute from its own limited human point of view. The rest is silence. Although God is inaccessible to beings, beings are not inaccessible to God. The quest for meaning (and moorings) in a seemingly fathomless World can be found in the earliest forms of literature. The Assyrian-Babylonian text Gilgamesh (3000 B.C.), for example, alludes to a futile search for immortality in an absurd, capricious cosmos. A related Babylonian work, called the Poem of Creation, dramatizes a titanic struggle between the forces of chaos (exemplified by the primordial goddess Tiamat) and the forces of order (represented by the upstart deity Marduk). These legends caused me to go over a plan in my mind, a plan on which I was willing to gamble my life with the powerful freedom of a being who truly does not care for that life, who has the extraordinary strength of being willing to die. “Bless be the name of our God; let us sing to his praise, yes, let us give thanks to his holy name, for he doth work righteousness forever,” Alma 26.8. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15