Randolph Harris II International Institute

A Cresleigh Home is the Difference Between Visiting a Palace (the Glimpse) and Coming to Live Permanently in One!

A perfect World, or a World destroyed, one or the other—someday will come the end of Hell. And then I shall go back to Heaven, content to stay there for the first moment of my existence, since the beginning of Time. The same factors which have thus coalesced into the exactness and minute precision of the form of life have coalesced into a structure of the highest impersonality; on the other hand, they have promoted a highly personal subjectivity. There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been s unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves. From this, the enhancement of metropolitan intellectuality, also, seems originally to stern. Therefore, uneducated people who are not intellectuality alive in the first place usually are not exactly blasé. A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all. In the same way, through the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus. This physiological source of the metropolitan blasé attitude is joined by another source which flows from the money economy. The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with halfwit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is the faithful subjective reflection of the completely internalized money economy. By being the equivalent to al the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of “how much?” Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably in hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

All things are possessed on the same level and differ from one anther only in the size of the area which they cover. In the individual case this coloration, or rather discoloration, of things through their money equivalence may be unnoticeably minute. However, through the relations of the rich to the objects to be had for money, perhaps even through the total character which the mentality of the contemporary public everywhere imparts to these objects, the exclusively pecuniary evaluation of objects has become quite considerable. The large cities, the main seats of money exchange, bring the purchasability of things to the fore much more impressively than do smaller localities. That is why cities are also the genuine locale of the blasé attitude. In the blasé attitude the concentration of men and women and things stimulates the nervous system of the individual to its highest achievement so that it attains its peak. Through the mere quantitative intensification of the same conditioning factors this achievement is transformed into its opposite and appears in the peculiar adjustment of the blasé attitude. In this phenomenon the nerves find in the refusal to react to their stimulation the last possibility of accommodating to the contents and form of metropolitan life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The self-preservation of certain personalities is bought at the price of devaluating the whole objective World, a devaluation which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of the same worthlessness. Whereas the subject of this form of existence has to come to terms with it entirely for oneself, one’s self-preservation in the face of the large city demands from one a no loses negative behavior of a social nature. This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve. If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one have a beneficial relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state. Partly this psychological fact, partly the right to distrust which beings have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan life, necessitates our reserve. As a result of this reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbors for years. And it is this reserve which in the eyes of the small-town people makes us appear to be cold and heartless. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Indeed, if I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often than we are aware, it is a sight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused. The whole inner organization of such an extensive communicative life rests upon an extremely varied hierarchy of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of the briefest as well as of the most permanent nature. The sphere of indifference in this hierarchy is not as large as might appear on the surface. Our psychic activity still responds to almost every impression of somebody else with a somewhat distinct feeling. The unconscious, fluid and changing character of this impression seems to result in a state of indifference. Actually this indifference would be just as unnatural as the diffusion of indiscriminate mutual suggestions would be unbearable. From both these typical dangers of the metropolis, indifference and indiscriminate suggestibility, antipathy protects us. A latent antipathy and the preparatory stage of practical antagonism effects the distances and aversions without which this mode of life could not at all be led. The extent and this mixture of this style of life, the rhythm of its emergence and disappearance, the forms in which it is satisfied—all these, with the unifying motive in the narrower sense, from the inseparable whole of the metropolitan style of life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

What appears in the metropolitan style of life directly as dissociation is in reality only one of its elemental forms of socialization. This reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears in turn as the form or the cloak of a more general mental phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions. The metropolis goes back to one of the large developmental tendencies of social life as such, to one of the few tendencies for which an approximately universal formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. However, this circle is closely coherent and allows its individual members only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities and free, self-responsible movements. Political and kinship groups, parties and religious associations begin in this way. The self-preservation of very young associations requires the establishment of strict boundaries and a centripetal unity. Therefore they cannot allow the individual freedom and unique inner and outer development. From this stage social development proceeds at once in two different, yet corresponding, directions. To the extent to which the group grows—numerically, spatially, in significance and in content of life—to the same degree the group’s direct, inner unity loosens, and the rigidity of the original demarcation against others is softened through mutual relations and connections. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The confidence that one has wort is normally picked up first from the attitudes of a mother or mother-surrogate toward the infant, and is then cultivated in the family by loyalty to the infant. As the child grows this initial feeling is reinforced by persons outside the family in their appreciation for one and one’s potentialities. Later, the more mature human being seems to keep within one’s memories, to refer to in difficult times, the images of those people who have believed in one. When I was in college I found the experience of having some adult believing in me crucially important; and at times thereafter in my life when I was faced with fateful decisions, I found myself casting about to fasten upon one of these persons. It was not that he or she would, in my memory, tell me what to do. It was rather that at such a time it was important for my own psychological security to find somebody who believed in me. This “belief” included his or her liking me, although it was not chiefly that; it included one’s confidence in my abilities and other qualities which the reader can experience through one’s own treasuring of such persons in memory better than through my attempt at enumeration. Part of the aim of psychotherapy is to help the individual in the steady, often long-term building up of one’s own self-affirmation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

With Leo the building up of his own day-to-day affirmations of himself, less dramatic (so that they rarely get into our notes, and then into case histories) and often hesitantly made, in every session. His dreams began to show a small amount of awareness of his own power: “I was climbing a ladder in which the rungs were weak, but I kept it working by holding the sides together.” Again: “I tamed some horses named Nacho and Peaches.” Or: “I wish I could do such and such.” Or: “I think I can accomplish it.” I would always make sure he knew I had heard such statements by responding in some way. Perhaps at the time I did not believe he could so the thing he wished (if I would take it he would in some way sense it), but I would affirm him by saying: “I too hope that someday you can do it” or “I do not see why you cannot do it eventually.” One way of avoiding this less dramatic but necessary step is shown in Leo’s approach to one of his dreams. That morning he had come in saying three times in three sentences: “It is hard.” Talking in a soft voice he related the following: “I was with my brother Max in a rowboat on the Okanogan River—then we, or rather I, lost the oars. We were then swimming upstream. I said to my brothers: ‘Why do you not rest on my shoulders?’ He put his hands on my shoulders and I began to sink. Then I cried out, think this was not a good idea, and he got off. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

“We landed. Then he wanted to keep swimming. I said: ‘No, the river is polluted.’ He acted as though it did not matter, and he swam down to north central Washington. I asked about the dirt in the river, and he said: ‘No, there was not much, just a little around the shore. My father was waiting for him.” Whatever the exoteric meaning of the dream, the purpose of Leo’s dreaming seemed eminently practical. He put his brother Max into it, the most down-to-Earth member of the family, who had at least worked out a plan. Why not take the chances his brother took? The fact that he dreamed it at all shows he was considering the idea. It is, of course, easier to preserve his innocence by shifting the discussion to cosmic, grandiose levels; but I believe Leo should be kept to the concrete, realistic consideration first. The fact that a human being can be self-conscious vastly increases his need for self-affirmation. We can know we affirm ourselves; or we can experience the lack of self-affirmation and feel shame. In a being, nature and being are not identical. However, for my bird Alex and Mimi, romping around the house, nature and being are identical—it becomes a bird regardless of what it does about it. A bird does not bear the burden of self-consciousness or of knowing that it knows; and while it escapes the guilt of this experience, it is also bereft of its glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

In the Tsuga mertensiana, known as the mountain hemlock, nature and being are also right; and it is not burdened with thinking about it or even knowing it. Consciousness is the intervening variable between nature and being. It vastly enlarges the human being’s dimensions; it makes possible in one a sense of awareness, responsibility, and a margin of freedom proportionate to tis responsibility. The reflective nature of human consciousness accounts for the fact that studies of terrestrial behavior cast only peripheral light on human aggression. The human being can be infinitely more cruel and can destroy for the sadistic pleasures of it—a privilege that is denied animals. All of this follows from the fact that in the human being nature and being are not identical. What about the souls who shrink in bitterness, who never flower as the heels of warriors walk over them, what about the souls warped and twisted by unspeakable injustice, who go into eternity cursing, what about a whole modern World which is personally angry with God, angry enough to curse Jesus Christ and God himself as Luther did, as Dora did, as you have done, as all have done. People in your modern World of the twenty first century have never stopped believing in God. It is that they hate God; they resent God; they are furious with God. They feel superior to God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

I cannot make them care by telling them God came here in the flesh as Jesus Christ to try to persuade human beings to live righteously and condemn the wicked. I cannot show them God’s wounds in Hell. That is not going to win them over, these victims, these grieving, furious sufferers of pain beyond God’s imagining. For souls to have free will and obtain Heaven, suffering was never necessary, the full understanding and receptivity to God never required a fast, a scourging, a crucifixion, a death. I know that the human soul transcended Nature, and needed no more than an eye for beauty to do this! Job was Job before he suffered! Just as after! What did the suffering teach Job that he did not know before? Thus beings become a self only as one participates in one’s development and throws one’s weight being this or that tendency, no matter how limited this choice may be. The self never develops automatically; beings become a self only to the extent that one can know it, affirm it, assert it. This why many continually proclaim the need for commitment and dedication. And this is why a being is more infinitely more educable than most animals and the rest of nature, as far as we know. There are other beings on this planet we know nothing about and have no power over. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Being less instinctually guided, one can, through one’s own awareness, influence to some extent one’s own evolution. Therein is possessed the collective shame and bewilderment of a being a human, and therein also is possessed the greatness of being one. We arrive finally in analyzing the creative act in terms of the question What is this intense encounter with? An encounter is always a meeting between two poles. The subjective pole is the conscious person in the creative act itself. However, what is the objective pole of this dialectical relationship? I shall use a term that will sound too simple: it is the artist’s or scientist’s encounter with one’s World. I do not mean World as environment or as the sum total of things; nor do I refer at all to objects about a subject. World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated wit the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between World and self and self and World; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The pole of World is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing—specifically a process interrelating the persons and his or her World. How artists encounter their World is illustrated in the work of every genuinely creative painter. Out of the many possible examples of this, I shall choose the superb exhibition of the paintings of Mondrian shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1957-58. From his first realistic works in 1904 and 1905, all the way to his later geometrical rectangles and squares in the 1930s, one can see him struggling to find the underlying forms of the objects, particularly trees, that he was painting. He seems to have loved trees. The paintings around 1910, beginning somewhat like Cezanne, move further and further into the underlying meaning of tree-the trunk rises organically from the ground into which the roots have penetrated; the branches curve and bend into the trees and hills of the background in cubistic form, beautifully illustrative of what the underlying essence of tree is to most of us. Then we see Mondrian struggling more and more deeply to find the ground forms of nature; now it is less tree and more the eternal geometric forms underlying all reality. Finally we see him pushing inexorably toward the squares and rectangles that are the ultimate form of purely abstract art. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Impersonal? To be sure. The individual self is lost. However this is not precisely a reflection of Mondrian’s World—the World of the decades of the twenties and thirties, the World in the period of emerging fascism, communism, conformism, military power, in which the individual not only feels lost, but is lost, alienated from nature and others as well as oneself? Mondrian’s paintings express creative strength in such a World, an affirmation in spite of the lostness of the individual. In this sense his work is a search for the foundation of individuality that can withstand these anti-human political developments. Anxiety in general results not so much from a fear of our impulses as from a fear of our repressed impulses. Anxiety may result from every impulse of which the expression would incur an external danger. Pleasures of the flesh may certainly be for this kind, but only so long as a strict individual and social taboo resting on them renders them dangerous. From this point of view the frequency with which anxiety is generated by pleasures of the flesh is largely dependent on the existing cultural attitude toward pleasures of the flesh. I do not see that pleasures of the flesh as such is a specific source of anxiety. I do believe, however, that there is such a specific source in hostility, or more accurately repressed hostile impulses. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Whenever I find anxiety or indications of it, the questions that come to my mind are, what sensitive spot has been hurt and has consequently provoked hostility, and what accounts for the necessity of repression? My experience is that a search in these directions often leads to a satisfactory understanding of anxiety. Anxiety is not only generated in childhood. There is no doubt that persons whom we call neurotic remain infantile in their attitude towards danger, and have not grown out of antiquated conditions for anxiety. Being educated by the curriculum of misfortune intimates in this challenging passage, may be the paramount education that one receives. The more one is shaken, the more one is introduced to possibilities that would not otherwise be available to one. While these possibilities may seem repellent at first, they could eventually prove far superior to one’s former prospects and instill a far more enduring faith. The loss of a parent, for example, can challenge a client to become more independent in one’s life, more capable. Fear can awaken humility in some clients and a renewed appreciation for limits. Anger can fuel hope, power, and accomplishment. Depression can fuel sensitivity. The question, of course, is how to promote these discoveries and how to sustain them over an extended period. The answer is possessed in the faith one acquires by assimilating one’s anxiety. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

There is a moment in the career of the seeker when one may have to face the problem of joining some special organization. Here we can deal only with the general question itself. For most beginners, association with such an organization may be quite helpful, but for most intermediates it will be less so, and for all proficients it will be definitely detrimental. Sooner or later the seeker will discover that in accepting the advantages of such association one has also to accept the disadvantages, and that the price of serving its interests is partnership in its evils. One discovers in time that the institution which was to help one reach a certain end, becomes itself that end. Thus the true gal is shut out of sight, and a false one is substituted for it. One can keep one’s membership in the organization only by giving up something of one’s individual wholeness of mind and personal integrity of character. The organization tends to tyrannize over one’s thoughts and conduct, to weaken one’s power of correct judgment, and to destroy a fresh, spontaneous inner life. One will come in time to refuse to take any organization at its own valuation for one see that it is not the history behind it but the service it renders. The only worthwhile enlightenment is the one which lasts all through the year and every year. It is the difference between visiting a palace (the glimpse) and coming to live permanently in one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

August 11, 2019 11:13 pm

The Full Development of the Individual is Conditioned by the Most Ruthless Struggle of Individuals

I was lying still somewhere, in an open place, on the rocky ground. I had the veil. I could feel the bulk of it, but I did not dare to reach inside and draw it out or examine it. Help the souls who are lost! Help them. Do not leave them in the whirlwind, do not leave them on Earth struggling to gain understanding. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive beings has to wage for one’s bodily existence attains in the modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon beings too free themselves of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Being’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of beings and their work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each being the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The full development of the individual is conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how they personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. The psychology basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swifts and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Beings are a differentiating creature. Their minds are stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from beings as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable—as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm events. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Thus the metropolitan type of being—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ protecting one against the threatening current and discrepancies of one’s external environment which would uproot one. One reacts with one’s head instead of one’s heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, this, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan beings. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena. The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange gives an importance to the means of exchange which the scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money and economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the same manner, the individuality phenomena is not commensurate with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations beings are reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objective measurable achievement is of interest. Thus metropolitan beings reckons with one’s merchants and customers, one’s domestic servants and often even with persons with whom one is obliged to have social intercourse. These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond a mere objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of the economic psychology of the small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions productions serves the customer who orders the goods, so that the producer and the consumer are acquainted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships. The money economy dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes from day to day, the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former. The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely by citing the dictum of the most eminent English constitutional historian: throughout the whole course of English history, London has never acted as England’s heart but often as England’s intellect and always as her moneybag! #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy had brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural sciences: to transform the World into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the World by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of the life-elements—just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so any people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor—long distances—would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious, namely, that from each point on the surface of existence—however closely attached to the surface alone—one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life. Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualistic character. These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Even though sovereign types of personality, characterized by irrational impulse, are by no means impossible in the city, they are, nevertheless, opposed to typical city life. The passionate hatred of the metropolis is understandable in these terms. The nature of some beings discover the value of the alone in the unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision for all alike. From the same source of this hatred of the metropolis surged their hatred of money economy and the intellectualism of modern existence. The idea of introducing Questers to the Quester has generally failed to effect the original purpose and has not seldom had disappointing results. It is better to recognize that this is an individual work, not to be identified with any group effort, even so small a group as two or three, let alone the larger ones of several dozen. People cannot blend so easily as to form a harmonious friendship or group, even if they are Questers. Yet many beginners in their enthusiasm try to create such friendships and have to learn their lessons when the friendship falls apart. It is better to let people find their affinity and form their companionships in a natural way. There is no duty laid upon anyone, whether teacher or taught, to give introductions unless a direct, intuitive bidding points to that duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Even where an organization is not actually obstructive or misleading, it is often cumbersome. Can the inquiring and aspiring person find no better refuge anywhere than some rigid church? Must one join some institution and have the rest of one’s life laid out for one by others even if it does violence to one’s own finer feelings and best reasonings? Must one join a crowd of other aspirants or attach oneself to some persuasive leader? It is a fact that many if not most do this, which shows the lack of strength in their minds and characters; but on the other hand a more popular way is easer and more comfortable. Belonging to an elite group, whether or not it be real as self-claimed, allows its members to feel superior, to be condescending, and to denigrate others. A movement may begin and seek to keep free from organization, administration, and authority, but it is unlikely to remain so. For human beings, fallible or ambitious, frail or emotional, will sooner, or later seek to impose their ideas, will, or themselves on the others. Few are willing to sacrifice their desire for the gregarious support offered by joining an organization and therefore few see how this binds them to its strict and rigid doctrines, imprisons them in its practices or methods, and obstructs their free hearing of the intuitive voice of their own soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

With the capacity of hostility to generate anxiety the relation between the two is not exhausted. The process also works the other ways around: anxiety in its turn, when based on a feeling of being menaced, easily provokes a reactive hostility in defense. In this regard it does not differ in any way from fear, which may equally provoke aggression. The reactive hostility too, if repressed, may create anxiety, and this a cycle is created. This effect of reciprocity between hostility and anxiety, one always generating and reinforcing the other, enables us to understand why we find in neuroses such an enormous amount of relentless hostility. When the intensification of hostility through anxiety is realized it seems unnecessary to look for a special biological source for destructive drives. This reciprocal influence is also the basic reason why severe neuroses so often become worse without any apparent difficult conditions from the outside. It does not matter whether anxiety or hostility has been the primary factor; the point this that is highly important for the dynamics of a neurosis is that anxiety and hostility are inextricably interwoven. I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A being’s own problem stares one alone in the face, and is not to be solved by any association of others. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The great mistake of all spiritual organizations is to overlook the fact that progress or salvation is a highly individual matter. Each person has one’s unique attitude towards life; each must move forward by one’s own expanding comprehension and especially by one’s own personal effort. Some people are held spellbound by others because their statements matter. Some authorities speak out of their own doubt-ridden souls—souls which always existed on the boundary. Many are called to give doubt to the faithful and faith to the doubters. Doubting is the symbol of the growing process, and may lead one into the mist interesting and even thrilling phenomena. To doubt constructively requires that one be well fortified with knowledge; the person who knows very little cannot take the risk the doubting requires. When we bring doubt to the faithful, that means these faithful are soundly based and can stand—and even need to stand—looking into the abyss of doubt. They are the one who can take the risk which confronts anyone who gazes into the Holy Void. It takes more than knowledge to doubt; it takes courage. Richness is a product of prolonged and multitudinous doubting. Doubting in this sense is a rich and adventurous back-packing among the high mountains; one’s knowledge gives one a firm footing on the trail but one’s doubt give the sense of venture. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Doubt opens new trails to the unknown; one learns new paths; one sees new things on the trip; there are fresh winds blowing from different directions. Doubt in this sense is expressive of the courage to venture when one never knows where one will come out. To venture cases anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self. The courage to doubt for the enlightened is one’s quest for the Holy Void and the use of the soul and love as our teacher. It means our lives are far from simple but at the same time they are glorious. Some may accuse one of being an atheist, but it also means that thousands of others will see one as their guide to meaning, to mystery and blessedness. To live in doubt is to live in ecstasy. It means no loner to live life continually under the phrase “in spite of.” As our faith increase, we will unequivocally know it is because we are seeking the truth and not merely because we are told to believe is the right thing to do. When the masculine and feminine temperaments within us are untied, completed, and balanced, when masculine power and feminine passivity are brought together inside the person and knowledge and reverence encircle them both, then wisdom begins to dawn in the soul. The ineffable reality and the mentalist Universe are then understood to be non-different from other another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Where both unity and diversity are experienced and the individual is able to attain both these levels, one is surely gifted with insight. However, if diversity has to be blotted out before becoming aware of unity, this may be regarded as a penultimate faculty; that is, the insight is genuine but is still not fully mature. Everything depends on the capacity of the individual. When one’s mind moves entirely and wholly into the One Infinite Presence, and when it settles permanently there, the divided existence of glimpse and darkness, of Spirit and matter, of Overself and ego, of Heaven and Earth, will vanish. The crossing over to a unified existence will happens. The state of nonduality is a state of intense peace and perfect balance. It is so peaceful because everything is seen as it belongs—to the eternal order of cosmic evolution; hence, all is accepted, all reconciled. For the heart in inner harmony and for which everything is one, no difference exists between this and that. Why is it that despite all the visible and touchable counter-attractions, despite the innumerable failures and long years of fruitlessness, so many beings have sought through so many ages in so many lands for God, for wat is utterly intangible, unnamable, shapeless, unseen, and unheard? #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Because the simple but astonishing fact is that the Overself, which is the presence of God in them, is part of their nature as human beings is why we search for God! Mysticism is nothing more than the methodical attempt to wake up to this fact. The soul which metaphysics points to in reasoning, mysticism establishes in experience. We all need to feel the divine presence. Even the being who asserts that one does not is no exception. For one indirectly finds it just the same in spite of oneself but under limited forms like aesthetic appreciation or Nature’s inspiration. Even if all contemporary mystics were to die out, even if not a single living being were to be interested in mysticism, even if all mystical doctrines were to disappear from human memory and written record, the logic of evolution would bring back both the teaching and the practice. They are two of those historical necessities which are certain to be regained in the course of humanity’s cultural progress. Because the Overself is already there within one in all its immutable sublimity, beings have not to develop it or perfect it. One has only to develop and perfect one’s ego until it becomes like a polished mirror, held up to and reflecting the sacred attributes of the Overself, and showing openly forth the divine qualities which had hitherto lain hidden behind itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

August 11, 2019 1:43 am

Of Happiness and Despair, We Have No Measure for After the Angel Had Spoken to Us, He Departed!

All right. Picture this. The population of the World has swelled to billions, and cities have risen though not in very many places, and mostly in that very valley where I had descended and left my marks on the walls of caves. Humankind hand wandered north and south as far as it could on the planet; settlements and towns and forts existed in various stages of development. Human’s wild imaginings of immortality and reunion wit the dead have everywhere given rise to religion. In the Nile Valley, a civilization of astonishing stability has developed, while war is waged all the time in the land we call the Holy Land. Billions of souls are now sputtered with enduring life, and they are of various creeds and yearnings for eternal life, which has brought them to this place with great ferocity. Mad expectations have pitched countless one into confusion. Others have grown so strong they exert a sort of rulership amongst the others. And some have learned some have learned that they can possess, or influence, or harm or love, as they case may be, to get others to do what they wish. The World is also populated by spirit! And some, have no memory anymore at all of being human, have become what men and women will for eternity call demons, prowling about, eager to possess, wreak havoc, or make mischief, as their development allow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

As we can see, humans are alienated because of the conditions in which they work and play. Industrial societies, in the Age of Information, produce certain cultural values. What are those values? What effect o they have on being’s striving for self-achievement? The urban culture is a money culture, that is, money stamps its character. Monetary interests lend urban society its essentially impersonal character and make beings a mere cog in a giant machine. To survive as an individual in this calculating World, beings must use their heads more than their hearts. The result is a blasé attitude in which nerves and feelings are blunted. If the individual does survive, it is only at the most terrible cost. Most, however, are overwhelmed by the splendor and pressures of the metropolis. When the system of private property produces a surplus of wealth, the possession of wealth becomes the primary means of achieving social status. In time mere wealth becomes an end in itself. It becomes conspicuous waste. Conspicuous because being’s wealth, if it is to secure them the esteem of their peers, must be seen; wasteful, because material but not human ends are served. As material values have gained pre-eminence, spiritual values have declined in direst proportion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The central fact of modern history is unquestionably the decline of religion as a ruling force in being’s lives. While one may argue with this claim, there can be no disputing the decline. In losing religion, beings lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; one was set free to deal with this World in all its brute objectivity. However, beings are bound to feel homeless in such a World, which no longer answered the need of one’s spirit. Just how anomie is related to the decline of religion and stimulation of material desire, faith is thought to be no longer a sustaining power and anarchy rules in the economy, any serious breakdown in that economy will have dire results for its victims. Lacking moral stability, they take their own lives. And the lack of spirituality and family values could also be why we are seeing a sharp spike in violence. The spike in violence is probably also due to the fact you have politicians like Jerry Brown and Darrell Steinberg vowing to “fight Trump,” which may also insight violence and also because White men in particular are being demonized by the media just for having pride in their culture, and this is making many people live in fear, have anxiety and feel ashamed of who they are, even though they have done nothing wrong. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

After the industrial revolution men and women continued to sing and dance, but rarely in cohesive groups. (In the latest dance craze, the “twist,” which was made popular by Chubby Checker in the 1960s, bodies never touched. You can see how much culture, just like religion has changed.) The decline of the of group dancing is a paradigm of what is called desocialization or decay. The perpetuation and further growth of desocializing culture involves the inevitability of its own eventual destruction. There are other monsters on Earth, existing twixt the visible and the invisible; but the great thrust of the World was and always has been the fate of its billions of Humankind. Is this pessimistic outlook justified? In place of earlier and cohering beliefs and activities, we now have mass culture. Of happiness and of despair, we have no measure for culture adds to the estrangement of beings. All mass media in the end alienates people from personal experience and, though appearing to offset it, intensify their mortal isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. The processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from the outside. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Though the steps by which anxiety develops are simple in principle, in practice it is usually difficult to understand the conditions of anxiety. One of the complicating factors is that the repressed hostile impulses are frequently projected not on the person factually concerned but on something else. In one of Dr. Freud’s case histories, for example, the little Hans did not develop an anxiety concerning his parents but an anxiety concerning white horses. An otherwise very sensible patient of mine, after a repression of hostility toward her husband, suddenly developed an anxiety concerning reptiles in the tiled swimming pool. It seems that nothing from germs to thunderstorms is too remote for an anxiety to be attached to it. The reasons for this tendency to detach the anxiety from the person concerned are quite obvious. If the anxiety factually concerns a parent, husband, friend or one in similar close relationship the assumption of hostility is felt to be incompatible with an existing tie of authority, love or appreciation. The maxim in these cases is he denial of hostility all around. By repressing one’s own hostility the person denies that there is any hostility on one’s part, and by projecting one’s repressed hostility to thunderstorms one denies any hostility on the other’s part. Many illusions of happy marriage rest on an ostrich policy of this kind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

That a repression of hostility leads with inexorable logic to the generation of anxiety does not mean that anxiety must become manifest every time the process takes place. Anxiety may be removed instantaneously by one of the protective devices we have discussed or shall discuss later. A person in such a situation may protect oneself by such means, for example, as developing an enhanced need for sleep or taking to drink. There are infinite variations in the forms of anxiety which may ensue from the process of repressing hostility. For instance, though things, or objects, have a radically different existence than do conscious human beings, we so often treat the two in the same way. Increasingly, society identifies people’s roles with their overall beings; factory managers, for example, perceive their workers as mechanical parts; consumers equate producers with things (for instance, clerk-things, waiter-things, doctor-things); and even governments, such as the American Democratic Party, views its citizens as moldable tools of the state. Yet our authentic existence is completely contrary to these frozen interpretations of our lives: it is a “no-thing.” At every instant, that is, we are completely free to disengage from who we were that instant before, not in the sense of changing our material reality or the circumstances within which are thrust, but in the sense of adopting attitudes toward these facticities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

To live authentically, then, one must be prepared, at each instant, to negate one’s identities of the past, to create new identities (or attitudes), and to affirm the nothingness that one is. How workable is this demanding vision of being? It is highly workable because we live it whether we want to acknowledge the point or not. We are condemned to be free. It is extremely difficult to achieve such a liberated state. For unlike experiencing a fullness of Being, it would be like a constant state of disorientation, or nausea—a void that we would be perpetually responsible for filling. It would also be a disconnected state, completely immune to subconscious (for example, cultural, historical, or personal) influences. However, do we really have to acknowledge total freedom to adopt attitudes toward a given situation in order to be considered authentic; or are there mitigating circumstances, pre- or unreflected-upon meanings, that color and limit our attitudinal range? Inherent in power-to-be is the need to affirm one’s own being. This, the second level in our spectrum, is the quiet, undramatic form of self-belief. It arises from an original feeling of worth imparted to the infant through the love of a parent or parents in the early months, and it shows itself later on in life as a sense of dignity. The word dignity, coming from the Latin dignus, “worthy,” means a “feeling of intrinsic worth,” an essential for every mentally healthy human being. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Many things many happen to this initial longing to be valued. Sometimes people believe things like, “I am worth something, but nobody in the World knows it.” Or they may feel, “I am not worth anything, and I am not supposed to be except when others can use me for pleasures of the flesh.” Or some may believe, “I am not worthy anything, but allied with God I am worth everything in the World.” The error many persons make is that of bypassing self-affirmation and jumping straight from powerlessness into aggression and violence. When one has always been powerless, the heady feeling one gets when one first realizes one is does have power seems to be intoxicating. It is as though one had to summon up adrenalin in order to experience the fact that one has power to be, and once the adrenalin is present, one moves on the strength of it into aggressive behavior. Hence persons in therapy often go through periods of being what their friends and family call excessively aggressive just after they realize their own power to be. This aggression or violence can burn like bonfire, but is generally no more than a temporary exercise. If self-affirmation, as a step in a person’s development, is omitted or given the staying capacity and depth to one’s power to be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Many in our culture tend to deny self-affirmation on moral grounds. They have been taught that this urge is selfish or egocentric in the pejorative sense, and that the way to love others is hate yourself. This is one of the most thoroughly anachronistic aspects of our deteriorated puritanism; our attitudes toward others parallel our attitudes toward ourselves and a basic love for ourselves is necessary if we are to love others, has now been proved beyond any doubt. The Biblical precept means what it says: Love your neighbor not as you hate yourself but as you love yourself. Therapeutically, it often helps to cast the patient’s behavior into perspective by reminding one, “You would not treat another person as badly as you treat yourself.” Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. However, it is not to be thought of merely as a “letting go”; it involves the total person, with the subconscious and unconscious acting in unity wit the conscious. It is not, thus, irrational; it is, rather, suprarational. It brings intellectual, volitional, and emotional functions into play all together. What I am saying may sound strange in the light of our traditional academic psychology. It should sound strange. Our traditional academic psychology has been founded on the dichotomy between subject and object which has been the central character of Western thought for the past four centuries. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

This dichotomy between subject and object is the cancer of all psychology and psychiatry up to now. It is not avoided by behaviorism or operationalism, which would define experience only in objective terms. Nor is it avoided by isolating the creative experience as a purely subjective phenomenon. Most psychological and other modern schools of thought still assume this split without being aware of it. We have tended to set reason over against emotions, and have assumed, as an outgrowth of this dichotomy, that we could observe something most accurately if our emotions were not involved—that is to say, we would be least biased if we had no emotional stake at all in the matter at hand. I think this is an egregious error. There are now data in Rorschach responses, for example, that indicate that people can more accurately observe precisely when they are emotionally involved—that is, reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when one’s emotions are engaged. Indeed, we cannot really see an object unless we have some emotional involvement with it. It may well be that reason works best in the state of ecstasy. What manner of encounter releases the vitality? What particular relation to landscape or inner vision or idea heightens the consciousness, brings forth the intensity? #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

By asking these questions, the teacher soon finds that one is faced by a new problem: the temperamental incompatibilities of the students. They cannot study together without coming into disagreement and they cannot work together without coming into conflict. They take offense too easily and do not realize that the teacher has duties toward many other students besides themselves. They cannot even discover that the teacher has sent more letters of given more interviews to another student without becoming jealous of the latter. Thus the personal factor cannot be eliminated from any group. In the end, the teacher finds that one has to be advise each student not to concern oneself about the others. So the teacher concludes that one can get better results by dealing with each individual separately than in a group. Those who serve the interests of their institution, those who mold its policy and become its instrument, will have to choose between such activity and the Ideal. To overact against the misuse of power of the deficiencies of an institution is to commit a fresh error. Whilst beings are imperfect and whilst power makes them drunk, the real issue is why the inhibitions are there in the first place? We cannot entrust the government of any religious institution, any religious organization, or any human life to a single being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The organization of church, group, or society along the usual lines is too often motivated by a mixture of urges—some creditable but others not. If there is the desire to spread what is believed to be true, there may also be the desire to occupy a prominent leading position in the organization, the ambition to dominate others. People try to escape their responsibility in this matter by handing it over to an official Church, or Spiritual Guide, or referring to Scripture. However, they fail to see that in the end it is they themselves who judge between doctrines, decide upon beliefs, choose spiritual paths, request ceremonies and accept observances, and finally personally pronounce the words: this is Truth! To accept belief is unconsciously or consciously to pass a judgment, one’s own judgment, on that belief. The illuminate is conscious of both the ultimate unity and the immediate multiplicity of the World. This is a paradox. However, one’s permanent resting place while one is dealing with others is at the junction-point of duality and unity so that one is ready at any moment to absorb one’s attention in either phase. The understanding that everything is illusive is not the final one. It is an essential stage but only a stage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Ultimately you will understand that the form and separateness of a thing are illusory, but the thing-in-itself is not. That out of which those forms appear is not different from them, hence Reality is one and the same in all things. This is the paradox of life and a sharp mind is needed to perceive it. However, to bring beginners out of their Earthly attachments, we have to teach first the illusoriness of the World, and then raise them to a higher level of understanding and show that the World is not apart from the Real. That Thou Art unifies everything in essence. However, this final realization cannot be got by stilling the mind, only by awakening it into full vigour again after the spiritual peace has been attained and then letting its activity cease of its own accord when thought merges voluntarily into insight. When that is done, you know the limitations of both soul and enquiry of mind as successive stages. Whoever realizes this truth does not divorce from matter, but realize non-difference from it. Hence we call this highest path the soul’s unity. However, to reach it one has to pass through the revelations of evolution and gain wisdom and knowledge. Christian Science caught glimpses of the higher truth but some get their facts and fancies confused together. Many admire the human heart, loving others as it does, mate with mate, and family with family, they imagine Heaven. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Beings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kin will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! And their souls are greats. They reach out beyond the love of self and the service of self in the name of Love. Love goes back and forth between Earth and Heaven eternally. Being know the Lord is here, and they want to know everything about God. And about themselves. They know and they want to know. God’s essence is Goodness, and he will not suffer these souls to cry in gloom and ignorance. God will not suffer the ingenious Humankind to continue without an inkling of the Divine. Souls of the dead have given human much inspiration, and encouragement, and those souls are out of Nature, as many have beheld it, and growing stronger by the day. In this high state one’s own mind is consciously connected with the divine Mind. The result can scarcely be understood by the uninitiated. “And it came to pass that after this manner of language did I persuade my brethren, that they might be faithful in keeping the commandments of God. And after the Angel had spoken unto us, he departed,” reports 1 Nephi 3.21 and 3.30. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

August 8, 2019 11:25 pm

The Soul is Still the Activity of thinking, the Emotion of Joy, and the Discrimination Between X and Y

And as we Angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point…souls and nothing but souls…we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on Earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process. And just as with Angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to Hudegrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among the mystics and for the different kinds of Glimpse among aspirants. All illumination and all Glimpses free the soul from its negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. One is able, as a result, to see into one’s higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden. One can symbolically look down and see flowers of the World enjoy the petal and the center colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated one may be unsure that our spectrum is even involved. I mean, it is as if out spectrum of color is not the limit! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The soul is still the activity of thinking, the emotion of joy, and the discrimination between X and Y. In the next and higher degree, it is as if the window were still more leaned so that still more beauty is revealed beyond it. Here there are no thoughts to intervene between the seer and the seen. In the third degree, the discrimination is no longer present. In the fourth degree, it is as if the window were thoroughly cleaned. Here there is no longer even a rapturous emotion but only a balanced happiness, a steady tranquility which, being beyond the intellect, cannot properly be described by the intellect. Some soul, for example, knew they were dead, and sought to respond to the prayers of their children, and actively attempted to advise, speaking with all the power they could muster in a spiritual voice. They struggled to appear to their children. Sometimes they broke through for a fleeting seconds, gathering to themselves swirling particles of matter by the sheer force of their invisible essence. Other times they made themselves visible in dreams, when the soul of the sleeping human was opened to other souls. They told their children of the bitterness and darkness of death, and that they must be brave and strong in life. They gave their children advice. And the seemed, in some instance at least, to know that the belief and attention of their sons and daughters strengthened them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

These souls requested prayers and offerings, they reminded the children of their duty. These souls were to some extent the least confused, expect for one thing. They thought they had seen all these was to be seen. There was no hint of Heaven, no light from Heaven penetrated Sheol, nor any music. From Sheol one saw the darkness and the stars, and the people of Earth. Again, mental peace is a fruit of the first and lowest degree of illumination, although thoughts will continue to arise although gently, and thinking in the discursive manner will continue to be active although slowly. However, concentration will be sufficiently strong to detach one from the World and, as a consequence, to yield the happiness which accompanies such detachment. Only those who have attained to this degree can correctly be regarded as “saved” ad only they alone are unable to fall back into illusion, error, sin, greed, or sensuality. In the second degree, there will be more inward absorption and cerebral processed will entirely fade out. Freedom from all possibility of anger is a fruit of the third degree and higher degree. If you think l entirely fade out. Freedom from all possibility of anger is a fruit of the third degree and higher degree. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

If you think you are a god to your children and can still derive strength from the mere sight of the liberation they pour on your grave, the Witness is both an abstract metaphysical concept and a concrete mystical experience. It is not an ultimate one, yielding pure Being, the unsplit Consciousness, but a provisional one. The Witness itself, while witnessing, is being witnessed. Regardless of if the soul’s descendants harken their advice or not, one cannot feel anger toward them, sometimes one will be able to communicate with their descendants with spectacular results. To be the witness is the first stage; to be Witnesses of the witness is the next; but to BE is the final one. For consciousness lets go of the witness in the end. Consciousness alone is itself the real experience. One discovers the presence of this link with World-Mind by a wonderful experience, brief and passing though it be. It is felt intensely and known intuitively. That the divinity is within one is thenceforth one’s certainty even at the times when awareness is absent. However, eventually, if mind develops, one has to asks the question, “What of the World outside?” Until it takes the final leap and transcends itself, human thought can rise to levels of godliness. We may reasonably hope to see God one day but not to be God. The Cosmic Vision of the World-Mind at work can make these souls seem like god to their children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Astral gods of a certain kind. Not the Creator of All. When they come to mortals, some souls know they are ghost. Others think they are alive and the whole World has turned against them. Others simply drift, seeing and hearing the sound of other living beings but remote from this as if in a stupor or dream. And some souls died. The dying soul will last a week, perhaps a month in human time, after its separation from the human body, retaining its shape, and then begin to fade. The essence will gradually disperse. Gone into the air, returned perhaps to the energy and essence of God. Their energy comes back into the Creator; the light of a candle returns to the eternal fire. Yet, these are spiritual beings, made in our image and in God’s image, and they cling to that image and hunger for a life beyond death. That is the agony. The hunger for life beyond death. The souls who become the strongest are those who perceive themselves as gods, or humans passed into the realm of the good God, and attentive to humans; and these souls gain power even to sway the others and strengthen them sometimes and keep them from fading away. There are various degrees and kinds of trance, ranging from mere oblivion to psychical visions and mental travelling, and higher still to a complete immersion of the soul in cosmic Divinity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

A rare but complete illumination must not only pass from the first to the final degree of intensity, but must also contain a picture of the cosmic order. That is to say, it must be a revelation. It must explain the profounder nature of the Universe, the inner meaning of individual existence, and the hidden relationship between the two. There are some souls who understand things in a different way. They know they are not gods. They know they are dead humans. They know they do not really have the right to change the destiny of those who pray to them; they know that the libations essentially are symbolic. These souls understand the meaning of the concept of symbolic. They know. And they know they are dead and they perceive themselves to be lost. If they could, they would reenter the flesh. For there in the flesh is all the light and warmth and comfort that they have ever known and can still see. And sometimes these souls manage to do exactly that! Two factors account for the differences between individual cosmic illumination. First, there is the human contribution made by the mind itself; second, there are ascending stages in the Illumination or rather in the receptivity to it. Cosmic Vision is of two kinds: a seeing the forms and objects around and feeling one with them, and seeing only the Idea of the Universe. This is called identifying through worship. It is the subtle Universe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

It is an advanced experience, not the ultimate so one ought not to stop there. I have witnessed it in various different fashions. I saw these souls deliberately descend and take possession of a stupefied mortal, take our one’s limbs and brain and live in the individual until the being gained the strength to throw the soul off. You know these things. All beings do—what is involved in possession. There is some confusion on this point in the minds of many students. On attaining enlightenment a being does not attain omniscience. At most, one may receive a revelation of the inner operations of life and Nature, of the higher laws governing life and beings. That is, one may also become a seer and find a cosmogony presented to one’s gaze. However, the actuality in a majority of cases is that one attains enlightenment only, not cosmogonical seership. And what I cannot fail to be frightened by, and horrified by Nature, what I cannot ignore is that these souls do have an effect on living men and women. There are those living humans already who have become oracles. They smoke or drink some potion to render their own minds passive, so that a dead soul might speak with their voice! And because these powerful spirit—for I shall call them spirits now—because these powerful spirits know only what Earth and Sheol can teach them, they might urge human beings on to terrible mistakes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

I have seen these spirits take possession of someone and order people into battle; I have seen them order executions. I have seen them demand blood sacrifice of human beings. Perhaps this is what is wrong with the thugs outside Mitch McConnell’s home who are currently saying, “Stab the expletive in the heart.” Tomi Lahren what is actually going on is called, “liberal privilege, and that is the misguided belief that those on the left and attack and harass anyone on the conservative side, anyone who is republican, anyone who is a Trump supporter because they believe they have the moral authority to do so.” Humans can create anything. Let us not forget Who Created us all. Angels have gathered, exchanged stories in amazement, then they go off again on their own explorations; they are more entangled with the Earth than they have ever been. However essentially, the reactions of Angels varies. Some, the Seraphim mainly, think the whole process of creation and evolution is downright marvelous; that God deserves a thousand anthems in praise that his Creation should lead to a being who can evolve an invisible deity from itself who would then command it to ever greater efforts at survival of war. Then there are those who think, “This is an error, this is an abomination! These are the souls of humans pretending to be Gods! This is unspeakable and must be stopped immediately!” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The deeper one penetrates into the Void the more one is purified of the illusions of personality, time, matter, space, and causality. Between the second and third stages of insight’s unfoldment there are really two further subsidiary stages which are wrapped in the greatest mystery and are rarely touched by the average mystic. For there are stages which lead further downwards into the Void. Some can touch the edge of the Void, as it is, but not its centre. These two stages are purificatory ones and utterly annihilate the last illusions and the last egoisms of the seeker. They are dissolved forever and cannot revive again. Nothing more useful can and may be said about it here. For this is the innermost holy of holies, the most sacred sanctuary accessible to beings. One who touched this grade touches what may not be spoken aloud for sneering ears, nor written down for sneering eyes. Consequently none has ever ventured to explain publicly what must not be so explained. All those of the bene ha Elohim whom I describe to you are alive now. They are immortal. How could you think it would be any other way? Now, there were souls in Sheol at that time who no longer exist, not in any form I know of, but perhaps they do in some form known to God. Tribes pray to different souls. These souls become their gods. Some are stronger than others. Look at the way everywhere, the battle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

All human beings on this planet are imperfect. Perfection is not fully attainable here. However, when a being has striven for it and advanced near to it, one will attain it automatically as soon as one is freed from the body. So long as beings are immured in this Earth place, so long must the enlightenment one attains be an imperfect one, or the fulfilment one experiences is a limited one. The liberation from further reincarnation can be attained while still here in the flesh, but the full completion of its consequent inner peace can come only after final exit from the body. So long as one is held by the finite flesh, so long as existence in the inner human body is continued, the perfect and complete merger of one’s individuality in the cosmic mind is impossible. However, once through the portals of so-called death, it becomes an actuality. It is not that philosophy denies the possibility of escaping from personal consciousness into the universal one; on the contrary, it well admits it. However, it declares that the journey is still not finished. These souls have only begun their evolution. Who knows how strong they may become? Beings have stepped into the invisible. What if they are meant to become Angels? #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Some have sensed the presence of Angels on Earth. They sense it as they sense the presence of a dead soul. It is the same part of the brain which perceives other things invisible; I tell you Angels have been glimpsed and shall now be imagined by these people. “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the Angels in Heaven,” reports Matthew 22.30. Believe in the divinity of your deeper self. Stop looking elsewhere for light, stop wandering hither and tither for power. Your intelligence has become falsified through excessive attention to external living, hence you are not even aware in which direction to look when you seek for the real Truth. You are not even aware that all you need can be obtained by the power within, by the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient Self. You have to change, first of all, the line of thought and faith which pleads helplessly: “I am a weak being; I am unlikely to rise any higher than my present level; I live in darkness and move amid opposing environments that overwhelm me.” Rather should you engrave on your heart the high phrase: “I possess illimitable power within me; I can create a diviner life and truer vision than I now possess. So this and then surrender your body, your heart and mind to the Infinite Power which sustains all. Strive to obey Its inward promptings and then declare your readiness to accept whatsoever lot it assigns you. This is your challenge to God and he will surely answer you. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Your soul will be slowly or suddenly liberated; your body will be granted a freer pathway through conditions. You may have to be prepared for a few changes before the feet find rest, but always you shall find that the Power in which you have placed an abiding trust does not go into default. Because one believes that self-improvement, the bettering of what being’s nature, is quite possible, one believes in the quest. One who learns the essence of spiritual questing and the basic need in practical living, learns that one must come into command of oneself. Who is willing to work upon oneself? Who even fees that one has any duty to do so? Yet this simple acknowledgment could lead to the discovery of God. The student of true philosophy is more intent on growth than on study. Each being should be oneself, not represent a copy of another being. However, one should be one’s best self, not one’s worst, one’s lower, one’s lesser. This calls for growth, aspiration, effort, on one’s part. That is to say, it calls for a quest. Out of one’s present self one is to evolve a better one and to actualize one’s higher possibilities. The divine spirit is always there in beings, has always been there; but until one cultivates one’s capacity to become aware of it, it might as well be non-existent for one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The Overself is always there; it has never left us, but it has to be ardently, lovingly, and subtly searched for. One must carry the idea of “I” to a deeper level of identification. Most groups of human beings, most of their associations, societies, and organizations suffer at some time from trouble caused by human weaknesses and shortcomings. These include divisions, jealousies, malices, and personal dislikes or hostilities. This is true of idealistic and religious groups as of business and professional ones. Those with experience of the cults and organizations know how unsatisfactory they are in the end. The passage of truth from mind to mind has always been a personal matter and cannot be otherwise, just as the training in prayer is equally person. In authentic living is an expression of complacency. It is designed around habit, custom, and the forgetting of life’s temporality. Being-in-the-World, on the other hand, is characterized by presence or responsiveness to the World (with all its possibilities and limits). The authentic person, accordingly, is one who responds, not just to Worldly demands, but to Being itself, or to the call within. What is this call to Being? It is like calling of the poet—passionate, poignant, and welling from the depths. When people live authentically, they have a spontaneous feeling that they are caught up in something above human desires to be achieved. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

August 7, 2019 9:11 pm

When We Reached the Earth, We Went Our Separate Ways to Perceive things, and Came Together Often!

Angels are individual, that is the key. We Who Fell are no single species, unless being the brightest, the most clever, and the most comprehending makes us a species, which I do not think it does. When God sent us down to Earth to Watch, specifically to observe all Humankind, we were curious about the dead as the living—this wreath of souls we could see and hear, gathered about the Word, and which we called Sheol immediately because it seemed to us that the realm of these weeping souls was the realm of pure gloom. “Sheol” means gloom. A gathering of Angels decided to go with me, to draw as close as possible to Matter in order to pull together for ourselves our entire knowledge, to better comprehend, as God had asked us to do. We discovered that some beings more sensitive, often more gifted. They want their lives to have some meaning, some fulfillment. They want the feel of living for some worthwhile end. However, often there is something wrong with the seeking. They too suffer from the intrusive ego. Their seeking lacks adequate sincerity. This need of success is greater for them than the need of the thing that is sought. If, for example, they pursue some art, the art itself counts less then the renown of the artist. They would be great artists, great writers, opera singers, pathfinders. They would aim high, but the mark is higher than their reach. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

When we reached the Earth, we went our separate ways to perceive things, and came together often and instantly and agreed upon what we had seen. What united us was our interest in the statement of God that Humankind was part of Nature. We just could not see how this was true. We went exploring. When humans miss their mark for success, they grow disillusioned. They are thrust back on their unsatisfied egos, and the great emptiness is possessed before them. They try to escape, but they run from themselves. They try to forget, but their only recourse is an excitation of the senses. This stimulant needs to be incessantly repeated. The little spell of liberation, the false glow, the hour of oblivion, leave them the more desolate and adds new tensions to the returning emptiness. Then there is leisure no more, no relaxedness, no return to the thing they once loved, no lingering ease of quiet discourse with friends, no natural savor of living, no perception of the unfolding wonder of things. However, instead they pass from excitation to a hollow release, from release to tension, from tension to new excitation. Nothing is itself anymore. And no more at the end of the day do they sink peacefully into the marvelous process of slowly gathering sleep. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Once they were so eager to make life feel real; now they shun its reality and are driven to pursue phantoms, the will-o’-the-wisp of sense-spurred distraction, the unseeing ghost of once clear-eyed joys, the phantom Aphrodite. However, it is not only the more cultivated, the more sophisticated, and the well-to-do with their more ample opportunities, who feel the great emptiness. In other ways it besets large numbers who, finding little satisfaction in their daily work, seek compensation in the leisure they now possess. There are many besides, people who win early pensions or otherwise can get along without toil through legacies or rents or other sources of unearned income, women who have no family cares—the new, unopulent leisure class. They have no training for leisure. They have, most of them, no strong interests of devotions. The habits of their work time convey no meaning to the time of liberation. Most of them live in cities, in drab and narrow confines within which they revolve in casual little circles. They see nothing ahead but the coming of mature age. They want to regain the feel of life. Time is theirs, but they cannot redeem it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

So they too betake themselves, in their various ways, to some form of excitation. Men and women live in large groups, very unlike the other primates, they built shelters for themselves, and they paint their bodies with various colors, the women often live separate from the men, and they believe in something invisible. Now what is that? Is it the souls of the ancestors, the dearly departed who are still locked in the air of Earth, disembodied and confused? Yes, it is the souls of ancestors, but the human worship other entities as well. They image a God who has made the Wild Beasts and to him they make blood sacrifice on Altars, thinking this aspect of Almighty God to be a personality of very distinct limits and rather easy to please or displease. Now I can say all this was a big surprise to me. I had seen the early sign of it. After all, I telescoped millions of years for you in my Revelations. However, when I drew near to these altars, when I heard the specific prayer to the God of the Wild Animals; when I began to see the care and deliberation of the sacrifice—the slaying of the ram or a deer—I was much struck by the fact that not only had these humans come to look like Angels, but they had guessed at the truth. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

They had come upon it instinctively! There is a God. They know. They do not know what God is like but they know. And this instinctive knowledge seems to spring from the same essence as does their surviving spiritual souls. Let me be even clearer. Self-consciousness, and the awareness of one’s own death—this has created a sense of distinct individuality in humans, and this individuality fears death; fears annihilation! They see it, know what is happening, see it happening. And pray to a God that he will not let such a thing have no meaning in the World. And it is this very same tenacity—the tenacity of this individuating the shape of the body, holding itself together, so to speak, clinging to life, as it were, perpetuating itself, by shaping itself according to the only World it knows. Having no recourse in themselves, they must get out of themselves. They take the easy ways out because they see no alternative. They have never learned to climb the paths leading to the pleasures that wait in the realm of ideas, in the growing revelation of the nature of things, in the treasuries of the arts, and in the rich lore of the libraries. They must seek instead the quick transport, the dream, the adventure, in the tavern or where the gamblers meet. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

They would cover the emptiness they cannot fill. They make a goal of what is a diversion. The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge or appetite, one’s own little festival of the Saturnalia, a brief excursion from one’s way of life. However, for these other the diversion becomes the way of life and diverts no more. For them the filled glass is not the cheerful accompaniment of pleasant reunions but a deceitful medicine for the ennui of living. For them the gambling venture is no mere holiday flutter but a never-satisfied urge that forever defeats itself. In 1946, in straitened England, the then equivalent of $6,567,769,230.7 (about $6.6 billion) was placed in bets on the horses and the dogs. (Nacho is from a breed of Boxer dogs that was considered one of the fastest in the races, which is why he has so many problems with his legs now and likes to sleep.) Besides which, vast sums changed hands on the results of football games. For hundreds of thousands of people the major news in the daily papers, day after day and month after month, was the lists of the winners and the betting odds. England was not, is not, alone in this respect. It is only that the figures happen to be more accessible. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

A former addict explained in the London Spectator why men and women do it. The gambler, he said, “gambles because it provides an emotional tension which his mind demands. He is suffering from a deficiency disease, and the only antidote he knows is gambling.” He is trying to escape the great emptiness. An English worker of the semi-skilled category once said to me: “A fellow has to do something, and what is there? Maybe I have a shilling or two in my pocket. Maybe I could buy an extra shirt. It is no go. So I put them on the dogs.” By these resorts people do not escape the great emptiness. What they get is a sequence of brief delusions of escape. In time the only thing they can escape to is what they themselves know for a delusion. The resort is only a drug to make them forget the disease. As with all such drugs, the dose must be continually renewed, and it becomes harder and harder to return to the pre-addict stage. They come to look on the great emptiness as something inherent in the very nature of things. That is all life is. Now they know the drug is a delusion, but they do not know that it has bred a deeper delusion. There are other avenues of escape that, while they may still be delusive, have the merit of not being recognized as such. Which means that the escape is actually made. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

In every large city, and notably in those areas where people go to spend their retirement, like Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails, where the climate is mild and sunny, all kinds of special cults flourish and new ones are frequently born. To these places report the hucksters of the supernatural and find a ready market for their wares. There are to be found the prophets of mystical union, robed and turned preachers of the Light of Asia, interpreters of the Rosy Cross, exponents of the Heavenly trance, new healers of the soul, tuners-in of the Infinite, operators in spiritual magics. Considerable numbers flock to them, some to seek a new sensation and then pass on, but some to stay and create a peaceful community. These last ones have found their peace. A stable reality, and nebula for their mystical dream. Back in the days when unremitting toil was the lot of all but the very few and leisure still a hopeless yearning, hard and painful as life was, it still felt real. People were in rapport with the small bit of reality allotted to them, the sense of the Earth, the tang of the changing season, the consciousness of the eternal on-going of birth and death. Now, when so many have leisure, they become detached from themselves, not mere from the Earth. From all the widened horizons of our greater World a thousand voices call us to come near, to understand, and to enjoy, but our ears are not trained to hear them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The leisure is ours but not the skill to use it. So leisure becomes a void, and from the ensuing restlessness beings take refuge in delusive excitations or fictitious visions, returning to their own Earth no more. The crisis in the European sciences has been the growing effort to impose natural scientific attitudes on the study of human (or psychological) phenomena. The basic problem with this trend is that it reduces, or debases, the human experience. It seeks to understand human behavior in terms of only itself surface (that is, observable, measurable) features; it equates psychological investigation with the investigation of physical or physiological phenomena, seeking to find invariant, universal laws of psychological functioning. In order to show that a phenomenon such as the smile is more than the contraction of the circumoral muscles or that fear or anger or attraction transcend the conditioned reflect, we have to investigate the person to whom these events occurred. The aim of phenomenology is to return to the things themselves, or to provide a method whereby human experience can be studied in its immediacy (as opposed to under controlled or laboratory conditions); the researcher suspends one’s preconceptions (for example, preselected questions) about the phenomenon under study; the researcher immerses oneself in as many aspects (for instance, cognitive, intuitive, affective) of the given phenomenon as possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

And the researcher collects and integrates these descriptions to provide a saturated (subjective or intersubjective) interpretation of the given phenomenon. That this method has its parallels in the artist’s mode of perceiving and apprehending phenomena was not lost. For it is precisely art, or the artists mode, that best illuminated psychology for these thinkers; it is precisely the artistic mode that could counterbalance reductionism. If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine, this was attributable neither to accident, or to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking and has thorough attentiveness and wonder, and the same demand for awareness, and the same will to seize the meaning of the World, as that meaning comes into being. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is not merely an artistic procedure; it is a systematic method of understanding and sharing data—an artistic-science blend, if you will. This leads us to the intensity of the encounter in the creative act. Absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved, and so on, are used commonly to describe the that artist, or scientist when creating or even the child at play. By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Artists, as well as you and I in moments of intensive encounter, experience quite clear neurological changes. These include quickened heart beat; higher blood pressure; increased intensity and constriction of vision, with eyelids narrowed so that we can see more vividly the scene we are painting; we become oblivious to things around us (as well as to the passage of time). We experience a lessening of appetite—persons engaged in a creative act lose interest in eating at the moment, and may work right through mealtime without noticing it. Now all of these correspond to an inhibiting of the functioning of the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system (which has to do with ease, comfort, nourishment) and an activation of the sympathetic nervous division. And, lo and behold, we have the flight-fight mechanism, the energizing of the organism for fighting or fleeing. This is the neurological correlate of what we find, in broad terms, in anxiety and fear. However, what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction, though this maybe the case later, after he or she has a highball or a pipe in the evening. Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one’s own potentialities. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Now this intensity of awareness is not necessarily connected with conscious purpose or willing. It may occur in reverie or in dreams, or from so-called unconscious levels. An eminent New York professor related an illustrative story. He had been searching for a particular chemical formula for some time, but without success. One night, while he was sleeping, he had a dream in which the formula was worked out and displayed before him. He woke up, and in the darkness he excitedly wrote it down on a piece of tissue, the only thing he could find. However, the next morning he could not read his own scribbling. Every night thereafter, upon going to bed, he would concentrate his hopes on dreaming the dream again. Fortunately, after some nights he did, and he then wrote the formula down for good. It was the formula he had sought and for which he received the Nobel prize. Though not rewarded so dramatically, we have all had similar experiences. Processes of forming, making, building go on even if we are not consciously aware of them at the time. William James once said that we learn to swim in the Winter and to skate in the Summer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Whether you wish to interpret these phenomena in terms of some formulation of the unconscious, or prefer to follow William James in connecting them with some neurological processes that continue even when we are not working on them, or prefer some other approach, as I do, it is still clear that creativity goes on in varying degrees of intensity on levels not directly under the control of conscious willing. Hence the heightened awareness we are speaking of does not at all mean increased self-consciousness. It is rather correlated with abandon and absorption, and it involves a heightening of awareness in the whole personality. However, let it be said immediately that unconscious insight or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hot or miss. They may indeed occur at times of relaxation, or in fantasy, or at other times when we alternate play with work. However, what is entirely clear is that they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication. Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power. Purpose involves all levels of experience. We cannot will to have insight. We cannot will creativity. However, we can will to give ourselves to encounter with intensity of dedication and commitment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The deeper aspects of awareness are activated to the extent that the person is committed to the encounter. However, the pressure to make all people members of organizations, to herd them together and affix labels, is a kind of mania. Why should there not be room for untrammeled, independent minds, who prefer to remain free and uninfluenced, untied to any one group? It is a common but fallacious belief that by joining a group we get at the truth more quickly, or progress to spiritual reality more easily. When people act together in religious or political organization, they often act worse than they would as individuals. Why is it that the eagerness with which so many disciples flock to join an ashram ends so often in a deterioration of character after they have lived in it for a while? The answer is that there is a fundamental fallacy behind the thinking which draws them into it. It is the fallacy that they have any business with the other disciples. Their true business is with their master alone. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

The disadvantage of adhering to a single system of belief or joining a single organization teaching religious, mystical, or hygienic principles is that the sound truths given out are usually one-sided; they ignore others equally sound and valuable but outside the purview of the system’s founder or the organization’s leader. This neglect prevents attainment of the full truth about the subject. For example, one political party speaks of wanting to save the environment, but only focuses on emissions. However, we also need to prevent deforestation, which is why Ethiopia planted 350 million trees in one day. Trees help to clean the air and release moisture into the air. It would be a good idea to take advantage of the rain by building more reservoirs so that we can have more drinking water and avoid droughts. And we need to reduce the amount of waste we send to the landfills. Landfills just inject garbage into the Earth and make it sick by poisoning. We have to do our best to save the Earth. “Or otherwise, can ye imagine yourselves brought before the tribunal of God with your souls filled with guilt and remorse, having a remembrance of all your guilt, yea, a perfect remembrance of all your wickedness, yea, a remembrance that yet have set at defiance the commandments of God?” (Alma 5.18). #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

For More Detailed Coverage on Landfills, Please Follow the Link Below (and here is a preview): Our Intern, Easton, recently took a trip to our local landfill so we could learn more about how items are disposed of in our community and we also asked 9 eye-opening questions! Check out what we learned, here: jillianharris.com/my-eye-opening…

August 6, 2019 10:45 pm

And How do We Relight the Flame When it is Cold, Why do We Dream When Our Thoughts Mean Nothing?

God said: “Wait!” So I found myself stopped at the gates of Heaven, along with all my companions, the Angels who generally went and did what I did, and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel, though not among my companions, were there, too. “Memnoch, my accuser,” said God, and the words were spoken with the characteristic gentleness and a great effulgence of light. “Before you come into Heaven, and you begin your diatribe, go back down to the Earth and study all you have seen thoroughly and with respect—by this I mean humankind—so that when you come to me, you have given yourself every chance to understand and to behold all I have done. I tell you now that Humankind is part of Nature, and subject to the Laws of Nature which you have seen unfold all along. No one should understand batter than you, save I. But go, see again for yourself. Then, and only then, will I call together a convocation in Heaven, of all Angels, of all ranks and all endowment, and I will listen to what you have to say. Take with you those who seek the same answers you seek and leave me those Angels who never cared, nor taken notice, nor though of anything but to live in My Light.” Parts of the psychoanalysis of a young man will demonstrate what happens when an individual’s power cannot be admitted consciously and openly, much like Memnoch In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

The power is not erased but comes out in a myriad of other, separate ways. These ways may be camouflaged power or they may be pseudopower. Soren, a Ph.D. student, good-looking, tall, appeared younger than his twenty-six years. He was the third and last child of an affluent Italian family of which the oldest child, Soren’s brother, who was nine years his senior, had always been successful both socially and on the athletic field. Soren’s sister, who was seven years older, had been in some form of therapy most of her life, had been hospitalized after a schizophrenic breakdown, and had been mute for two years in the mental hospital where she now was. His father, the treasurer of a large chain of stores, was detached, successful at work, and hypochondriacal at home—kind at times, but completely unpredictable, wanting the children to be “sweet” to him and reacting to family disagreements by becoming sick and withdrawing. Soren’s mother, who had been and still was a beauty, dominated the family constellation. She was flighty, subtle, inconsistent, intelligent, and in arguments would change her viewpoint with every sentence in order to put the other person on the defense. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

She had “spoiled” Soren—preparing his favorite cuisine, driving him to school so that he would not have to take the subway like the other boys—and was more than glad when Soren, who disliked school consistently and strongly, would feign illness in order to stay home with her. Soren’s mother was delicate toward him, actively opposing his ineffectual efforts later to date girls. The mean table was a constant battlefield of bickering, with one member of the family not speaking to another for weeks on end. This technique of cutting the resented person dead (“I would walk by my father as though he was not there,” said Soren) was resorted to particularly by Soren and his sister, the weakest members of the family. Soren’s sister eventually enlarged the pattern to include the whole World by her muteness at the hospital. Our opening question is: How was Soren to achieve any power in such a family and such a World? Caught in a double bind, with a mother who would change her stance at the drop of a word, with a father who would withdraw with the threat of a heat attack whenever the smoldering undercover warfare of the family burst out into the open, a pawn between his sister who was mentally disturbed and a successful brother who did come to protect Soren at school but teased him mercilessly at home—what was Soren to do? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Should Soren try, now that he had grown to six feet and was good-looking, to assert himself on the social scale? However, the girls at high school had always called him the “baby” (which he had been), and this still bedogged him. The athletic field? He was a novice there; and besides his brother had completely usurped that mode of recognition. Intellectually? For his entire life, until he got into college, he had hated school, did not prepare his work. All of this in spite of the fact that he basically was highly imaginative and, as it later turned out, demonstrated a rich mind and active intelligence. In his boyhood Soren presents the picture of the “little fellow,” who had learned early to be “sweet” to others, never to blow up, and, like the little countries in Europe in the eighteenth century, to get some protection by making alliances with different important members of the family. This self-deprecation pattern went so far, he confessed, that he preferred to be disliked in high school (the other boys had for him a disparaging nickname, “Sappo”) because that at least brought him some attention. Where does his power go? When he was sixteen he had had two epileptic attacks and had been on a daily dose of Dilantin since. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

These epileptic attacks are interesting for our purpose as a symptom of the seething cauldron of emotions under the surface in Soren. Whatever these attacks show physically, the psychological dimension is generally a massive rage. This rage builds up and finally explodes in the periodic seizure. The explosion is blotted out of consciousness, so the individual never has to be aware of, or has to be responsible for, what he does. However, it turns out to be violence directed chiefly against himself—the person himself gets physically hurt, to a greater or lesser degree, as he falls at the time of the seizure. Furthermore he is, like Soren, chronically crippled by having this Damocles’ Sword hanging over his head, never knowing when it will fall. All the while Soren denied this, saying: “I never get emotional or upset—I saw what it does to my sister so I vowed I would never get that way.” Soren’s dreams early in the therapy were frequently of thieves breaking into the house, which was a kind of fortress for him. The only thing he could do was to play dead, the ultimate symbol of impotence and innocence: A group of thieves was in the house. Someone came downstairs—I curled up as though dead. He looked at me a long time. After a while I went outside. The thieves grabbed me. Then a crowd of people were outside, where a woman began to chase me with a meat cleaver in her hand, and then a man took the cleaver and began to chase me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

“I remember moments of unhappiness,” said Soren, “never any joy in our family. I learned to roll with the punches in family fights, to go along, never to expect anything—you get hurt that way. Why struggle? It is painful, and I learned early never to believe in pain of any sort…Nobody paid any attention to my feelings. I was always belittled.” This is similar to the way Memnoch felt about God creating human beings and their suffering. “I went up to Heaven,” he said, “ablaze with thoughts and doubts and speculations. I knew wrath. The cries of suffering mammals had taught me wrath. The screams and roars of wars amongst beings had taught me wrath. Decay and death had taught me fear. Indeed all of God’s Creation had taught all I needed to speed before him (God) and say, ‘Is this what you wanted! Your own image divided into male and female! The spark of life now blazing huge when either dies, male or female! This grotesquerie; this impossible division; this monster! Was this the plan?’” Soren and Memnoch are both like Gulliver, all tied up with ropes by Lilliputians, this is a symbol which betrays their own image of hidden power. Memnoch’s only happy time was before the creation of humans. Soren’s only happy time was the year he went to Israel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The Israeli-Arab war was beginning, and Soren covered it for an American newspaper. He looked back upon this period with fond memories; he loved the excitement, the enforced relationship with death in his walking along the Gaza strip among the bodies of fallen soldiers. For a brief period he left himself to be of some significance. He was twenty-four at this time, and Soren fell in love with a girl—the first time he had ever been in love. The occasion, as distinguished from the cause, of his coming for psychoanalysis was his turmoil over whether to marry this girl or not. His family was aligned against her, but when I met her she seemed a sympathetic though somewhat optimistic person who was someone Soren could talk and who gave him some recognition. About three months after his psychotherapy started, he told me that he believed he could influence distant objects to change. He was shy and hesitant in telling me this, saying he knew it sounded irrational and adding that if I did not believe what he said he could not tell me. I replied that my task was not to argue the truth or falsehood of such ideas; but to find out what function they served for him; and obviously the ideas were significant for him. This apparently satisfied him, for Soren then began to reveal a whole system of belief in “retribution” at the hands of God and in harm being meted out to others and punishment for wrongs they had done. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

When we awakens in the morning, Soren must think of his family or else they would get hurt. He must lift the sheets up two feet, look at an exact spot on the wall, stand up exactly the right way on the floor, go to the bathroom and urinate, all before he exchanged a word with anyone. He must take his clothes out, put on his undershirt, sit down on the bed and put his left shoe on first, then his trousers. If he makes a mistake in this ritual, he must go back to bed and start the whole thing over. After that he must say “good morning” to Charlotte (the maid) or to his brother. At breakfast he had to eat in the same rigid order; he must drink his orange juice, then eat his egg, then drink his milk. And so on. When he does something wrong in this system, his father will have a heart attack or something will happen to his mother. Punishment and happiness, he believed, were portioned out by God. Several years earlier Soren had been relatively happy when enrolled in journalism school. As a “result” his grandmother died because he had placed the book Huckleberry Finn in a certain position on his desk or because of the way he had placed his pennies on his dresser. When I, testing the rigidity of the system, asked whether his grandmother might not have died anyway, he replied, not at the time or in some other way. If Soren does right, others will benefit; if he does wrong, others, especially those in his own family, will get sick or have accidents. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Soren cannot have pleasures of the flesh, nor must he enjoy it very much. When he did experience pleasures of the flesh, he waited in fear for several days for the retribution to fall. Surely enough, two days later his mother was mugged and robbed in the train station in a neighboring city. What strikes us immediately in this complex system is the tremendous power it gives him. Any chance deed of his could decide whether someone lived or died. He even had power over the weather: “When it rains, the rain is sent by God to punish me.” He actually controlled the Universe that way. “I have to control everything about my life. I could not live if I did not control the future.” It is worthy of note that “control” was one of Soren’s favorite words, and he used it often. I contended myself at first by remarking that he must feel as if he were in a strait jacket with all those rigid compulsions, and did not he find it a heavy weight upon him? He agreed that it was difficult, but he had no choice. Moreover, he had not been able to read Faust when in high school because of all the “demons” running around in it, and even Mary Poppins was prohibited when it became filled with devils. He could not say the word that goes before Yankees in the title of a contemporary play. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Soren did see the vast power that his system gave him, after I pointed it out to him. However, Memnoch was also very powerful. God created him and his followers first—the archangels were Memnoch, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and many others whose names have never been discovered—either inadvertently or deliberately. There were actually fifty archangels, and they were the first made. Memnoch is actually Satan. The archangels are very powerful because they are the ones who communicated in the most direct way with God, and also with the Earth. That is why they were labeled Guardian Angels, as well as Archangels. Much like Soren, the Archangels were sometimes given a low rank in religious literature, but they do not have a low rank. What they have is the greatest personality and the greatest flexibility between God and humans. However, whenever the Angels have a problem with God, they would take their concerns to Memnoch, so much like Soren a lot of power rested on his shoulders. Also, like Soren, Memnoch became rejected as he was deemed God’s accuser. Satan means accuser. “And the early religious writers, knowing only bits and pieces of the truth, thought it was man whom I accused, not God; but there are reasons for this, as you will soon see. You might say I have become the Great Accuser of everybody,” says Memnoch. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Much like Soren, some thought Memnoch seemed “exasperated.” Soren have lived as a child, he knew, in such emotional disorder that he had to have something solid. He was compensating for a boyhood that was completely powerless. “I would allow people to use me to build themselves up,” he said; and one can be sure Soren have to take revenge. The neurotic power (or magic) is in direct proportion to the early powerlessness. Such a person will not and cannot five up his system until he experiences some real power in the actual World. That Soren had plenty of threats against which to protect himself is shown in several dreams that occurred during the weeks he was telling me about his retribution system. One was: “I was left in the house alone. A masked man and woman disguised as my mother and father broke into our house to attack me.” He also often dreamed of the Mafia, and suddenly asked one day: “Is my mother this Mafia, the enemy? Sometime pain is the punishment or is an alleviating factor. I then can give up the compulsions. Generally the compulsions does not affect my life, but it leaves me very frightened. In some ways it is like voodoo. I keep thinking may I have dome something I should not have. I do not want to be responsible for all those things happening.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Memnoch feels the say way as Soren, he does not want to be held responsible for everyone’s mistakes. “At times when I am angry and making speeches to all of Heaven, I accuse them…if you will pardon the expression again—of being held to Go as if by a magnet and not having a free will or personality such as we possess. But they have these things, they do, even the Ophanim, who are in general the least articulate or eloquent—in fact, Ophanim are likely to say nothing for eons—and any of these First Triad can be sent by God to do this and that, and have appeared on Earth, and some of the Seraphim have made rather spectacular appearances to men and women as well. To their credit, they adore God utterly, the experience without reserve the ecstasy of his presence, and he fills them completely so that they do not ask questions of him and they are more docile, or more truly aware of God, depending on one’s point of view,” Memnoch. So, you can see that both Memnoch and Soren feel frustrated and like they are the only ones who can keep the order and peace. However, is it not that Soren and Memnoch want the controlling the system not to continue—it gives their lives a tremendous sense of significance—but neither wants to accept the responsibility for the power. It is to be kept secret, not admitted openly; they both are a controller of life and death for countless people related to them, and no one but the both of them know it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

By acting as controller, Memnoch and Soren can preserve their façade of innocence. When people have to ask for help, and feel a need to be in control, it can be humiliating. Therefore, they have to work out a covert system of secret control over others while doing so. Much like Memnoch, Soren was a puppeteer, pulling wires, in reality or in fantasy, to direct his therapist, his girl friend, his professors, and everyone around him. Memnoch had to direct God, the Angels, and humans. They both are weak, greatly needing an authority figure and tried to maneuver people into taking the responsibility they felt they had. One must, at all costs, not let one’s power come out into the open or let oneself be seen as powerful; one must forever remain the innocent little boy or Angel. To make someone else responsible but powerless—this is the bind the Soren and Memnoch tried to put their authority figure in. It is the bind both of them had been in all of their lives. The pattern of God and retributions, I proposed, must have the effect of reversing the above pattern: it must be a way that one can be powerful with no responsibility. Memnoch and Soren had no confidence in the possibility of their changing; change must come from the outside. This conviction was necessary to keep the whole retribution system intact. Memnoch and Soren get their power by being secretly allied with God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

All power remains with God; God requires that Soren and Memnoch have no autonomous power to assert themselves. If one once decided that one could make a fateful decision on one’s own, God himself would be challenged and the whole system would fall away like mist under the morning Sun. Taking responsibility upon one’s self, asserting one’s own autonomy, was challenging God and committing the sin of hubris. “Angels are not perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They do not know everything God knows, that is obvious to you and everyone else. However, they know a great deal; they know that all can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where Angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and god’s reflection in those of his most devoted souls,” Anne Rice. One who has attained the consciousness of Overself puts in no claim to the attainment. One accepts it in so utterly natural and completely humble a manner than most people are deceived into regarding one as ordinary. One has not attained who is conscious that one has attained, for this very consciousness cunningly hides the ego and delivers one into its power. That alone is attainment which is natural, spontaneous, unforced, unaware, and unadvertised, whether to the being or to others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

At this stage there is no struggle for further growth; it comes as softly and as naturally as a flower’s. There is no sacrifice of things the ego desires or clutches to itself, for there is such insight as to their worth or worthlessness that they stay or fall away of themselves. It is better to attain such high status without knowing it. For this absence of pride and presence of humility keeps the ego from threatening it. The actions of a being who has attained this degree are inspired directly by one’s Overself, and consequently are not dictated by personal wishes, purposes, passions, or desires. They are not initiated by one’s ego’s will higher than one’s own. Since there is no consciously deliberating thinking, no broken trends. There is only spontaneous thought, feeling, and action, all being directed by intuition. For one not to be aware that one is acting virtuously, courageously, wisely, or practicing contemplation beautifully, free from interfering mental images and thought, this is the ideal disposition. For then, if one does not know that one—the person—is doing so, no egoism will taint one’s consciousness. It will be pure being. One will do whatever has to be done by one as a human creature—whether it be a physical act or a mental one, one will respond to all situations that call for a human response, but neither the act nor the response will be accompanied by the personal ego. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

This does not mean that one’s Worldly life or one will suffer loss of identity—only that one will be isolated from the Worldly self-centered thought, desire, and motive which prompts the existence of the mass of people. One feels no need—so conspicuous in neurotics with a message—to call attention to oneself. Rather does one seek to keep it away. The strength of the enlightenment will determine the extent of its effects. An illumination maybe permanent but at the same time it may be only partial. Not until it is complete and lasting is it really philosophic. It is not only true that there is variety in the types of illumination but also true that there is a scale of degrees in the illumination itself. Until one has established permanently, although not necessarily at the very highest level, the consciousness can become corrupted, the being can fall back. “As I sit here and slowly close my eyes, I take another deep breath and feel the wind pass through my body. I am the one in your soul, reflecting inner light. Protect the ones who hold you, cradling in your inner child. I need serenity in a place where I can hide. I need serenity, nothing changes, days go by. Where do we go when we just do not know and how do we relight the flame when it is cold. Why do we dream when our thoughts mean nothing and when will we learn to control? Tragic visions slowly stole my life. Tore away everything, cheating me out of my time,” Serenity by Godsmack. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

August 6, 2019 8:17 am

Good Health Generally Means the Ability to Resolve Contradictions—It is a Synthesis Like Breathing!

God created the Universe and Time. Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled. God said to us, “Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.” It is all garbled, in countless texts throughout the World. There are texts which are irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology; and there are texts that mortals know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but which can be rediscovered in time. “And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone,” reports Matthew 14.23. He was there alone. So are we. Beings are alone because they are mortal! In some way every creature is alone. In majestic isolation every star travels through the darkness of endless space. Each tree grows according to its own law, fulfilling its unique possibilities. Animals live, fight, and die for themselves alone, confined to the limitations of their bodies. Certainly, they also appear as male and female, in families and in flocks. Some of them are gregarious. However, all of them are alone! Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

This is true of every creature, and it is more true of humans than any other creature. One is not only alone; one also knows that one is alone. Aware of what one is, one asks the question of one’s aloneness. One asks why one is alone, and how one can triumph over one’s being alone. For this aloneness one cannot endure. Neither can one escape it. It is one’s destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from one. In the story of paradise we read—“Then the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone.” And as we pondered, as we opened our arms and sang and tried to comfort them, while stepping invisibly and artfully through the material of Earth, something momentous made itself known to us, shocking us out of our explorations. Before our very eyes, the Twelfth Revelation of Physical Evolution was upon us! It struck us like the light from Heaven; it distracted us from the cries of the covert invisible! It shattered our reason. It caused our songs to become laughter and wails. The Twelfth Revelation of Evolution was that of the female of the human species had begun to look more distinctly different from the male of the human species by margin so great that no other anthropoid could compare! #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The female grew pretty in our eyes, and seductive; the hair left her face, and her limbs grew graceful; her manner transcended the necessities of survival; and she became beautiful as flowers are beautiful, as the wings of birds are beautiful! What had risen, a female tender-skinned and radiant of face. And God created the woman from the body of Adam. Here an old myth is used to show that originally there was no bodily separation between man and woman; in the beginning they were one. Now they long to be one again. However, although they recognize each other as flesh of their own flesh, each remains alone. They look at each other, and despite their longing for each other, they see their strangeness. In the story, God himself makes them aware of this fact when he speaks to each of them separately, when he makes each one responsible for one’s own guilt, when he listens to their excuses and mutual accusations, when he pronounces a separate curse over each, and leave them to experience shame in the face of their nakedness. They are each alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The creation of the woman has not overcome the situation which God describes as not good for man. He remains alone. And the creation of the woman, although it provides a helper for Adam, has only presented to the one human being who is alone another human being who is equally alone, and from their flesh all other beings, each of whom will stand alone. We ask, however—is this really so? Did not God accomplish something better? Is not our aloneness largely removed in the encounter of the genders? Certainly it is during hours of communion and in moments of love. The ecstasy of love can absorb one’s own self in its union with the other self, and separation seems to be overcome. However, after these moments, the isolation of self from self is felt even more deeply than before, sometimes ever to the point of mutual repulsion. We have given too much of ourselves, and now we long to take back what was given. Our desire to protect our aloneness is expressed in the feeling of shame. When our intimate self, mental or bodily is opened, we feel ashamed. We try to cover our vulnerability, as did Adam and Eve when they became conscious of themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other’s innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other’ they could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate mortals from their aloneness: it is human’s greatness that one is centered within one’s own being. Separated from one’s World, one is thus able to look at it. Only because one can look at it can one know and love and transform it. God, in creating one the ruler of the Earth, had to separate one and thrust one into aloneness. Humans are also therefore able to be spoken to by God and by other beings. One can ask questions and give answers and make decisions. One has the freedom for good or evil. Only one who has an impenetrable center in oneself is free. Only one who is alone can claim to be a human. This is the greatness and this is he burden of being. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” From this primal decree millions of human beings are now liberated. More and more beings have more and more leisure. The working day grows shorter, the week end longer. More and more women are released at an earlier age from the heavier tasks of the rearing of children, in the small family of today, when kindergarten and school and clinic and restaurant come to their assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

More and more people are freed for other things, released from the exhaustion of their energies in the mere satisfaction of elementary wants. No longer is the pattern so simple as that of Longfellow’s blacksmith, who something attempted, something done, had earned a night’s repose. Released from what? When necessity no longer drives, when people own long hors in which to do what they want, what do they want to do? Where necessity is heavy upon beings, they yearn for the joys of leisure. Now many have enough leisure. What are the joy they find? The shorter working day is also a different working day. Nearly all people work for others, not for themselves—not the way a person works who has one’s own little plot of Earth and must give oneself up to its cultivation. For many, work has become a routine—not too onerous, not too rewarding, and by no means engrossing—a daily routine until the bell rings and sets them free again. For what? It is a marvelous liberation for those who learn to use it; and there are many ways. It is the great emptiness for those who do not. People of a placid disposition do not know the great emptiness. When the day’s work done, they betake themselves to their quiet interests, their hobbies, their gardens or their amateur workbenches or their stamp collecting or their games or their affairs or their church activities or whatever it be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

When they need more sting in life, they have a mild “fling,” taking a little “moral holiday.” Some find indulgence enough in the vicarious pleasure of snidely malicious gossip. Their habits are early formed and they keep a modicum of contentment. However, the number of the placid is growing less. The conditions of our civilization do not encourage that mood. For one thing, the old-time acceptance of authority, as God-given or nature-based, is much less common. Religion is for very many an ancient tale, a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong, reduced to ritual or the moral precepts of the Sunday pulpit. There is little allegiance to the doctrine that every being has allotted place. How could there be when competition has become a law of life? There is incessant movement and disturbance and upheaval. And with the new leisure there come new excitations, new stimuli to unrest. So the new leisure has brought its seeming opposite, restlessness. And because these cannot be reconciled the great emptiness comes. Faced with the great emptiness, unprepared to meet it, most people resort to one or another way of escape, according to their kind. Those who are less conscious of their need succeed in concealing it from themselves. They find their satisfaction in the great new World of means without ends. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Those who are more conscious of their need cannot conceal it; they only distract themselves from the thought of it. Their common recourse is excitation, and they seek it in diverse ways. The first kind are the go-getters. When they are efficient or unscrupulous or both, they rise in the World. They amass things. They make some money. They win some place and power. Not for anything, not to do anything with it. Their values are relative, which means they are no values at all. They make money to make more money. They win some power that enables them to seek more power. They are practical beings. They keep right on being practical, until their unlived lives are at an end. If they stopped being practical, the great emptiness would engulf them. They are like planes that must keep on flying because they have no landing gear. The engines go fast and faster, but they are going nowhere. They make good progress to nothingness. They take pride in their progress. They are outdistancing other beings. They are always calculating the distance they have gained. It shows what can be done when you have the know-how. They feel superior and that sustains them. They stay assured in the World of means. What matters is winning. “But what good cam of it at last?” Ouoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory.” Victory for the sake of the winning, means for the sake of the acquiring, that is success. So the circle spins forever means without end, World without end. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

One will find that the onset of insight will not be at all like the picture of it which one had previously and erroneously formed. When one awakens to truth as it really is, one will have no occult vision, one will have no astral experience, no ravishing ecstasy. One will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and one will realize that truth was always there within one and that reality was always there around one. Truth is not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. It is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. It is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again. The discovery of one’s true being is not outwardly dramatic, and for a long time no one may know of it, except oneself. The World may not honour one for it: one may die as obscure as one lived. However, the purpose of one’s life has been fulfilled; and God’s will has been done. There is nothing melodramatic about realization of Truth. Those who look for marvels look in vain, unless indeed its bestowal of singular serenity is a marvel. No one really knows ho this enlightenment first dawns on one. One moment it was not there, the next moment one was somehow in it. No announcements tell the World that one has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming being’s greatest victory—over oneself. This is in fact the quietest moment of one’s whole life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

To find out that one’s way does lie through cults, in the hope of finding one to suit one, ventures into a danger-beset field, where lunacy is often mistaken for illumination and where exaggerated claims substitute for solid facts. The desire for power over others, for authority, is a form of personal ambition which has, in the past, mixed easily with a spiritual glimpse. A new sect, a new movement, has then come to birth. The seeker after truth who comes in contact with it would be far safer to take some of the teaching without sacrificing one’s freedom, without joining the group. If any work, institution, or organization is centered in the Overself it cannot fall into the base, negative, or selfish currents which, in the historic past, have polluted, poisoned, and sometimes destroyed so many tasks and enterprises. The fears which repression serves to overcome may also be overcome by keeping the hostility under conscious control. However, whether one controls or represses hostility is not a matter of choice, because repression is a reflex-like process. It occurs if in a particular situation it is unbearable to be aware that one is hostile. In such a case, of course, there is no possibility of conscious control. The main reasons why awareness of hostility may be unbearable are that one may love or need a person at the same time that one is hostile toward one, that one may not want to see the reasons, such as envy or possessiveness, which have promoted the hostility or, that it may be frightening to recognize within one’s self hostility toward anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

In such circumstances repression is the shortest and quickest way toward an immediate reassurance. By repression the frightening hostility disappears from awareness, or is kept from entering awareness. I should like to repeat this sentence in other words, because for all its simplicity it is one of those psychoanalytic statements which is but rarely understood: if hostility is repressed the person has not the remotest idea that one is hostile. The quickest way toward a reassurance, however, is not necessarily the safest way in the long run. By the process of repression the hostility—or to indicate its dynamic character we had better use here the term rage—is removed from conscious awareness but is not abolished. Split off from the context of the individual’s personality, and hence beyond control, it revolves within one as an affect which is highly explosive and eruptive, and therefore tends to be discharged. The explosiveness of the repressed affect is all the greater because by its very isolation it assumes larger and often fantastic dimensions. As long as one is aware of animosity its expansion is restricted in a few different ways. First, consideration of the circumstances as they are in a given situation shows one what one can and what one cannot do toward an enemy or alleged enemy. Second, if the anger concerns one whom one otherwise admires or likes or needs, the anger will sooner or later become integrated into the totality of one’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Finally, inasmuch as a being has developed a certain sense of what is appropriate to do or not to do, personality being as it is, this too will restrict one’s hostile impulses. If the anger is repressed, then access to these restricting possibilities is cut off, with the result that the hostile impulses trespass the restrictions from inside and outside, though only in fantasy. If the chemist I mentioned yesterday had followed his impulses he would have wanted to tell others how Kirk had abused his friendship, or to intimate to his superior that Kirk had stolen his idea or kept him from pursuing it. Since his anger was repressed it became dissociated and expanded, as would probably have shown in his dreams; it is likely that in his dream he committed murder in some symbolic form, or became an admired genius, while others went disgracefully to pieces. By its very dissociation the repressed hostility will in the course of time usually because intensified from outside sources. For instance, if a high employee has developed an anger toward his chief, because the chief had made arrangements without discussing them with him, and if the employee represses his anger, never remonstrating against the procedure, the superior will certainly keep on acting over his head. Thereby new anger is constantly generated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The neurotic attitude calls forth a reaction of the environment, by which the attitude itself is reinforced, with the result that the person is more and more caught, and greater and greater difficulty escaping. This phenomenon is called Teufelskreia. Another consequence of repressing hostility arises from the fact that a person registers within oneself the existence of a highly explosive affect which is beyond control. Before discussing the consequences of this we have to consider a question which it suggests. By definition the result of repressing an affect or an impulse is that the individual is no longer aware of its existence, so that in one’s conscious mind ones does not know that one has any hostile feelings toward another. How then can I say that one registers the existence of the repressed affect within oneself? The answer is possessed in the fact that there is no strict alternative between consciousness and unconscious, but that there are several levels of consciousness. Not only is the repressed impulse still effective—one of the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud—but also in a deeper level of consciousness the individual knows about its presence. Reduced to the most simple terms possible this means that fundamentally we cannot fool ourselves, that actually we observe ourselves better than we are aware of doing, just as we usually observe others better than we are aware of doing—as shown, for example, in the correctness of the first impression we ger from a person—but we may have stringent reasons for not taking cognizance of our observations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

For the sake of saving repetitive explanations I shall use the term register when I mean that we know what is going on within us without our being aware of it. These consequences of repressing hostility may themselves be sufficient to create anxiety, provided always that the hostility and its potential danger to other interests are sufficiently great. States of vague anxiety may be built in this way. More often, however, the process does not come to a standstill at this point, because there is an imperative need to get rid of the dangerous affect which from within menaces one’s interest and security. A second reflex-like process sets in: the individual projects one’s hostile impulses to the outside World. The first pretense, the repression, requires a second one: one pretends that the destructive impulses come not from one but from someone or something outside. Logically the person on whom one’s own hostile impulses will be projected is the person against whom they are directed. The result is that this person now assumes formidable proportions in one’s mind, partly because in any danger the degree of potency depends not only on the factual conditions but also on the attitude taken toward them. The more defenseless one is the greater the danger appears. The anxiety with which we react to a danger does not depend mechanically on the realistic greatness of the danger. An individual who has developed mechanically an attitude of helplessness and passivity will react with anxiety to a comparatively small danger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

As by-function the projection also serves the need for self-justification. It is not the individual oneself who wants to cheat, to steal, to exploit, to humiliate, but the others want to do such things to one. A wife who is unaware of her own impulses to ruin her husband and subjectively convince ed that she is most devoted may, because of this mechanism, consider her husband to be a brute wanting to harm her. The process of projection may or may not be supported by another process working to the same end: a retaliation fear may get hold of the repressed impulse. In this case a person who wants to injure, cheat, deceive others has also a fear that they will do the dame to him. How far the retaliation fear is a general characteristic ingrained in human nature, how far it arises from primitive experiences of sin and punishment, how far it presupposes a drive for personal revenge, I leave as an open question. Beyond doubt it plays a great role in the minds of neurotic person. These processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from outside. “Tell them to fear not, for God will deliver them, yea, and also all those who stand fast in that liberty wherewith God hath made them free,” Alma 6.21. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

August 6, 2019 12:14 am

Many Beings Ere Now Have Dreamed as Much, but One Who by Such Dreams Sets Nothing, Has the Easiest Time of it!

The night was warm and receptive. My courtyard banana trees at Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails had not been touched by a freeze this Winter, and grew thick and drowsing as every against the stucco walls. The wild impatiens and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water splashed from the cherub’s horn into the basin. This way to the palace. Point your car along a winding drive-way up the green hillside shaded with great elm trees. Enter the wide and friendly doorway and look at the murals in our lobby. They will tell you the story of our industry. As you go through the offices, you will probably marvel as we did at all the comforts and services we have. Imagine a sea of blonde desks with tan chairs, outdoor lighting pouring everywhere, roomy offices with individually-controlled air-conditioning and area-controlled Music by Muzak coming out of walls. We need few private secretaries. All we have to do is pick up a phoning device and dictate our message to a disc that whirls in a sunny room in another part of the building. Here a pool of stenographers type all day long with buttons in their ears. We do not see them and they do not see us, but they know our voices. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

A high-speed pneumatic tube system winds through the entire building. We send material from one office to another not by messenger but by torpedo containers traveling twenty-five feet a second. Simply have the attendant put your paper, magazine, or memo in the plastic carrier. One inters the container in the tube, dials the appropriate number, and, whoosh, it is shot across the building. There is a complete sound system throughout headquarters. If, for example, a bad storm is forecast, there will be an “Attention Please,” and you may go home early. At noon, enjoy movies in an auditorium the size of a small theater, visit the library, watch the World Series on Color TV, or play darts and table tennis in the game room. The finest catering service and a staff of friendly waitresses bring you luncheon. Then go to the company store, pitch horseshoes, or take a brief stroll under the elms. What happens to an office when it is offered facilities like these? At first there were a few small complaints. The main difficulty is that we find it all but impossible to get off the campus. You can speed several miles to town for a quick lunch. Otherwise you stay on the grounds until closing. City employees everywhere have the chance to renew, at least slightly, their connection with the World during lunch hours. When we first came many of us rambled in the woods and picked flowers, but we seldom do that anymore. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

As for our work-efficiency, I think it has diminished a bit as a result of what one of my friends calls “our incestuous situation.” When you are isolated in the country it is not easy to feel that sense of urgency that distinguishes most business people. I sometimes have a feeling of being in limbo. More than ever one feels—ungratefully—over-protected. While on the job, I actually cannot feel hot or cold. I cannot even get sick. This will sound ridiculous, but when the company obtained a supply of influenza shots, I found myself in the absurd position of refusing one. For some reason I wanted a chance to resist the flu in my own way. What is the moral of all this? I am not quite sure. However, do not beings, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps one is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to one as well-being? In the Crystal Palace (suffering) is unthinkable. You believe, do you not, in a crystal palace which shall be forever unbreakable—in an edifice, that is to say, at which no one shall be able to put out one’s tongue, or in any other way to mock? Now, for the very reason that is must be made of crystal, and forever unbreakable, and one whereat no one shall put out one’s tongue, I should fight shy of such a building. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The origins of power are also the origins of aggression. For aggression is one use—or misuse—of power. Aggression springs from an innate tendency to grow and master life which seems to be characteristic of all living matter. Only when this life force is obstructed in its development do ingredients of anger, rage, or hate become connected with it. Power comes from the root meaning “to be able.” In this sense, it is interesting that ability and power are used together, and it has a lot to do with nature and nurture. We seem to be born with something of this power motivation in us. However, this does not at all cast the die in favor of the nature side of the dichotomy, for this power motivation is formed in terms of security, status, and prestige. These characteristics are certainly social and are learned by the developing infant from and in one’s culture. As one watches a child building with blocks and then knocking the construction down to build it again, one realizes that power and aggression have beneficial values. From there the child goes on to explore, to experiment, to master one’s World as best one can and as far as one’s level of development enables one. At origin, aggressiveness is almost synonymous with activity. If Dr. Freud had been right in supposing that our chief aim is blissful satiation, it would be hard to explain this exploratory behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

It is also likely that our children are striving for superiority. What we learn from psychotherapy is applicable to the growing child: if the authority present, either therapist or parent, condemns the activity before the child has established that beachhead of ability and power, the child will have difficulty establishing it later and will probably learn it with some admixture of hostile aggression. Thereafter one will tend to do the act in question with some anger and rebellion to compensate for the condemnation of authority. In origin the infant shows one’s power and aggressiveness always in conjunction with its opposite—for instance, with one’s need to be dependent and to be nourished. The whole process of growing up can be seen as beginning with the severing of the biological tie to the mother (when one is born from the womb, where everything was done for one automatically). After the cutting of the umbilical cord, one has to learn to form relationships on a psychological basis. Each venturing forth represents a use of one’s individual power and ability, and one then comes back to one’s mother. The nutrient side of this development manifests itself in one’s need to be cared for and to be loved, and the aggressive side in one’s need to assert oneself, to protest if necessary. The former is the “yes,” the latter is the “no.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

If one’s aggressiveness is blocked, as is often the case with suburban middle-class children, one will tend to remain forever dependent. Or if one’s need for love and care is unmet, one may well become destructively aggressive and spend one’s life wreaking revenge upon the World—as is sometimes the cause with children in any socioeconomic class. Or if one has no boundaries, nothing against which to test one’s strength, no opposition in the firmness of parents, one may turn one’s aggression against oneself in nail-biting and self-recrimination or senseless anger against anyone who happens to come along. The child’s mobility can be seen as a way of increasing the distance one can move from one’s mother. It is a practice of independence from her, a practice which increases through life regardless of where one’s actual mother is or whether she is alive of dead. An unfortunate upbringing can turn the individual’s powers to destructive ends. A male patient was periodically seized by uncontrollable anger against his wife and children, in which he would loose endless invectives and pound his wife in rage with his fists. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

It turned out the husband who was physically attacking his wife in rage had been the son of a lady of the night, and that when he was a very small child he had often been used by his mother as a conversation piece to make contacts with different men in cafes. Then the mother would take the man to her room, while the child sat at the table for an hour or so alone. During his school years he lived with her grandparents and was generally ostracized by people in the village because of his upbringing. He recalled going to the houses of women who gossiped about him and then defecating on their doorsteps as revenge. When other children had parties to which he was not invited, he would often go to the edge of the group and ask for some ice cream and cake. He had developed a sense of caring for feeding his rabbits and other animals at home, but this affection was a lonely one, and he never overcome his nervousness in an intimate situation with his peers. It is entirely understandable that such an upbringing would lead to destructive rage and aggression in later human situations. The normal development of an infant requires the love and care of the parent along with one’s own capacity to explore and increase one’s sense of mastery day by day. “Let e do it” is a recurrent entreaty in small children; and wise mothers encourage their children to do as much as possible for themselves, however tiresome it may be to wait patiently while the child takes minutes to tie a knot which the adult can tie in seconds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Reading Grimm’s Fairy-Tales and playing cops and robbers and war games may not be harmful for children, as for some, it allows them to release their aggression. For other children, who cannot separate fiction from reality, it can be dangerous. If society is in danger, it is not because of a being’s aggressiveness but because of the repression of personal aggressiveness in individuals. Parents who are anxious that their children not to turn into warmongers may, by proscribing war games and the like, be cultivating just the opposite. They are more likely to create the very type of personality which they are concerned to avoid. For the child needs all the aggressive potential one can get to protect and assert one’s growing individuality. If its pursuit would mean defeating the purposes of the self, it is well known that an acute hostile impulse may be the direct cause of anxiety. One example may serve for many. Mark goes on a hiking trip with Elsa, to whom he is deeply devoted. Nevertheless he feels acutely and savagely infuriated against her because his jealousy has somehow been aroused. When walking with her on a precipitous mountain path he gets a severe attack of anxiety, with heavy breathing and heart-pounding, because of a conscious impulse to push the girl over the edge of the path. The structures of anxiety like these is due to an imperative impulse which, if yielded to, would mean a catastrophe for the self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

In the great majority of persons, however, a direct causal connection between hostility and neurotic anxiety is far from evident. In order, then, to make it clear why I declare that in the neuroses of our time hostile impulses are the main psychological force promoting anxiety, it is necessary to examine now in some detail the psychological consequences which result from a repression of hostility. Repressing a hostility means pretending that everything is all right and this refraining from the fighting when we ought to fight, or at least when we wish to fight. Hence the first unavoidable consequence of such a repression is that it generates a feeling of defenselessness, or to be more exact, it reinforces an already given feeling of defenselessness. If hostility is repressed when a person’s interest are factually attacked it becomes possible for others to take advantage of one. The experience of a chemist, Giovanni, represents an everyday occurrence of this kind. Giovanni had what was regarded as nervous exhaustion as a consequence of too much work. He was unusually gifted and very ambitious, without knowing that he was. For reasons we shall leave aside he had repressed his ambitious strivings and hence appeared modest. When he entered the laboratory of a great chemical firm another member of the staff, Kirk, a little older in years and higher in rank that Giovanni, took him under his wind and showed every sign of friendliness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Because of a series of personal factors—dependence on others’ affection, previous intimidation concerning critical observation, not recognizing one’s own ambition and hence not seeing it in others—Giovanni was happy to accept the friendliness and failed to observe than in reality Kirk cared for nothing but his own career. And it stuck him but dimply that on one occasion Kirk reported as his own idea which was relevant for a possible invention but which was really Giovanni’s idea, one that had formerly expressed to Kirk in a friendly conversation. For the flicker of a moment Giovanni was distrustful, but because one’s own ambition factually stirred up an enormous hostility in him, he immediately repressed not only this hostility but with it also the warranted criticism and distrust. Hence he remained convinced that Kirk was his best friend. Consequently when Kirk discouraged him about continuing a certain line of work he took the advice at face value. When Kirk produced an invention that Giovanni might have made, Giovanni merely felt that Kirk’s gifts and intelligence were far superior to his own. This by having repressed his distrust and his anger Giovanni failed to notice that in crucial questions Kirk was his enemy rather than his friend. Because he clung to the illusion that he was liked, Giovanni relinquished his preparedness to fight for his own interests. He did not even realize that a vital interest of his own was attacked, and consequently could not fight for it, but allowed the other to take advantage of his weakness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

The desire of an individual to join a group can never be given more than qualified approval. However, if one feels certain that something may be gained by associating with other seekers, and if one is successful in finding a group devoted exclusively to the search for the highest Truth, it may be all right for one at that particular phase of one’s development. There is need of a school where an effective form of service would be the giving of practical initiation into prayer for inexperienced beginners, and the guidance of development for inexperienced beginners, and the guidance of development for experienced intermediates. This could do much good. A single meeting for prayer is usually enough: individuals could then be left to work out for themselves the contact thus given, returning to the school periodically for further and more advanced instruction. Instead of being found out, the particular needs and special tendencies of the individual seeker will be ignored and even suppressed in the endeavour to conform one to the system. There is both good and bad in this. Which of these one will receive depends upon the competence of the teacher, if one has one, or the mental attitude one takes toward the system itself—upon one’s blind slavish adherence to it or intelligent, open-eyed use of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

One is under no obligation to stay fixed in an ashram or group merely because one once entered it. The time comes when the aspiring philosopher feels that one will get no actual benefit from one’s studies and make no personal progress unless one enters the second stage and begins to work on oneself. It is then that one will perceive, if one is not too foolish, that most of these groups and cults are of no further use to one. We must be prepared in advance not to expect too much from human institutions, for the simple reason that they are administered by or composed of human beings, that neither they nor the institutions are perfect, that any claim to the contrary is a roseate dream, any belief in the affirmative is naïve, and the person holding it is inexperienced. I am not criticizing those who follow such ways or advocate such teachings, nor venturing to judge their rightness or wrongness. The need for, and the usefulness of, group organization is admitted. However, I feel there is an equal need for a different approach, for independence from all group organizations; there is room for a path which avoids joining. This need not be misunderstood. There are those who like the first way and they will have to follow it. There are others who will prefer the second way. I am among them. Both ways are needed but by different people. Those who feel their own path or school or cult calls to them should heed it. It is right for them. However, they should not be so narrow as to proclaim it to be the only way to God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

When all illusory ideas are discarded, one will be able to see directly into the truth, and to see it without delay. For what need could there then be to pass through progressive stages? The name “lightning flash of insight” should not be allowed to give the impression that its swiftness is its most important attribute. That is merely incidental. What constitutes its essential attribute is its introducing an entirely different state of mind, an entirely new kind of perception, within us so that we are transformed in ourselves along with the World with which we are in relation. When the ego finally falls out of the picture, it does so with the swiftness of a flash of lightning. Enlightenment seldom comes all at once. However, in the case of rare geniuses or of those with rare good karma, the possibility is certainly there. That illumination can be quite instantaneous in some cases, only gradual in other, and entirely absent in most, need not be an enigma. Even when they are beneath the surface, the workings of the law of recompense are still the same. Even though one becomes enlightened, one should continue to work for several more decades to obtain more understanding. When enlightenment comes through philosophic preparation for it, the experience is sudden, direct, unexpected, and spontaneous. It comes to some minds with the force of a Himalayan mountain torrent rushing out from a narrow gorge. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Enlightenment may come slowly or suddenly but in the second case it has the effect of Sunlight bursting through the sky. Those geniuses who get a lasting illumination by direct gift of Grace without having worked, studied, prepared, or trained for it, are rare. Everyone has to undergo the gradual development and patient ripening that a flowering bush has to undergo. The calmness which one carries inside oneself, and which is apparent in all one’s bearing, has not arisen out of nothing. It has come to one out of long struggle and after varied suffering. When we sin, we are like the foolish man who jumped from the airplane. No matter what we do on our own, only a crash-landing awaits us. We are subject to the law of justice, which, like the law if gravity, is exacting and unforgiving. The spirit in each of us naturally yearns for family love to last forever. Pour out your heart to God. Hold on to this illumination against the intrusions of negative personal habits and negative personal characteristics is another matter and success can happen. When conditions are ripe and prerequisite qualification fulfilled, the truth spontaneously shows its self-revealing character. It may come as an instantaneous flash of understanding or as a vision of cosmic drama, but most often it comes quite slowly in bits and pieces. The holy joy may visit you but cannot stay in you if both the primal energy and the ego are staying in you. Purify yourself of one and empty yourself of the other, if you would convert a passing glimpse into the permanent union. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

August 4, 2019 11:55 pm

One Soul, I think, Can Often Make Atonement for Many Others, if it be Devoted and it Will Free Us of All the Weight and Pain of Life!

Ah, let us be true to one another, the World, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams so various, so beautiful, so new. In moments, I stood in my own courtyard in Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails, looking up at my own lighted windows, windows that had been mine for so long, hoping and praying that Sully was there, and afraid that he was not. Team play is the thing. Team play means that you alone cannot get too far out ahead of the troops. You cannot because in our company it is necessary to consult and check over everything. Someone will ask whether this does not lead to a certain amount of mediocrity. It does. We have a substantial number of mediocre people in the company—that is, men and women of ordinary ability who would probably never originate anything under any circumstances. However, where organizing an effort is concerned it is sometimes better to have mediocre talent than a bunch of creative individuals who disturb the situation by questioning everything. In terms of performance, if you have a slow but sure operation, mediocre personnel, including your nephews, can carry it out beautifully. In planning, mediocrity has and still does hurt the company. Our method is to get together and talk it out, each one of us contributing one’s mite. When thirty-three can do it better, why have one being make a decision? #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The consequence of the policy of teamwork is that our executives commit few errors—although sometimes they arrive at the right decision three years too late. However, the sure markets for the company’s products bring in so much money that the mistake is buried under mountains of dollar bills. Our interminable round of conferences may also be counted on to produce by default serious errors of omission. These do not hurt noticeably either, for the reason cited above. I got over my impatience at the slow pace of things, but I felt it once at a lecture given to senior and junior executives on the new central filing system that would go into effect when we reached the palace. A fierce little girl, a vestal of the files, told us how it was going to be. We sat, without anyone suggesting it, according to rank, and I could work out the possible course of my company career, if I stayed with it, just by looking at the assemblage of heads in front of me—bald and white in the front rows, then pepper-and-salt, and gradually back where I was, the black, brown, and blonde heads of hair. I thought of my own head, slowly changing through the years as I moved up a row or two, with never a chance by a brilliant coup of jumping while still brown-headed—or even pepper-and-salt—over several rows and landing among the white thatches. When anything I accomplish I do as a member of a group, how could I make such a leap? #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

A little more tension would be welcome. This may be based on fragmentary evidence, but I suspect that when people are not placed under at least a minimum of tension they seek it out in their dreams. One day overheard our press-relations man conferring with our public-relations manager, Josh Tyler, who said: “Maybe next time, Sully, you had better try it the other way.” The press man came out of the office and saw me. “Boy!” he said, “I sure got a bawling out on that!” Another man of some rank joined his local Democratic Party, and worked hard at it during the presidential campaign. However, he felt guilty about what he had done. Finally he rushed upstairs and confessed to the president of the corporation. “Gosh,” he told me afterward in a disappointed tone, “he did not mind at all. He just put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘Do not worry, Armin, I am a Jeffersonian Republican myself!’” We conform by choice. Critics of big business are constantly on the watch for the kind of over-cooperation that a company explicitly demands of its members. Our company does not demand anything. Oh, there is tactful pressure on us to join the annuity and insurance program, and a rather strong insistence on Red Cross and Community Chest contributions, but nothing serious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

What you have to watch out for is the amount of compliance you fall into by yourself, without realizing it. When my book was published, something like this almost happened to me. Far from resenting the satire, most of our employees who read it enjoyed the book. I was asked to autograph dozens of copies, and several were brought and prominently displayed in the company lending library. I had thought of myself as a writer in temporary captivity. Now that was no longer possible. A captive of what? Good Will? I began to feel what I now recognize was a gradually deepening contentment. If you are on the watch for the symptoms, here are a few: (1) You find that you are planning your life defensively, in terms of savings plans and pensions, rather than thinking speculatively of moving up fast—faster than the others. (2) You become much less impatient over inefficiency, shrug your shoulders and accept it as the way things are. (3) Your critical faculties become dull; you accept second-best; it seems unsporting to complain. (4) Nothing makes you nervous. (5) You find that you are content to talk to people without saying anything. (6) You mention something like (improvising now) “our Human Development Department” to outsiders and learn with surprise that they think you have made a joke. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

During this period of contentment, which lasted quite a few months, I did not concern myself with anything beyond the requirements of my job. I became easy-going and promiscuously nice, and had a harmless word for everybody. Finally, I was reminded that this sort of thing was the mark of a fat soul. A succession of incidents helped indicate what was wrong. Mystery does oppose theology. When the mystical and the theological are mixed, it does not work with the proper fire of magic. The volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook one can entertain in the unity of one’s being without feeling defensive or insecure is what creates a fat soul. It is the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. Essentially the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. However, we are remote from the lives of others. Shortly before we moved to the country the press-relations man and I were looking out our eleventh-floor window in the direction of the waterfront. We saw a half-circle of beings gathered on a far-off pier. “Is not that what they call a shape-up?” he asked with faint curiosity. It was easy to tell that he barely imagined that these beings existed and that their quaint customs were real. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Some weeks before, I had looked down on a gentleman in a homburg and cutaway, running among the crowds in the financial district. He carried a bouquet of red roses wrapped in green paper. You do not associate this street with flowers, and it was exciting to see him running, holding his green wrapping like a torch of something beautiful in this place. And then he died on his feet, twisting over and slumping to the pavement. His head rested against the wall of a building. He rested with the flowers flung across his knees and his fine hat askew, and the absurd and living gallantry that produced his death could only be nothing to us or to anyone in the crowds that simply swerved around him and kept going, because of the way we are concentrated and oriented away from things like that. How remote we were too from the crazy musicians who arrived on a blustery fall day with the idea that, since this was a financial center, there would be a rain of coins from the tall buildings in response to their trumpet, guitar, and bass fiddle. The wind swirled their jazz among the canyons. I saw that no one was paying them the slightest attention. Feeling guilt, I threw them a quarter, but they did not see it. They danced and made jazz in the cold, while upstairs we went on with our work, and they did not exist, and it was nobody’s fault. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

It is not that we should have been expected to know about longshoremen, or care particularly about the beings in the homburg, or throw coins to the brave musicians, but we have simply, systematically, avoided letting these aspects of life into our field of visions. We came in from the suburbs and plundered the city, and left each night without having the least idea of what was going on there. Even our daily experienced in the rapid transit was spent behind newspaper; taxis shielded us from the bad sections of town. We never heard guitars strumming on the dirty doorsteps, nor comprehended possible excitement of disorderly feelings that make other people so much more alive than we are. And when the corporation moved to the country our isolation from all that became completely splendid. Now most of us could anticipate fifteen-and thirty-minute rides in car pols from our suburban homes to a suburban office. You could almost hear an official sign of contentment on the day that we moved. The need to identify oneself with an organized group, established religion, or particular sect, or indeed with any cause, is at base the need to identify oneself with the God within. One unwittingly wants to belong to something larger than one’s own little ego. Such membership helps to achieve this because it removes the sense of separateness and the feeling of loneliness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

However, affiliation with a group only removes a sense of separateness at the surface level. With the efflux of time, one finds it necessary to search for satisfaction at a deeper level. For the group, the church, or the institution are outside one and give it only temporarily, partially, or spottily. Only by turning around and looking within one’s own being is a durable and fuller result is possible. For there, in the hidden presence of the Spiritual self, one will find that larger Cause, Source, Mystery, with which one can identify oneself in the perfect way. In joining a society or group one joins mostly those who are not more advanced than oneself in the capacity to pray. There are certain hindrances to progress which accompany membership in such organizations. If, however, the social value of finding other persons interested in spiritual subjects outweighs the immediate need of making inner progress, then membership would of course be most helpful. However, there are several reasons why it is beneficial to keep groups small, as they might help answer mutual questions. Quality should be the only consideration in admissions to groups; quantity would in the end disintegrate the group. Let the effort be limited to study, clearing up questions, and talks. If there is no powerful and uplifting leader in their midst to protect them, group prayer should not be practiced among beginners. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

There is a right time and a wrong time for personal endeavour to lead and assist a spiritual group. The right time will come only with competence. Until then there is the ever-present task of the student’s own self-improvement. That is above all else. It is only as group allegiances are slowly widened that goodwill can be established towards those who are outside such borders. Now we come upon one important distinction between pseudo, escapist creativity on the one hand and that which is genuine on the other. Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter. This was illustrated vividly to me when I worked with a young man in psychoanalysis. A talented professional, this man had rich and varied creative potentialities, but he always stopped just short of actualizing them. He would suddenly get the idea for an excellent story, would work it out in his mind to a full outline which could have then been written up without much further ado, and would relish and enjoy the ecstasy of the experience. Then he would stop there, writing down nothing at all. It was as though the experience of seeing himself as one who was able to write, as being just about to write, had within it what he was really seeking and brought its own reward. Hence he never actually created. This was a fairly baffling problem to him and to me. We had analyzed many aspects of it: his father had been a somewhat gifted writer but a failure; his mother had made much of his father’s writings, but had shown only contempt for him in other realms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The young man, an only child, had been pampered and overprotected by his mother and often had been shown preference over his father—for instance, by being served special food at meals. The patient was clearly competing with his father, and if he succeeded faced a dire threat. All this and more we had analyzed in some detail. A vital link of experience, however, was missing. When discussing the difference between fear and anxiety we found as our first result that anxiety is a fear which essentially involves a subjective factor. What then is the nature of the subjective factor? When one is experiencing anxiety, one has the feeling of a powerful, inescapable danger against which one is entirely helpless. Whatever the manifestations of anxiety, whether it be a hypochondriac fear of cancer, anxiety concerning thunderstorms, a phobia about high places, or any comparable fear, the two factors of an overpowering danger and defenselessness against it are invariably present. Sometimes the dangerous force against which one feels helpless may be felt to come from outside—thunderstorms, cancer, accident and the like; sometimes the danger is felt to threaten one from one’s own ungovernable impulses—fear of having to jump down from a high place, or to cut someone with a knife; sometimes the danger is entirely vague and intangible, as it often is in an anxiety attack. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Such feelings in themselves, however, are not characteristic only of anxiety; they may be exactly the same in any situation which involves a factual overpowering danger and a factual helplessness toward it. I imagine that the subjective experience of persons during an Earthquake, or of an infant under two years of age exposed to brutalities, is in no way different from the subjective experience of one who has anxiety concerning thunderstorms. In the case of fear the danger is present in reality and the feeling of helplessness is conditioned by reality, and in the case of anxiety the danger is generated or magnified by intrapsychic factors and the helplessness is conditioned by one’s own attitude. The question concerning the subjective factor in anxiety is thus reduced to the more specific inquiry: what are the psychic conditions that create the feeling of an imminent powerful danger and an attitude of helplessness toward it? This at any rate is the question that the psychologist has to raise. That chemical conditions in the body can also create the feeling and the physical concomitants of anxiety is as little a psychological problem as the fact that chemical conditions can produce elation or sleep. In tackling this problem of anxiety, Dr. Freud has, as so often in other problems, shown us the direction in which to move. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Dr. Freud has given us direction with the concept of anxiety by his crucial discovery that the subjective factor involved in anxiety is possessed in our own instinctual drives; in other words, both the danger anticipated by anxiety and the feeling of helplessness toward it are conjured by the explosive force of our own impulses. In principle, any impulse has the potential power to provoke anxiety, provided that its discovery or pursuit would mean a violation other vital interests or needs, and provided that it is sufficiently imperative or passionate. In periods when there are definite and severe taboos against pleasures of the flesh, like the Victorian era, yielding to pleasures of the flesh has often meant incurring a realistic danger. An unmarried young lady, for example, had to face a real danger of tortured conscience or social disgrace, and those yielding to masturbation urges had to face a real danger in so far as they were subject to threats of castration or warnings of fatal physical injuries or mental disease. The same holds true today for certain perverted pleasures of the flesh, such as exhibitionistic drives or impulses directed toward minors. In our times, however, as far as “normal” pleasures of the flesh are concerned, our attitude has become so lenient that admitting them to ourselves, or carrying them out in reality, involves serious danger much less frequently; hence there is less factual reason for apprehension on that score. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Now no matter how you may interpret the causes of this pattern, one central feature is clear—the encounter was lacking. Is not this the essence of escapist art? Everything is there but the encounter. And is not this the central feature of many kinds of artistic exhibitionism—what Rank calls the artiste manqué? We cannot make a valid distinction by saying one kind of art is neurotic and the other healthy. Who is to judge that? We can only say that in exhibitionistic, escapist forms of creativity there is no real encounter, no engagement with reality. That is not what the young man is after; he wants to be passively accepted and admired by mother. In cases of this kind it is accurate to speak of regression in the negative sense. However, the crucial point is that we are dealing with something quite different from creativity. The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as given to a person. A man or woman may have the talent whether one uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. However, creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a creative person, but only of a creative act. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Sometimes, in the case of Picasso, we have great talent and at the same time great encounter and, as a result, great creativity. Often times we have great talent and truncated creativity, as many people felt in the case of Scott Fitzgerald. Many times we have a highly creative person who seems not to have much talent. It was said of the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was one of the highly creative figures of the American scene, that he was a “genius without talent.” However, he was so creative because he threw himself so completely into his material and the challenge of saying it—he was great because of the intensity of his encounter. So, creativity can channel people away from pleasures of the flesh and anxiety and provide them with a healthy outlet for their soul. We have to begin by cultivating intuitive feelings. These come to us infrequently at first and so the process is a gradual and long one. Eventually, we reach a point, a very advanced point, where the ego sees its own limitations, perceives its helplessness and dependence, realizes that it cannot lift itself up into the final illuminations. It should then surrender itself wholly to the Overself and cast its further development on the mercy and Grace of the power beyond it. It will then have to go through a waiting period of seeming inactivity, spiritual stagnation, and inability to feel the fervor of devotion which it formally felt. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

This is a kind of dark night of the soul. Then, slowly, it begins to come out of this phase, which is often accompanied by mental depression and emotional frustration, into a higher phase where it feels utterly resigned to the will of God or destiny, calm and peaceful in the sense of accepting that higher will and not in any joyous sense, patiently waiting for the time when the infinite wisdom will bring it what it once sought so ardently but what it is not as detached from it is detached from Worldly ambitions. After this phase there will come suddenly unexpectedly and in the dead of night, as it were, a tremendous Realization of the egoless state, a tremendous feeling of liberation from itself as it has known itself, a tremendous awareness of the infinitude, universality, and intelligence of life. With that, new perceptions into the Laws of the cosmos will suddenly unfold themselves. The seekers must thus pass from intuition into insight. It is the making of the being ready, the preparation of one’s mind and heart, which takes so much time, so many years even in many cases; but the enlightenment itself is a single short happening: the effect remains permanently. Call upon the Lord, that his kingdom may go forth upon the Earth, that the inhabitants thereof may receive it, and be prepared for the days to come, in which the Son of Man shall come down in Heaven, clothed in the brightness of his glory, to meet the kingdom of God which is set up on the Earth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

August 4, 2019 12:50 am

Ah Love, Let Us be True to One Another of the Heart has its Reasons which Reasons Knows Not!

I think I sold my soul for a place like this. Look, you are alive, whatever you are, but you are not human. You can make a miracle, can you not? I love art, of course. Beauty. However, I got mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult—free love, give to the less affluent, rise one’s hand against no one, you know, a sort of Amish community. There were these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother, know liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare. These books were not like the others books. They were psalms that never appeared in any Bible. I figured that much out, simply by comparing them to other Latin reprints of the same period that I got out of the library. This was some sort of original work. If one joins a monastic order one will usually have to take a vow to practise certain restraints and renunciations. To a lesser degree this also occurs with joining certain groups and circles in the World outside such orders. The value of the vow is that it sets up a standard to be followed, a course to be travelled, and a goal to be reached. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

One may fall from the standard, deviate from the course, and fail to approach the goal, but their existence of sacred standards and goals may help one come closer to the object of the vow than one might otherwise have come. On the other hand, the layman who is not interested in vows but simply resolves to improve oneself lacks their stimulus. There is nothing but the inner force of one’s own ideal to keep one from abandoning the self-imposed rigours of one’s discipline. One depends on the power which one will have to summon up from somewhere within oneself. The weakness of binding oneself to the new regime which one has imposed on one’s own life that it can easily be shirked at any time, that if one yields to the inclination to do so, the restraints upon it will be weaker and fewer. Whatever church, organization, or cult to which one commits oneself, one should always make for oneself at least the reservation that one should retain the freedom to leave and go elsewhere or to cease seeking among outer organizations and to search within. However, there is a place and a need for the cohesion of a group, for the sustained teamwork of an organization, and for the discipline imposed on individuals by a church. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Any institution dedicated to training for the life of the Spirit will always keep out the Spirit. It cannot be found through any formal performance nor through any organized group work. And all that training can do is to open a way wherethrough, if It is already coming or will come, it may pass. I made my life rich enough that I stopped caring about changing the World if ever I really thought of it; I made a life you see, you know, a World unto itself. However, others are able to open their soul in a sophisticated way to…to something. There is something else, something about our dilemma, that you cannot invent theologies, but for them to work they have to come from some deeper place inside a person—a totality of human experience. Illumination is not a result which follows moral purification and emotional discipline. These things are necessary but only preparatory. It is a result which follows conscious attempts to seek the Real and discard the illusory. This discrimination will show itself in the kind of values that are attached to the World, in the thinking reflections that are made about the World, and in the deliberate rejection of ego that takes place during meditation. It begins with either the intellect as enquiry, or the feelings as World-weariness, but is passes gradually into the whole life of the individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

It the enlightenment is to be continuous and the self-conquest completed, the technique which is to achieve them must be a sufficiently adequate one. To become established in the Reality is to give up seeking all those transient and temporary experiences which come by pursuing particular techniques, whether they be techniques of yoga or techniques of taking supplement, and take to philosophy. We must carefully qualify by such words as “intermittent,” “partial,” and “temporary,” the attainments to which exercises lead. This is because the full and permanent attainment cannot emerge out of meditation alone. It is a fruit of the threefold planting of meditation and reflection and action combined. Hence although the foregoing exercises will bring the student considerably nearer it, it must not be thought that any mystical exercise of itself can confer ultimate enlightenment. The path to this exalted result must traverse all fields to spiritual enlightenment. We need to know the truth, the wisdom-knowledge, but it is not enough. We need to have the living mystic experience, the vital feeling of what I am, but it is not enough. For we need to synthesize the two in a full actual intuitive realization, conferred by the Overself. This is Grace. This is to emerge finally—born again! #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Good people work here. Since joining the company I have not heard one person raise one’s voice to another in anger, and rarely even in irritation. Apparently when you remove fear from a being’s life you also remove one’s stinger. Since there is no severe competition within our shop, we are serene. We do compete mildly perhaps, by trying to achieve good marks in the hope that our department head will recommend a promotion or an increase to the Salary Committee. Cutting out the other beings and using tricks to make one look bad is hardly ever done. At higher levels, now and then, executive empires will bump into each other and there will be skirmishes along the border. However, these are for the most part carried on without bullying and table pounding, and the worst that can happen to the loser is that one will be moved sideways into a smaller empire. It would be wrong to say that our employees are not lively. They have fun and love, and go on camping trips, go skinning, and operate power boats, have yacht parties, and read things and go to the movies, and ride motorcycles like anybody else. In the office they know what to do (usually after consolation) in almost any circumstance. What a great many of them have lost, it seems to me, is temperament, in the sense of mettle. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

We speak of a mettlesome horse. Well, these are not mettlesome people. When the ego is threatened—because at our company we do not threat people’s egos, they lack, perhaps, the capacity to be mean and ornery. Rather the ego tends to atrophy through disuse. Another curious thing is our talent for being extremely friendly without saying anything to each other. I remember a conversation that went on something like this: “Sully! Where did you come from? I have not seen you in—I guess it has been about a year and a half.” “Just about that, Jillian. A year and a half at least.” “What are you up to, for goodness’ sake?” “I have been in Canada, and now I am back in the states.” “Always on the move!” “Well, I guess I am. I just thought I would come down and have a chat with you before leaving.” “It is great that you did. How is your family?” “Fine, Jill, how is yours?” “They are fine, too. We just all had a family reunion and it was lovely.” “The years go by, do they not?” “They sure do.” “Well…” “Well…” Well, I guess I had better be moving along.” “It has been wonderful talking to you, Sully. Look, before you get on the plane, why do you not come down for another talk?” “I will, young lady. You can count on it.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Also common among our employees is a genuine and lively interest in the career of upper-level executives whom they may never have laid eyes on. As the gentlemen move from one station to another, their progress is followed with exclamations and inside comments. “Hmm…Armin has moved to Purchasing! I thought so.” “Look at Welsh—he has taken over the top spot in Patagonia. Anybody can tell that they are setting him up for a vice-presidency.” Who cared about Armin and Welsh? At one point, I did. I had to prepare a press release about them, and update—add two more lines to—their official biographies. The role of the corporation’s top directors in our cosmos is an interesting one. In out company, members of the board are not remote figures from outside who drop in to attend meetings now and then. They are on the job every day. They recognize us, nod, and often say hello. I have found these august gentlemen to be amiable and even shy in the presence of their subordinates, but their appearance one the scene is the occasion of total respect, body and soul, such as I have never witnessed outside the army. They are not feared either. They conduct themselves in a friendly, most democratic manner. It is not awe they inspire but, so far as I can see, pure admiration. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

I was once talking to a young man in the employee-relations department when his eyes, gazing over my shoulder, suddenly lit up with joy. I turned, expecting to see our pretty receptionist, but it was a director passing by and giving us a wave of his hand. This unity and harmony are important for everyone who does not know how to control one’s inmost self would feign control one’s neighbor’s will according to one’s own conceit. For the living person, power is not a theory but an ever-present reality which one must confront, use, enjoy, and struggle with a hundred times a day. Every person is born a bundle of potentialities. Very few of these have become formed into actual powers at birth; one cannot yet walk or talk or make a flying machine. However, one can cry and this cry is the potentiality that develops into the complex system of communication in language. No one can doubt the delight the normal infant gets at the maturing of these potentialities into powers as one is able to talk, to crawl, to walk, to run. All of us who have watched children running in the park, skipping and jumping as randomly as puppies, can appreciate the pleasure of sheer movement, of exercising muscles that demand to be used. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The potentiality to explore, to see the World as a person of one’s age can, will increasingly become an actual power as one’s neuromuscular structure develops. Everyone who has observed one’s own development with wonder will be aware that there is both nature and nurture in every step of this actualization of one’s potentialities. However, these potentialities also being anxiety. Potentiality becomes actuality, but the intervening variable is anxiety. The potentiality for pleasures of the flesh, which takes a decisive leap ahead at puberty, brings excitement and joy but also the anxiety associated with new relationships and new responsibilities. Power pushes toward its fulfillment. It is neither good nor evil, ethically speaking; it only is. However, it is not neutral. It requires in some way its own expression, although the forms of the expression vary greatly. There is an inescapable conflict between a being’s individual powers and the culture to which he or she belongs; and there is bound to be a struggle of these powers against the culture that seeks to hold the individual within its bounds. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This constant struggle has a dialectical nature—as one pole changes, the other does too. Anxiety connected with an activity will spoil the pleasure that it would otherwise hold. This is not true for minor anxieties; on the contrary, they may produce an added zest. Riding a roller-coaster with some apprehension may make it more thrilling, whereas doing it with strong anxiety will make it a torture. A strong anxiety connected with pleasures of the flesh will render them thoroughly unenjoyable, and if one is not aware of the anxiety one will have the feeling that pleasures of the flesh do not mean anything. That maybe confusing because I have said that a feeling of dislike may be used as a means of avoiding an anxiety, and now I am saying that the dislike may be a consequence of the anxiety. Actually, both statements are true. Dislike may be the means of avoiding and the consequence of having anxiety. This is one small example of the difficulty in understanding psychic phenomena. They are intricate and involved, and unless we make up our minds that we must consider innumerable, interwoven interactions we shall make no progress in psychological knowledge. The purpose of discussing how we may defend ourselves against anxiety is not to give an exhaustive picture of all possible defenses. In fact we shall soon learn more radical ways of preventing anxiety from arising. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

My main concern now is to substantiate the statement that one may have more anxiety than one is aware of, or may have anxiety without being aware of it at all, and also to show some of the more common points where it may be looked for. Thus, in short, anxiety may be hidden behind feelings of physical discomfort, such as heart-pounding and fatigue; it may be concealed by a number of fears that seem rational or warranted; it may be the hidden force driving us to drink or to submerge ourselves in all sorts of distractions. We shall often find it as the cause of inability to do or enjoy certain things, and we shall always discover it as the promoting factor behind inhibitions. For reasons we shall discuss later, our culture generates a great deal of anxiety in the individuals living in it. Hence practically everyone has built up one or another of the defenses I have mentioned. The more neurotic a person is, the more is one’s personality pervade and determined by such defenses, and the greater the number of things one is unable to do or does not consider doing, although according to one’s vitality, mental capacities or educational background one would be justified in expecting one to do them. The more sever the neurosis, the more inhibitions are present, both subtle and gross. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

There are three contemporary dilemmas: (1) the failure of institutional authority, (2) the rising ride of nihilism, and (3) the struggle for psychospiritual balance, or integration. When people declare that God is dead, they do not mean all gods or every God to come; they meant the gods, both secular and religious, that no longer bred inspiration and hope, but only disillusionment and decay. This denotes the corrupt gods that catered to some greedy elite; churches financed by cocaine king; the repressive gods that stifled pleasures of the flesh, creative play, and emotional expressiveness; the technocratic gods that sapped the populace of meaningful and stimulating work; and the scientistic gods that deny the legitimacy of nonrational phenomena. This forecast the breakdown of institutional authority. We can also foresee a gaping chasm left in the wake of this breakdown—a chasm which could lead to nihilism. When people no longer have traditions to steer them or gods to inspire them, what happens? Many of them flounder; they become reckless, anarchistic beast, or they form reactionary, xenophobic enclaves. These extremes strike a note of familiarity in our own unstable era, an era bereft of traditions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

This World view can be characterized as a primordial clash of counraries—on the one hand, repression, order, or an Apollonian consciousness and on the other hand, indulgence, abandon, or Dionysian awareness. Wherever one is sacrificed the other suffers, because neither can operate in isolation. How can we cope with these warring (individual and collective) tendencies? By confronting them, by acknowledging both our limits and our possibilities, our need for order and discipline, as well as spontaneity and abandon. In so doing, we foster dynamic, realistic lives. This is what is meant by passionate people who master their passions, or those who self-overcome. Sometimes it is okay to surround ourselves with limited horizons, as long as we do not retire from life but put ourselves in the midst of it; do not be fainthearted but take as much as possible upon yourself, over yourself, and into yourself. What we want is totality; fight for the extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will. Discipline yourself to wholeness, create yourself. A human being who is strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward oneself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom is a being of tolerance, not weakness but of strength. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed in the whole. In the case of abstract painters, for example, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. The paint, the canvas, and the other materials then become a secondary part of this encounter; they are the language of it, the media, as we rightly put it. Or scientists confront their experiment, their laboratory task, in a similar situation of encounter. The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, will power. A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity. The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity. Let prayer stay as a beautiful, peace-bestowing, and calming exercise. If it does, it need not limit you to getting stuck with “Experience” as a final attainment. It is a felt experience, but one which must be accompanied by the knowledge that the entire Universe is a form of knowledge. The two together complete the prayerful experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Thus one learns to understand that one must advance beyond ordinary situations to this goal of Being, to become established in it, in this stillness, ever-present and ever-proven. So do as you wish in this matter, do not deprive yourself of the occasional or even regular practice of prayer, should you be inclined toward it, so long as you comprehend that though it has its very important place in the Quest, it is not essential to attainment of the ultimate goal itself. Love is the primary attribute and motive for the spiritual purposes we were changed to undertake by our beloved God. A marvelous work is about to come forth. This revelation establishes that those who desire to serve God qualify for such faith, hope, charity and love, with a focus on the glory of God. Charity, which is the pure love of Christ, includes God’s eternal love for all his children. We are blessed with great love for our fellow beings and environment, for we are called to carry the gospel to the World to win souls unto Christ. When we gain a vision of love, the Lord’s work will be accomplished. We need to align our hearts with love and move away from feelings of mere responsibility or guilt. Loving performing ordinances for ancestors will strengthen and protect our youth and family in a World that is becoming increasingly evil. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

When we work in righteousness, our decisions are Heaven blessed. Most of us need time to fit and equip ourselves for the glorious moment of insight, but a few receive it in a day. It must be remembered that it does not actually happen in time but out of it, in the great Stillness. The being does not know about the absolute final truth a second before—and then it is all there. How soon it can settle down in one will also vary with different persons—it is a few hours in one case but three years in another. Those who seek the will of the Lord as individuals and for their families must strive for righteousness, meekness, kindness, and love. Humility and love are the hallmark of those who see the Lord’s will, especially for their families. Perfecting ourselves, qualifying ourselves for the blessings of covenants, and preparing to meet God are individual responsibilities. We need to be self-reliant and anxiously engaged in making our homes a refuge from the storms that surround us and a sanctuary of faith. When there is love at home, there is beauty all around. Whether enlightenment is reached by steps as an outcome of practice unremittingly done, or that it comes suddenly all at once, it must be a concept-free phenomenon, a set of doctrines and covenants that are understanding, and possess a recognition of what always was, is, and will be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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August 2, 2019 10:26 pm

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