If the intellectual were to admit that one also has power, although a different kind from that of the politician, the businessman, and the military leader, it would clear the air. Furthermore, modern society clearly needs the intellectuals and their guidance; the corporate power needs to be shared with them as well as with the other disinherited groups of society. It is worthwhile to recall that in The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, Lestat de Lioncourt, the intellectual vampire appears to be getting ready to be decapitated, but is pulled in by Queen Akasha, the 6,000-year-old most powerful and first vampire in the World. However, later Queen Akasha faces a struggle, when all the vampires turn against her and is herself decapitated by one of the redhead witches the was responsible for bring the dark forces into her life that cursed her with vampirism. This is a graphic allegory of the role of intellectual and the nutrient power that one can express in our day. Be careful who you are willing to die for, as they may not be there to nourish you in your time of need. I have argued against the idea that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between power and the intellectual. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
And of course, this deepening knowledge of him made me ache for him all the more. I considered again that in my dark preternatural youth, I had made companions for myself who could never really be companions—Gabrielle, who had no need of me; Nicolas, who had gone mad; Louis, who could not forgive me for having seduced him into the realm of the mysterious, even though he had wanted the secrets himself. There is one psychoanalytic term that has gained wide popularity and in popular use has changed its meaning. Such popular use always indicates a significant fact about a society and therefore deserves our attention. I refer to the term “ego.” People say that something is good or bad for their “ego.” They mean by this that their self-feeling—in the sense of the status which they accord themselves—rises when something is good and falls when something is bad for their ego. In this usage ego is only part of the person. My “ego” is not identical with “I” or “self.” It is not identical with the I who is well or ill, who sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, who acts, walks, sits, stands, lies, who is moved by others, by what is seen and experienced. Moreover, what is “good” or “bad” for my who is not at all necessarily good or bad for me, although I may be inclined to think so. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The popular “ego” gains from success, winning in competition, status, being admired, flattered, loved; it does not gain from facing the truth, from loving somebody else, from humility. It behaves like a stock or a piece of merchandise endowed with self-awareness: if it is much in demand it rises, is blown up, feels important; if not, it falls, shrinks, feels it is nothing. Thus, it I an alienated part of the self. Alienation can be like a psychic accident. Like when the soul of a dead person takes over a living body; a spirit possessing a human being; it has to be persuaded to let go. However, while it is only part of the self, it has the tendency to become the focal point of the feeling of identity and to dominate the whole life of the people who ae involved with their “ego” to a significant degree. Their mood fluctuates with their ego. They are haunted by their “ego” and preoccupied with its enhancement and downfall so much so that the vibration and the constriction coming from egotistical individuals may make others sense that they are being forced quite literally out of their physical self. These individuals may feel that they have a life apart from their “ego,” but they stand or fall with it. The “ego” has become their identity and at the same time the main object of their worry, ambition, and preoccupation, crowding out any real concern with themselves and with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
I am concerned here only with the attitude which the person takes toward such handicaps or advantages or privileges, which is important for one’s ability to deal them. In this attitude the structure of the sense of identity and the way in which such factors as the social background and innate advantages or handicaps are incorporated in the sense of identity play a decisive role. What are the dynamics of such alienated concepts of identity? Sometimes they crystallize around repeated parental remarks which, rather than referring to a particular act of the child, say or imply that the child is or lacks, by its very nature, such and such; that Tom is a lazy good-for-noting or that he is “just like Uncle Harry,” who happens the be the troublemaker in the family. Frequently they develop from an ego-ideal that is alien to the child’s own personality, but about which one has come to feel that, unless one is such and such, one is nothing. Whatever their genetic origin, I shall consider here mainly the phenomenological structure of alienated identity concepts and the dynamics of this structure which tend to perpetuate self-alienation. By making some quality or circumstance, real or exaggerated or imagined, the focal point of a reified identity, I look upon myself as though I were a thing (res) and the quality or circumstance were a fixed attribute of this thing or object. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, the “I” that feels that I am this or that, in doing so, distances itself from the very same reified object attribute which it experiences as determining its identity and very often as a bane on its life. In feeling that I am not such and such, I distinguish between the unfortunate I and the presumably unalterable quality or lack which, for all time, condemns me to have this negative identity. I do not feel that I am doing this or that or failing to do it, but that there is a something in me or about me, or that I lack something and that this, once and for all, makes me this or that, fixes my identity. The person who has this attitude toward oneself usually is unaware of its being a particular attitude with concrete and far-reaching implications. One takes one’s attitude for granted as a natural, inevitable one and is aware only of the painful self-consciousness and self-preoccupation it involves. One cannot imagine how anyone with one’s fate could have any other attitude. The two most significant implications of this attitude to oneself are: the severance from the living I of the reified attribute which is experiences as a fixed, unchangeable quality, and the severance of this reified attribute from its dynamic and structural connection with other qualities, needs, acts, and experiences of the person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In other words, the reified attribute is cut off from the living, developing, fluctuating I in time, since it is experienced as immutable. However, it is also cut off from being experiences as an integral part of the living personality, connected with the totality of the person’s strivings, attitudes, perceptions, feelings, with one’s acting and failing to act. In reality, of course, we can observe that certain actions, moods, and experiences cause changes in the role of the negative identity in the conscious feelings and thoughts of the person. However, one usually does not experience the reified attribute which forms the core of one’s negative self-feeling as something connected with, and due to, one’s own actions and attitudes, but as something fixed on which one has no influence. Furthermore, just as the person’s feeling about oneself may fluctuate with the ups and downs of one’s “ego,” so it also varies with the intensity of the negative self-feeling based on some reified attribute which, at times, may disappear altogether from the conscious thoughts of the person. However, when it reappears it is recognized as the same unfortunate quality that throughout the past has tainted—and will forever taint—the person’s life. Thus, in spite of such fluctuations, the alienated attribute is experienced as a “something” that basically does not and cannot change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To be saddled with a reified, negative identity seems, on the face of it, noting but a painful burden. Yet one often can see people cling to such negative self-images with a great deal of stubbornness and in the face of contradictory evidence. In psychoanalytic therapy, it is often seen that the patient who comes for help tries to convince the therapist that nothing can be done for one, since one is born with such and such a handicap or without such and such an advantage. On closer scrutiny, one may find that such insistence by the patient on the hopelessness of the situation has a way of occurring at a point when the patient is afraid to face an issue, or when one wants to be pitied rather than helped. Thus, the reified identity concept often provides a protection against an anxiety-arousing challenge, a way out of a feared situation, and thereby a certain relief. This relief is dynamically similar to the relief observable in certain hypochondriacal and paranoid patients. It sounds paradoxical to speak of relief in the case of patients who are obviously beset by worry, suffering, and fear as the hypochondriac and the paranoid. However, the hypochondriacal patient who is preoccupied with imagined, anticipated, or real ailments sees oneself as the “customarily handicapped” one and thereby avoids the anxiety-provoking prospect of facing and dealing with one’s real problems. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
One’s hypochondriacal preoccupation get the patient off the sport with oneself—namely, off the spot where one would have to deal with one’s realistic personality problems. There are neuroses which may occur in individuals whose personality is otherwise intact and undistorted, developing as a reaction to an external situation which is filled with conflicts. Character neuroses is a condition in which—through the symptomatic picture may be exactly like that of a situation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformations of the character. They are the result of an insidious chronic process, starting as a rule in childhood and involving greater or lesser intensity. Seen from the surface a character neurosis, too, may result from an actual situation conflict, but a carefully collected history of the person may show that difficult character traits were present long before any confusing situation arose, that the momentary predicament is itself to a large extent due to previously existing personal difficulties, and furthermore that the person reacts neurotically to a life situation which for the average healthy individual does not imply any conflict at all. The situation merely reveals the presence of a neurosis which may have existed for some time. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
In the second place, we are not so much interested in the symptomatic picture of the neurosis. Our interest is possessed predominantly in the character disturbances themselves, because deformations of the personality are the ever-recurring picture in neuroses, whereas symptoms in the clinical sense may vary or be entirely lacking. Also from a cultural viewpoint character formation is more important than symptoms, because it is character, not symptoms, that influences human behavior. With greater knowledge of the structure of neuroses and with the realization that the cure of a symptom does not necessarily mean the cure of a neurosis, psychoanalysts in general have shifted their interest and given more attention to character deformations that to symptoms. Speaking figuratively we may say that the neurotic symptoms are not the volcano itself but rather its eruptions, while the pathogenic conflict, like the volcano, is hidden deep down in the individual, unknown to oneself. These restrictions granted we may rise the question whether neurotic persons today have traits in common which are so essential that we may speak of a neurotic personality of our time. As to the character deformations which accompany different types of neuroses, we are struck by their differences rather than by their similarities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The hysterical character, for instance, is decidedly different from the compulsive character. The differences which strike our attention, however, are differences of mechanisms or, in more general terms, differences in the way the two disturbances manifest themselves and in the ways in which they are solved, such as the great role of projection in the hysterical type as compared with the intellectualization of conflicts in the compulsive type. On the other hand, the similarities which I have in mind to do not concern the manifestations or the ways in which they have brought about, but they concern the content of the conflict itself. To be more exact, the similarities are not so much in the experience which have genetically prompted the disturbance but in the conflicts which are actually moving the person. In Tales of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, Lestat was in Paris, France with his mother Gabrielle at a café on the Left Bank. It was a lovely spring day and a grand time to be in Paris, as all the songs say. He was drinking a beer, reading the English papers, and realized that he was overhearing a conversation. He drifted away again. And Lestat realized that he was overhearing this strange conversation and it was not in English and it was not in French. Gradually he came to know that it was not in any language really, and yet it was fully understandable to him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Lestat then put down his paper, and began to concentrate. On and on it went. It was a sort of argument. He looked down and slowly turned around and there were two beings, seated at the table talking to each other, and just for a moment, it seemed normal—two men in conversation. He started to feel like he was fading out and realized that the two individuals were not human beings. It was painfully clear that there were illusory. They simply were not of the same fabric as everything else. They were not being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source. Like the light in Rembrandt. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. The whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its detail. God and Satan pretended not to see Lestat, but they allowed him to hear their discussion. The devil said he feels for humankind in their wretchedness, and humans have become more bestial than any beast because they have reasons. The Lord agreed that human beings too easily become lax; they need vigilance, even though beings ever errs the while one strives. God proposed that the human beings should be ever active, ever live creation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
God told the Devil that he must go on doing his job. And the Devil did not want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said the he understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he could not simply shirk his duties, it was not that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was amicable. This conversation tells us that it is crucial for us to take action, strive, and put in effort. Forever the active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence. In the beginning in Genesis, when it is declared, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” this may be to intellectualistic. Perhaps sensibility will do, in the beginning was the Sense. In the beginning there was the Deed. The Big Bang was when the cells of God began to divide. One may well be a bit suspicious of offers and guarantees, of salvation by a guru. How this can be done without thwarting Nature’s intent to develop us fully on all sides is difficult to see. If we are granted absolution from such effort, we shall be robbed of the important values implicit in self-effort. This is why people consider human beings to be an experiment. We are supposed to see what we are made of and overcome our destructive nature and heal, love and create. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The searcher who is undeceived by fine phrases and knows when to look for the self-interest behind them, will know also when emphasis on the need of a master is cunningly or emotionally turned into exaggeration of the need. I will be the most deferential of beings before the teaching and in the presence of a truly illuminated being. However, I will stubbornly resist, and stand firm on my ground, when I am asked to surrender my intellectual freedom and become one’s bonded disciple, open no longer to the teaching or influence of any other being. One has to detach oneself—or to let oneself become detached by book or teacher—from false ideas, conventional fallacies, or blind leadership. The statement of high truth made by any prophet or sage will always remain an individual interpretation—this is a point that is too often unnoticed or unknown or unacceptable. All history authenticates it. The highest authority by which any mystic can speak is really one’s higher self’s. One revelation and communication cannot therefore be valid for, or binding upon, other beings. If, however, they do accept one’s pronouncements as such, they do so as a venture of faith. When a mystic takes one’s inner voice to be nothing less than God’s, one’s inner experience to be nothing else than the uttermost union with God, and then proceeds to use them as justification for imposing one’s commands on other mortals, one is no longer a true mystic. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
One has introduced an “other.” One no longer touched the perfect unity of one’s own innermost being but has returned to the World of duality. And because no finite being can really become the infinite God, that “other” reduces itself to being a figment of one’s imagination at best or a lying, possessing spirit at worst. Full enlightenment is not attainable, expect the exuberant emotional fancy of over-enthused followers, for the gulf between being and God is too deep and too wide to be crossed. However, partial enlightenment is attainable, for something like godlike has been reflected into the human being’s heart. However, if it is impossible to become a part of God, it is possible to become a Child of God—that is, a being inspired and guided by God. In time one’s relation to the higher self becomes more intimae than any Earthly friendship, closer than any human union could ever be. Yet it always remains a relation, never becomes an absorption; always a nearness, never a merger. We never become God. We only become a channel for part of God’s light, wisdom, and power. If perfect union, is not attainable, what is attainable is the intimate presence of, and mental communion with, God in our heart, which brings peace and truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. The first is called life fear. This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves—which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear of self-actualization. The opposite fear is called death fear. This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy, the fear of having one’s independence taken away. This is the fear most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate. Both kind of fear have to be confronted, in varying proportions to be sure, by both men and women. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. However, if we are to move to self-realization, the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Power was originally a sociological term, a category used chiefly to describe the actions of nations and armies. However, as students of the problem have increasingly realized that power depends upon emotions, attitudes, and motives, they have turned to psychology for the needed clarification. In psychology, power means the ability to affect, to influence, and to change other persons. Each person exists in an interpersonal web, analogous to magnetic fields of force; and each one propels, repels, connects, identifies with others. Thus such considerations as status, authority, and prestige are central to the problem of power. I have used the phrase “sense of significance” to refer to a person’s conviction that one counts for something, that one has an effect on others, and that one can get recognition from one’s fellows. What is the relationship between power and force? Certainly force, the lowest common denominator of power, has been widely identified with power in America; it is the automatic first association with power of most people in this country. This is the chief reason power has been scorned and disparaged as a dirty word. Power is the coercive force in the middle ground between power as energy and power as violence. Not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I did not know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him in some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts. I myself has this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere—in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them—and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt’s paintings would have us to believe. We find in every culture the conflict between routine and the attempt to get back to the fundamental realities of existence. To help in this attempt has been one of the functions of art and of religion, even though religion itself has eventually become a new form of routine. Even the most primitive history of beings shows us an attempt to get in touch with the essence of reality by artistic creations. Primitive beings are not satisfied with the practical function of their tools and weapon, but strives to adorn and beautify them, transcending their utilitarian function. This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Aside from art, the most significant way of breaking through the surface of routine and of getting in touch with the ultimate realities of life is to be found in what may be called by the general term of “ritual.” I am referring here to ritual in the broad sense of the word, as we find it in the performance of a Greek drama, for instance, and not only to rituals in the narrower religious sense. What was the function of the Greek drama? Fundamental problems of human existence were presented in an artistic and dramatic form, and participating in the dramatic performance, the spectator—though not as a spectator in our modern sense of the consumer—was carried away from the sphere of daily routine and brought in touch with oneself as a being, with roots of one’s existence. I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt’s soul in the end. Rembrandt touched ground with his feet, and in this process gained strength by which he was brought back to himself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good? He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of beings. Many hardly ever get out of the realm of human-made conventions and things, and hardly ever break through the surface of one’s routine, aside from grotesque attempts to satisfy the need for a ritual as we see it practiced in lodges and fraternities. The only phenomenon approaching the meaning of a ritual, is the participation of the spectator in competitive sports; here at least, one fundamental problem of human existence is dealt with: the fight between beings and the vicarious experience of victory and defeat. However, what a primitive and restricted aspect of human existence, reducing the richness of human life to one partial aspect! If there is a fire, or a car collision in a big city, scores of people will gather and watch. Millions of people are fascinated daily by reporting of crimes and by detective stories and artificial news. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Many religiously go to movies in which crime and passion are the two central themes. All this interest and fascination is not simply an expression of bad taste and sensationalism, but of a deep longing for a dramatization of ultimate phenomena of human existence, life and death, crime and punishment, the battle between beings and nature. However, while Greek drama dealt with these problems on a high artistic and metaphysical level, our modern drama and ritual are crude and do not produce any cathartic effect. All this fascination with competitive sports, crime and passion, shows the need for breaking through the routine surface, but the way of its satisfaction shows the extreme poverty of our solution. The marketing orientation is closely related to the fact that the need to exchange has become a paramount drive in modern beings. It is, of course, true that even in a primitive economy based on a rudimentary form of division of labor, beings exchange goods with each other within the tribe or among neighboring tribes. The being who produces cloth exchanges it for grain which one’s neighbor may have produced, or for sickles or knives made by the blacksmith. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
With increasing division of labor, there is increasing exchange of good, but normally the exchange of goods is nothing but a means to an economic end. In the capitalistic society exchanging has become an end in itself. The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of the sense of dignity which is so characteristic of beings even in most primitive cultures. One must lose almost all sense of self, of oneself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and being who have become things have no self. Rembrandt’s skills were great—and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with—that not only could he see that goodness in beings, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole. One cannot fully appreciate the nature of alienation without considering one specific aspect of modern life: its routinization, and the repression of the awareness of the basic problems of human existence. We touch here upon a universal problem of life. Beings have to earn their daily bread, and this is always a more or less absorbing task. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
One has to take care of the many time- and energy-consuming tasks of daily life, and one is enmeshed in a certain routine necessary for the fulfillment of these tasks. One builds a social order, conventions, habits and ideas, which help one to perform what is necessary, and to live with one’s fellow beings with a minimum of friction. It is characteristic of all culture that it builds human-made, artificial World, superimposed on the natural World in which a being lives. However, only if one remains in touch with the fundamental facts of one’s existence, if one can experience the exaltation of love and solidarity, as well as the tragic fact of one’s aloneness and of the fragmentary character of one’s existence, then beings cannot fulfill themselves. If one is completely enmeshed in the routine and in the artifacts of life, if one cannot see anything but human-made, commonsense appearance of the World, one loses one’s touch and the grasp of oneself and the World. However, with each portrait Rembrandt understood the grace and goodness of humankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and wisdom which resides in every soul. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
As a result of the harmony Rembrandt possessed, his skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person oneself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work. He taught in many places, said on many occasions, “No one saves us but ourselves; no one can and no one may. Each alone must tread the path.” We can hear and see the echoes of these beliefs that Rembrandt expressed in the faces he painted. They were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become. If we cannot find a genuine indication of the presence of God-consciousness in a person by some fleeting or permanent reflection in the mirror of our own internal experience, then we must perforce abandon our would-be discipleship to the care of the divinity that is possessed hidden somewhere at the back of our minds. This is why the merchants of the Drapers’ Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God’s saints. However, nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. “This is my vision,” said Rembrandt to God. In the absence of a master let one follow a lone path, welcoming whatever one can learn from competent authorities but attaching oneself to none. The ways of success are still open to aspirants. Nobody should overrate the help which a spiritual guide is able to give and underrate one’s own resources. The quest is a work whose continuity goes on for a whole lifetime, whereas the personal contact which is needed to make a guide’s help effective can only be gotten occasionally at most and then only for limited periods of time. I give the warning because I know from several of my correspondents that this is a common tendency among beginners and even among those who ought to know better. The importance of a teacher is somewhat overrated. If one continues one’s program of study, prayer, community service, and if one appeals to one’s own higher self for guidance, one will certainly continue to progress. Earthly responsibilities will not interfere, for the time spent away from prayer is also part of the spiritual life. Towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, the Devil grew suspicious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The Devil did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He had believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore Worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other being in the cosmos—they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire. Although Rembrandt knew his discovery of being born out of, and that he still remained rooted in the Infinite Mind of God, it was a tremendous revelation but it did not make him identical with God. It made the mystical channel only for the cosmic mind, not one with it. He touched the cosmic and did not become entirely transformed into it. Well, Rembrandt suffered all the abuse heaped upon him by the Devil. He lost his fine house in the Jodenbreestraat. He lost his mistress, and finally even his son. Yet on and on he painted, without a trace of bitterness or perversity; on and on he infused his paintings with love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Human beings can only hope to realize the Overself which is a ray or intermediary, but not the World-Mind itself. For the latter is too vast and infinite and remote. Hence when mystics talk of knowing God or feeling God, this is only partly true for they can never know or feel God in his fullness. The soul is as close as we can approach to that Mind, but surely it is enough. For it reflects something of the Mind’s nature. No being we know of can come to know God as God is in himself, for that is impossible, but all beings can come to know God as God is in relation to us. This is because the Overself is all being’s contact-point with the World-Mind. We are not God but rather an emanation from God. We are still beings but there is something Godlike in the centre of our being. The Deity is inaccessible but that centre is not. Finally, as Rembrandt lay on his deathbed the Devil pranced about, gleefully, ready to snatch Rembrandt’s soul and pinch it between evil little fingers. However, the Angels and saints cried to God to intervene. “In all the World, who knows more about goodness?” they asked, pointing to the dying Rembrandt. “Who has shown more than this painter? We look to his portraits when we would know the divine in man.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
When it is said that the Infinite Being cannot be known by the finite mind it is not meant that the Infinite Being is forever unknowable by human beings. For there is in everyone of us a link between the two, and if a being is willing to let go of one’s Worldly concerns long enough to find one’s way to that link—whether by reflection or by prayer—one will discover that this link—intuition can lead one into the Infinite Presence. At that sacred moment one becomes IT because one forgets the personal self. It exists whether one exists or not, but one exists only in dependence upon it. If the very interesting question be asked, “How did the first mortal come to discover this Presence?” I suggest that we may draw near to the holy of Holies yet never enter it, feel its eternal atmosphere yet never understand it. God alone knows why this manifestation should be. Even the mystic never attains God in its fullness but only that ray of God within oneself, which is the soul. Although such an attainment is imperfect in the conventional mystic, the philosophic one can hope to attain perfection. However, neither can cross the Overself’s farthest boundary—but that is another matter. That which one finds deep within oneself is, one understands intuitively, a reflected ray from that which exists behind the whole Universe but it is still only a ray. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
And so God broke the pact between Rembrandt and the Devil. He took to himself the soul of Rembrandt, and the Devil, so recently cheated of Faust for the very same reason, went mad with rage. Well, he would burry the life of Rembrandt in obscurity. He would see to it that all the man’s personal possessions and records were swallowed by the great flow of time. And that is of course why we know almost nothing of Rembrandt’s true life, or what sort of person he was. Beings may know the soul but not God. They may not see the face, or understand the nature, of the final essential reality—and live. One who claims such experience practices self-deception and is caught in illusion. Nonetheless, the Devil could not control the fate of the paintings. Try as he might, he could not make people burn them, throw them away, nor set them aside for the newer, more fashionable artist. In fact, a curious thing happened, seemingly without a marked beginning. Rembrandt became the most admired of all painters who had ever lived; Rembrandt became the greatest painter of all time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
I took a trip to San Jose, California, the Silicone Valley, to search from lost Rembrandts, before the clever flock of psychics guarding such antiquities sensed my meddlesome telepathic scanning—which they do with remarkable efficiency—and quickly cut me off. Many people wondered where the Winchester Mansion gets its money and somehow thought I knew. There once was a staggering abundance of gold and jewels in its vaults. Its investments in the great banks of Europe are legendary. It owns property in many cities, which alone could sustain it, if it did not possess anything else. And then there are its various treasures—paintings, statues, tapestries, antique furnishings and ornaments—all of which it has acquired in connection with various occult cases and upon which it places no monetary value, for the historical and scholarly value exceeds any appraisal which could be made. The Winchester once has a library alone worth a king’s ransom in any Earthly currency. There were manuscripts in all languages, indeed some from the famous old library of Alexandria burnt centuries ago, and others from the libraries of the martyred Cathars, whose culture is no more. There were texts from ancient Egypt for a glimpse of which archaeologists would have cheerfully committed murder. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
There were texts by preternatural beings of several known species, including vampires. There were letters and archives in these documents supposedly written by me, but which had been authenticated and predated my birth. Some of the documents were also drafted by Mrs. Winchester in the Blue Séance room. When they assert that they have untied with God, they have, if truly attained, united with God’s deputy, their higher self, their own divine soul—which is not the same. And if they have deceived themselves then they have untied only with their conception of God. That is, they have never gone outside the enclosing circle of their own thought. The five senses cannot perceive It and the thinking faculties cannot conceive It. It cannot be brought down to the level of humans nor can human raise themselves to its height. Whoever believes that one experiences the Absolute at any time, experiences only an imagination of one’s own brain. The Overself is so close to God, so akin to the World-Mind that no being need look farther, or aspire higher. Our finite minds cannot lift more than the smallest corner of the smallest corner of the infinite veil behind which the Ultimate Mind eludes us. No one overwhelmed by the experience of Enlightenment has yet said the last word about Absolute Truth; for no words can either exhaust it or even touch it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
I wince to think of how much time has been wasted by intelligent men and women arguing about whether psychotherapy cures and trying to fit psychotherapy into the Western twenty-first century medicine. Our task is to be a guide, friend, and interpreter to persons on their journeys through their private Hells and purgatories. Specifically, our task is to help patients get to the point where they can decide whether to they wish to remain victims—for to be a victim has real benefits in terms of power over one’s family and friends and other secondary gains—or whether they choose to leave this victim-state and venture though purgatory with the hope of achieving some sense of paradise. Our patients often, toward the end, are understandably frightened by the possibility of freely deciding for themselves whether to take their chances by completing the quest they have bravely begun. All though history it is true that only by going through Hell does one have any chance of reaching heave. The journey through Hell is part of the journey that cannot be omitted—indeed, what one learns in Hell is prerequisite to arriving at any good value thereafter. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
In America we seem, by our practice, to act on the wish that we could pass over the despair of mortification and know only the exaltation of ascent. We seem to believe that we can be reborn without ever dying. Such is the spiritual version of the American Dream! We also need to have the courage to relate to other beings, the capacity to risk one’s self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy. It is the courage to invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an increasing openness. Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that is we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected. A common practice in our day is to avoid working up the courage required for authentic intimacy by shifting the issue to the body, making it a matter of simple physical courage. It is easier in our society to be unclothed physically than to be exposed psychologically or spiritually—easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experiences as making us more vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Ah, such a circus for the eye—this low-ceilinged cave—chocked-full of every imaginable kind of packageable and preserved foodstuff, toilet article, and hair accoutrement, ninety percent of which existed not at all in any form whatsoever during the century when I was born. We are talking sanitary napkins, medicinal eyedrops, plastic bobby pins, felt-tip markers, creams and ointments for all nameable part of the human body, dishwashing liquid in every color of the rainbow, and cosmetic rinses in some colors never before invented and yet undefined. Imagine Louis XVI opening a noisy crackling plastic sack of such wonders? What would he think of Styrofoam coffee cups, chocolate cookies wrapped in cellophane, or pends that never run out of ink? Well, I am still not entirely used to these items myself, though I have watched the progress of the Industrial Revolution for two centuries with my own eyes. Such drugstores can keep me enthralled for hours on end. Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of Wal-Mart. And everybody is to everybody else a commodity, always to be treated with certain friendliness, because even if one is not of use now, one may be later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference. There is also a good deal of subtle distrust. When one being says to another, “You speak to Louis Pointe du Lac; he is all right,” it is an expression of reassurance against a general distrust. Even love and the relationships between genders has assumed this character. The great the emancipation of the pleasures of the flesh, as it occurred after the First World War, was a desperate attempt to substitute mutual pleasures of the flesh for a deeper feeling of love. When this turned out to be a disappointment the erotic polarity between the genders was reduced to a minimum and replaced by a friendly partnership, a small combine which has amalgamated its forces to hold out better in the daily batter of life, and to relieve the feeling of isolation and aloneness which everybody has. The alienation between being and being results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other precapitalist socities. Modern society consists of atoms (if we use the Greek equivalent of individual), little particles estranged from each other but held together by selfish interests and by the necessity to make use of each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Yet beings are a social entity with a deep need to share, to help, to feel as a member of a group. What has happened to these social strivings in beings? They manifest themselves in the special sphere of the public realm, which is strictly separated from the private realm. Our private dealings with our fellow beings are governed by the principle of egotism, “each for oneself, God for us all,” in flagrant contradiction to Christian teaching. The individual is motivated by egotistical interest, and bot by solidarity with and love for one’s fellow beings. The latter feelings may assert themselves secondarily as private acts of philanthropy or kindness, but they are not part of the basic structure of our social relations. Separated from our private life as individuals is the realm of our social life as citizens. In this realm the state is the embodiment of our social existence; as citizens we are supposed to, and in fact usually do, exhibit a sense of social obligation and duty. We pay taxes, we vote, we respect the laws, and in the case of war we are willing to sacrifice our lives. What clearer example could there be of the separation between private and public existence than the fact that the same being who would not think of spending one hundred dollars to relieve the need of a stranger does not hesitate to risk one’s life to save the stranger when in war they both happen to be soldiers in uniform? The uniform is the embodiment of our social nature—civilian garb, of our egotistic nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The division between the community and the political state has led to the projection of all social feelings into the state, which thus becomes an idol, a power standing over and above the being. Beings submit to the state as to the embodiment of one’s own social feelings, which one worships as powers alienated from oneself; in one’s private life as an individual one suffers from the isolation and aloneness which are necessary result of this separation. The worship of the state can only disappear if beings take back the social powers into oneself, and builds a community in which one’s social feelings are not something added to one’s private existence, but in which one’s private and social existence are one and the same. What is the relationship of beings toward oneself? I have described elsewhere this relationship as marketing orientation. In this orientation, beings experience themselves as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. One does not experience oneself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. One is alienated from these powers. One’s aim is sell oneself successfully on the market. One’s sense of self does not stem from one’s activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from one’s socioeconomic role. Our sense of value depends on ourselves: on whether we can sell ourselves favorably, whether we can make more of ourselves that we started out with, whether we are a success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
One’s body, one’s mind and one’s soul are one’s capital, and one’s task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of oneself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the personality package, conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If one fails in a profitable investment in oneself, one feels that one is a failure; if one succeeds, one is a success. Clearly, one’s sense of one’s own value always depends on factors extraneous to oneself, on fickle judgment of the market, which decides about one’s value as in decides about the value of commodities. Nevertheless, as people begin their journey, they pause in the vestibule of hell, where they hear the cries of anguish from the opportunists. These souls who in life were neither good nor evil but acted only for themselves. They are the outcasts who took no sides in the rebellion of the Angels. In modern psychology these opportunists are called well adjusted; they know how to keep out of trouble! However, they are guilt of the sin of fence-sitting. Hence they are neither in hell nor out of it. They are eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Hell enacts the law of symbolic retribution: since these opportunists took no sides they are given no place. As their sin was a darkness, so they move in darkness. As their own guilty conscience pursued them, so they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets. Any being who is neither good nor evil is simply not living an authentic life. The law tends to take care to punish the evil depicted in society, and they understand profoundly the passion that drives beings away from the moral life. They believe that it takes courage to be a real sinner. Many people learn to cope wit their problems (not to cure them) in part by means of religion or a therapist’s superior familiarity with disordered human types. As one journeys deeper into hell, such as the gluttonous, the hoarders, and wasters, the wrathful and the sullen, the important thing is not the specific evils with which one struggles but the journey itself. In any quest-romance the recognition of negative states leads to a purification of the self, a casting of the dead/diseased self in favor for a new life. Likewise the function of psychoanalysis, from one point of view, is a movement toward healthy by traversing the morbid landscape of one’s own past. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Dr. Freud remarks that hysterical patients suffer mainly from reminiscence might be extended to include all those who are inwardly compelled to autobiographical narrative. The Inferno—or hell—consists of suffering and endless torment that produces no change in the soul that endures it and is imposed from without. However, in Purgatorio suffering is temporary, a means of purification, and is eagerly embraced by the soul’s own will. Both must be traversed before arriving at the celestial Paradiso. I think of these three stages as simultaneous—three coexisting aspects of all human experience. Leaving aside the manifest picture and looking at the dynamics effective in producing neuroses, and that is anxieties and the defenses built up against them. Intricate as the structure of a neurosis may be, this anxiety is the motor which sets the neurotic process going and keeps it in motion. Anxieties or fears—let us use these terms interchangeably for a while—are ubiquitous, and so are defenses against them. These reactions are not restricted to human beings. If an animal, frightened by some danger, either makes a counter-attack or takes flight, we have exactly the same situation of fear and defenses. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we are afraid of being struck by lightning and put a lightning rod on our roof, if we are afraid of the consequences of possible accidents and take out an insurance policy, the factors of fear and defense are like wise present. Fear and defense are present in various specific forms in every culture, and may be institutionalized, as in the wearing of amulets as a defense against the fear of the evil eye, the observation of circumstantial rites against the fear of the dead, the taboos concerning the avoidance of menstruating women as a defense against the fear of evil emanating from them. These similarities present a temptation to make a logical error. If the factors of fear and defense are essential in neuroses, why not call the institutionalized defenses against fear the evidence of cultural neuroses? The fallacy in reasoning this way is possessed in the fact that two phenomena are not necessarily identical when they have one element in common. One would not call a house a rock merely because it is built out of the same mater as the rock. What, then, is the characteristic of neurotic fears and defenses that makes them specifically neurotic? Is it perhaps that the neurotic fears are imaginary? No, for we might also be inclined to call fear of the dead imaginary; and in both cases we should be yielding to an impression based on a lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
No, for neither does the primitive know why one has a fear of the dead. The distinction has nothing to do with gradations of awareness or rationality, but it consists in the following two factors. First, life conditions in every culture give rise to some fears. They may be caused by external dangers (nature, enemies), by the forms of social relationships (incitement to hostility because of suppression, injustice, enforced dependence, frustrations), by cultural traditions (traditional fear of demons, of violation taboos) regardless of how they may have originated. An individual may be subject more or less to these fears, but on the whole it is safe to assume that they are thrust upon every individual living in a given culture, and that no one can avoid them. The neurotic, however, not only shared the fears common to all individuals in a culture, but because of conditions in one’s individual life—which, however, are interwoven with general conditions—one also has fears which in quantity or quality deviate from those of the cultural pattern. Secondly, the fears existing in a given culture are warded off in general by certain protective devices (such as taboos, rites, customs). As a rule these defenses represent a more economical way of dealing with fears than do the neurotic’s defenses built up in a different way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Thus the normal person, though having to undergo the fears and defenses of one’s culture, will in general be quite capable of living up to one’s potentialities and of enjoying what life has to offer one. The normal person is capable of making the best of the possibilities given in one’s culture. Expressing it negatively, one does not suffer more than is unavoidable in one’s culture. The neurotic person, on the other hand, suffers invariably more than the average person. The only reason why I did not mention this fact when discussing the characteristics of all neuroses that can be derived from surface observation is that it is not necessarily observable from without. The neurotic oneself may not even be aware of the fact that one is suffering. Reason does not at all mean our contemporary intellectualism, or technical reason, or rationalism. It stands for the brad spectrum of life in which a person reflects on or pauses to question the meaning of experience, especially suffering. In our age reason is taken as logic, as it is mainly channeled through the left hemisphere of the brain. Therefore, if we take it in a broad sense, reason can guide us in our private hells. However, reason even in one’s amplified sense cannot lead us into the celestial paradise. We have the need of other guides on our journey. These guides are revelation and intuition. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The Real is wholly nothing to the five senses and wholly unthinkable to the human intellect. Therefore and to this extent only it is also called the Unknowable. However, there is a faculty latent in beings which is subtler than the sense, more penetrative than the intellect. If one succeeds in evoking it, the Real, the unknowable, will then come within the range of one’s perception, knowledge, and experience. However, although the Absolute in its passive state is unknowable, the Overself as a representative of its active aspect, of the World-Mind, is knowable. If the pure essence of Godhead is too inaccessible for beings, nevertheless one has not been left bereft of all divine communion. For there is a hidden element within oneself which has emanated from the Godhead. It is really one’s higher, better self, one’s soul. The Infinite Mind is beyond human perception but its presence and operation are not. The point in human consciousness where these become known is the Overself. However, although the Absolute is imperceptible to human powers, It has not left us utterly bereft of all means of communion. We are linked to It by something that is possessed hidden in the very deeps of our own being, by Its deputy to beings, the divine Overself. Human power can penetrate to those deeps and discover the hidden treasure. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
This higher self is what the successful mystics of all religious have really achieved union with, despite the widely different names of God downwards, which they have given it. One may know that God is here even though one is incapable of know what God is like. If we cannot know the all of God because we do not have the equipment of God, we can at least know something of God and the way we are related through the Overself. Living through other people is a fine way to evade our own problems and it will also make the other person a first-rate candidate for therapy later one. You have as much as a right to live as any other human being. However, there is a common defense of many people overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. Some other force must have the power to change things since obviously these people do not; their actions do not really mater. To fill the vacuum left by their failure to act, the powerless frequently rely on the practice of magic rites. Worried about being above average weight, some people ask to be hypnotized to cause them to eat less. However, this only takes away a person own responsibility; and why not learn to be one’s own hypnotist? This dependence on magic stretches back through the centuries of oppression of unrepresented groups, and colonial peoples. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
It is assumed that beings can be made passive, docile, and helpless and can be kept this way by the use of built-in threats and the occasional assignation of a loved or community member. However, in the false calm, we repressed the question we should have been asking: When an individual is rendered unable to stand up for oneself socially or physically, as in slavery, where does one’s power go? No one can accept complete impotence short of death. If one cannot assert oneself overtly, one will do it covertly. Thus magic—a covert, cult force—is an absolute necessity for the powerless. The spread of magic and the reliance on the occult is one symptom of the widespread importance in our transitional age. Sometimes people also lash out at others, paradoxically, against those closet and dearest to one. That is because these individuals represent people in whom one has submerged oneself. In this respect they should be fought (in the individual’s mind) for the sake of one’s own autonomy. It is parallel to the counter-will, the being’s self-assertion in opposition exactly to those upon whom is most dependent. Thus the life-destroying violence becomes also life-giving violence. They are intertwined as the sources of the individual’s self-reliance, responsibility, and freedom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Although it is inevitable, beings do not immediately fight everyone in their lives to assert their own freedom. This occurs partly because the people who are still helping them, they have to surrender temporarily some of the autonomy they do have; partly as a counterbalance to the excessive transference that turns the people helping them (financially and or emotionally) into a god. There is thus a self-affirmation precisely in self-destructive violence. Ultimately the affirmation is expressed in the person’s demonstration of one’s right to die by one’s own hand if one chooses. If, as is our tendency in this country, we condemn all violence out of hand and try to eradicate even the possibility of violence from a human being, we take aware from one an element that is essential to one’s full humanity. For the self-respecting human being, violence is always an ultimate possibility—and it will be resorted to less if admitted than if suppressed. For the free beings it remains in imagination an ultimate exit when all other avenues are denied by unbearably tyranny or dictatorship over the spirit as well as the body. To be alive is power, existing in itself, without a further function, omnipotence enough. The persons I have known, or have known of, who have great moral courage have generally abhorred violence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
We should not allow the crushing of another person, whether physically, psychologically, or spiritually. One’s moral courage stands out more clearly when they become the symbol of a value lost sight of in a confused World. The innate worth of a being must be reversed solely because of one’s humanity and regardless of one’s politics. As long as there exist persons with moral courage, we can be sure that the triumph of the human robot has not yet arrived. Courage often arises not only out of one’s audaciousness, but also out of one’s compassion for the human suffering one witnesses around one. It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that mortal courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering of one’s fellow beings. I am tempted to call this perceptual courage because it depends on one’s capacity to perceive, to let one’s self see the suffering of other beings. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we do not want to become involved, when we do not want to confront even the issue of whether or not we will come to the assistance of someone who is being unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the other’s suffering, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Hence the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement, “I did not want to become involved.” When we find our own heart and mind, our own inspiration, our spiritual longings, one senses of being guided by ethereal means, this encounter is compared to the secular resurrection. Resurrection reappears in a radically different landscape in order to restore love and joy to the craving soul. It is as if by helping others, we are coming back for our own salvation. We participate wit the ongoingness of the race. To find out the truth little by little oneself is to make it really one’s own. To be pushed into it with a plunge by a master always entails the likelihood of a return to one’s native and proper level later on. We must find the Overself through our own perceptions, that is, through our own eyes—or never. It will not suffice to believe that we can go on seeing it through the eyes of another being—be one a holy guru, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself; reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. Something more is needed that what books or even gurus, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself: reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
I walked slowly down the steps, and through the smart, glittering art deco lobby with its magazine-page glamour. How good it felt to be moving like a mortal, to open the doors, to wander out into the fresh air. I headed north along the sidewalk among the evening strollers, eyes drifting naturally over the newly refurbished hotels and their little cafes. I reflected on Mercedes telling me how her mother actually had saved her when she was a little girl—she had been the provider for the family when her real father had left. Hence, she was very loyal to her mother. Consequently, Mercedes felt that in therapy she got the permission without condemnation to express her struggle to be; she got the experience and authority from God, of her own rights and her own being she had previously lacked. My giving vent to my rage was my living out my belief that she was a beautiful person with her own rights. I did not need to say it because she could see if from my actions. In our culture, physical courage takes its form chiefly from the legends of strong people, and many people in frontier times. Our prototypes have been people like Mercedes and pioneer heroes who took the law into the own hands, who survived because they were brave, self-reliant and could endure the inevitable loneliness in homesteading with the nearest neighbor twenty miles away. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, the contradiction in our heritage from this frontier are immediately clear to us. Regardless of the heroism it generated in our forebears, this kind of courage has now not only lost its usefulness, but had degenerated into brutality. When I was a child in a small Bay Area town, boys were expected to fistfight. However, our mothers represented a different viewpoint, so the boys often got licked at school and then whipped for fighting when they came home. This is scarcely an effective way to build character. As a psychoanalyst, I hear time and again of beings who had been sensitive as boys and who could not learn to pound others into submission; consequently, they got through life with the conviction that they are cowards. America is among the most violent of the so-called civilized nations; our homicide rate is three to ten times higher than that of the nations of Europe. An important cause of this is the influence of that frontier brutality of which we are heirs. We need a new kind of physical courage that will neither run rampant in violence nor require our assertion of ego-centric power over other people. I propose a new form of courage of the body: the use of the body not for the development of musclemen, but for the cultivation of sensitivity. This will mean the development of the capacity to listen to with the body. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Learning to think with the body is a valuing of the body as the means of empathy with others, as expression of the self as a thing of beauty and as a rich source of pleasure. Such a view of the body is already emerging in American in religious doctrines and covenants teach us about the sanctity of the body. Are bodies are made in the image of God. Our bodies house our spirits. However, our bodies are also subject to pin, illness, disabilities, and temptation. However, we are willing, even eager, to accept these challenges because we know that only with spirit and element inseparably connected can we progress to become like our Heavenly Father. “For beings are spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.33. In these traditions, the body is not condemned, but is valued as a source of justified pride. I propose this for our consideration as the kind of physical courage we will need for the new society toward which we are moving. However, the alienated attitude toward consumption not only exists in our acquisition and consumption of commodities, but it determines far beyond this the employment of leisure time. What are we to expect? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
If a being works without genuine relatedness to what one is doing, if one buys and consumes commodities in an abstractified and alienated way, how can one make use of one’s leisure time in an active and meaningful way? One always remains the passive and alienated consumer. One consumes ball games, moving pictures, newspapers and magazines, books, lectures, natural scenery, social gatherings, in the same alienated and abstractified way in which one consumes the commodities one has bought. One does not participate actively, one wants to take in all there is to be had, and to have as much as possible of pleasure, culture and what not. Actually, one is not free to enjoy one’s leisure; one’s leisure-time consumption is determined by industry, as are the commodities one buys; one’s taste is manipulated, one wants to see and to hear that one is conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is an industry like aby other, the customer is made to buy fun as one is made to buy clothes and shoes. The value of the fun is determined by its success on the market, not by the anything which could be measured in human terms. In any productive and spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
In the alienated form of pleasure nothing happens within me; I have consumed this or that; nothing is changed within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. Beings are not only alienated from the work one does, and the things and pleasures one consumes, but also from social forces which determine our society and the life of everybody living in it. Our actual helplessness before the forces which govern us appears more drastically in those social catastrophes which, even though they are denounced as regrettable accidents each time, so far have never failed to happen: economic depressions and wars. These social phenomena appear as if they were natural catastrophes, rather than what they really are, occurrences made by beings, but without intention and awareness. This anonymity of the social forces is inherent in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to most other societies in which social laws are explicit and fixed on the basis of political power or tradition—capitalism does not have such explicit laws. It is based on the principle that if only everybody strives for oneself on the market, the common good will come to it; order and not anarchy will be the result. There are, of course, economic laws which govern the market, but these laws operate behind the back of the acting individual, who is concerned only with one’s private interest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
You try to guess these laws of the market as a Calvinist in Geneva tried to guess whether God had predestined one for salvation or not. However, the laws of the market, like God’s will, are beyond the reach of your will and influence. To a large extent the development of capitalism has proven that this principle works; and it is indeed a miracle that the antagonistic co-operation of self-contained economic entities should result in a blossoming and ever-expanding society. It is true that the capitalistic mode of production is conducive to political freedom, while any centrally planned social order is in danger of leading to political regimentation and eventually to dictatorship. While this is not the place to discuss the question of whether there are other alternatives than the choice between free enterprise and political regimentation, it needs to be said in this context that the very fact that we are governed by laws which we do not control, and do not even want to control, is one of the most outstanding manifestations of alienation. We are the producers of our economic and social arrangements, and at the same time we decline responsible arrangements, and enthusiastically, and await hopefully or anxiously—as the case may be—what the future will bring. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Our own actions are embodied in the laws which govern us, but these laws are above us, and we are their slaves. The giant state and economic system are not any more controlled by beings. They run wild, and their leaders are like a person on a runaway horse, who is proud of managing to keep in the saddle, even though one is powerless to direct the horse. For good reasons every culture clings to the belief that its own feelings and drives are the one normal experience of human nature, and psychology has not made an exception to this rule. Dr. Freud for example, concludes from his observations that woman is more jealous than man, and then tires to account for this presumably general phenomenon on biological grounds. Dr. Freud also seems to assume that all human beings experience guilt feelings concerning murder. It is an indisputable fact, however, that the greatest variations exist in the attitude toward killing. Some cultures do not feel that a murderer requires punishment. In many primitive tribes the injury done a family when one of its members is killed by an outsider may be repaired by presenting a substitute. In some cultures, the feeling of a mother whose son has been killed can be assuaged by adopting the murderer in his place. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Making further use of anthropological findings we must recognize that some of our conceptions about human nature are rather naïve, for example the idea that competitiveness, sibling rivalry, kinship between affection and sexuality, are trends inherent in human nature. Our conception of normality is arrived at by the approval of certain standards of behavior and feeling within certain standards of behavior and feeling within a certain group which imposes these standards upon its members. However, the standards vary with culture, period, class and gender. These considerations have more far-reaching implications for psychology than appears at first impression. The immediate consequence is a feeling of doubt about psychological omniscience. From resemblances between findings concerning our culture and those concerning other cultures we must not conclude that both are due to the same motivations. It is no longer valid to suppose that a new psychological finding reveals a universal trend inherent in human nature. The effect of all this is to confirm what some sociologist have repeatedly asserted: that there is no such thing as a normal psychology, which holds for all beings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
These limitations, however, are more than compensated by the opening up of new possibilities of understanding. The essential implication of these anthropological considerations is that feelings and attitudes are to an amazingly high degree molded by the conditions under which we live, both cultural and individual, inseparably interwoven. This in turns means that if we know the cultural conditions under which we live we have a good chance of gaining a much deeper understanding of the special character of normal feelings and attitudes. And inasmuch as neuroses are deviations from the normal pattern of behavior there is for them, too, a prospect of better understanding. In part, taking this way means following Dr. Freud along the path that led him ultimately to present the World with a hitherto unthought-of understanding of neuroses. While in theory Dr. Freud traced back to our peculiarities to biologically-given drives he has emphatically represented the opinion—in theory and still more practice—that we cannot understand a neurosis without a detailed knowledge of the individual’s life circumstances, particularly the molding influences of affection in early childhood. Applying the same principle to the problem of normal and neurotic structures in a given culture means that we cannot understand these structures without a detailed knowledge of the influences the particular culture exerts over the individual. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
For the rest it means that we have to take a definite step beyond Dr. Freud, a step which is possible, though, only on the basis of Dr. Freud’s revealing discoveries. For although in one respect he is far ahead of his own time, in another—in his over-emphasis on the biological origin of mental characteristics—Dr. Freud has remained rooted in its scientific orientations. He has assumed that the instinctual drives or object relationships that are frequent in our culture are biologically determined of being’s nature or arise out of unalterable situations (biologically given pregenital stages, Oedipus complex). Dr. Freud’s disregard of cultural factors not only leads to false generalization, but to a large extent blocks an understanding of the real forces which motivate our attitude and actions. I believe that this disregard is the main reason why psychoanalysis, inasmuch as it faithfully follows the theoretical paths beaten by Dr. Freud, seems in spite of its seemingly boundless potentialities to have come into a blind alley, manifesting itself in a rank growth of abstruse theories and the use of shadowy terminology. We have seen now that a neurosis involves deviation from the normal. This criterion is very important, though it is not sufficient. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Persons may deviate from the general pattern without having a neurosis. The artist who refused to give more time than necessary to earning money, may have a neurosis or he or she may simply be wise in not permitting oneself to be pulled into the current of competitive struggle. On the other hand, many persons may have a severe neurosis who according to surface observations are adapted to existing patterns of life. It is in such cases that the psychological or medical point of view is necessary. Curiously enough, it is anything but easy to say what constitutes a neurosis from this point of view. At any rate, as long as we study the manifest picture alone, it is difficult to find characteristics common to all neuroses. We certainly cannot use the symptoms—such as phobias, depressions, functional physical disorders—as criterion, because they may not be present. Inhibitions of some sort are always present, for reason I shall discuss later, but they may be so subtle or so well disguised as to escape surface observation. The same difficulties would arise if we should judge from the manifest picture alone the disturbances in relations with other people, including the disturbances in sexual relations. These are never missing but they may be very difficult to discern. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
There are two characteristics, however, which one may discern in all neuroses without having an intimate knowledge of the personality structure: a certain rigidity in reaction and a discrepancy between potentialities and accomplishments. Both characteristics need further explanation. By rigidity in reactions I mean a lack of that flexibility which enables us to react differently to different situations. The normal person, for instance, is suspicious where one senses or sees reasons for being so; a neurotic person may be suspicious, regardless of the situation, al the time, whether one is aware one’s state or not. A normal person is able to discriminate between compliments meant sincerely and those of an insincere nature; the neurotic person does not differentiate between the two or may discount them altogether, under all conditions. A normal person will be spiteful if one feels an unwarranted imposition; a neurotic may react with spite to any insinuation, even if one realizes that it is in one’s own interest. A normal person may be undecided, at times, in a matter important and difficult to decide; a neurotic may be undecided at all times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Rigidity, however, is indicative of a neurosis only when it deviates from the cultural patterns. A rigid suspicious of anything new or strange is a normal pattern among a large proportion of the less affluent in Western civilization; and the small bourgeois’ rigid emphasis on thrift is also an example of normal rigidity. In the same way, a discrepancy between the potentialities of a person and one’s actual achievements in life may be due on to external factors. However, it is indicative of a neurosis if in spite of gifts and favorable external possibilities for their development the person remains unproductive; or if in spite of having all the possibilities for feeling happy one cannot enjoy what one has; or if in spite of being beautiful a woman feels that she cannot attract men. In other words, the neurotic has the impression that one stands in one’s own way. Sometimes we can understand from people’s words and the look in their eyes that their soul is sunken in despair that bears down on many others, turning their course and resolution by imagined perils, as one’s own shadow turns the frightened horse. This means that some people are experiencing various levels of evil in hell, the depth of the unconscious. These types of individuals need a guide to help them through this dangerous mortal landscape they must traverse. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
When we are alive in someone’s World, we can be a friend, an accompanying presence for the bewildered pilgrim and help them interpret these levels in hell. As a result, our presence can change the magnetic field. We are souls among souls in limbo; we are all struggling along in the spiritual condition, whether we be rich or less affluent, a student or teacher, at that particular time. We need not be too concernedabout the directive language ere. We must search continually for the inner meanings, which is that some cannot find their way alone through this misery. Beings require not only the stability of a legend, but also a legend that one can assimilate to one’s own purposes. Still, listening to someone else’s teaching, or reading it, will only be a temporary makeshift until the day when one can establish communication with one’s own intuitive self and receive from it the teaching which one, as a unique individual, needs. From no other source can one get such specially suitable instruction. All Nature shows the self-evolution which is going on. Each of us is part of it. Each of us can carry oneself further into the next phase and beyond. The Force and Intelligence are present, but the faith in them must be drawn on. Otherwise, we shall have to look outside for help, probably for someone to guide, lean, on and be carried by. However, held too long and too far, the hope proves illusory. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Our discover of being born out of, and still remaining rooted in, the Infinite Mind of God, is a tremendous one but it does not make one identical with God. It makes the mystic a channel only for the cosmic mind, not one with it. One touched the cosmic and does not become entirely transformed into it. Human beings can only hope to realize the Overself which is a ray or intermediary, but not the World-Mind itself. For the latter is too vast and infinite and remote. Hence when mystics talk of knowing God or feeling God, this is only partly true for they can never know of feel God in his fullness. The soul is as close as we can approach to that Mind, but surely it is enough. For it reflects something of the Mind’s nature. This is why the seers call it a spark of the One Divine Flame, and the prophets declared it to be created in the image of God. The finite minds which are the offspring of the One Mind may not hope to rise in power or understanding to its attitude. Nevertheless, because they are inseparable from it, they may find hints of both these attributes within themselves. The Divine Essence is undiscoverable by human sense and intellect but not by human intuition and insight. We may, however, attain to partial knowledge of the transcendent Absolute by and through its emanation in us, the higher self. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Remember, beginnings are always hard and most are artificial. It was the best of times and the worst of times—really? When! And all happy families are not alike; even Sarah Winchester must have realized that. Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I do not believe that rescuing one poor mortal from such a fiend can conceivably save my soul. As one of the Sons of Liberty of the American Revolutionary War of 1775, I have taken life too often defending the thirteen colonies—unless one believes that the power of one good deed is infinite. I do not know whether or not I believe that. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty—eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I have done. Nevertheless I like saving those innocents from their fate. I feel an obligation to a World you love because that World for you is still intact. It is conceivable your own sensitivity might become the instrument of madness. You speak of works of art and natural beauty. I wish I had the artist’s power to bring alive for you the Vince of the fifteenth century, my master’s palace there, and the love I felt for him when I was a young boy. Oh, if I could only make those times come alive for either you or me…for only an instant! What would it be worth? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
And what a sadness it is to me that time does not dim the memory of that period, that it becomes all the richer and more magical in light of the World I see today. If you would persuade, you must appeal first to interest rather than intellect. This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this World. However, courage is not the opposite of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair. Nor is the courage required mere stubbornness—we shall surely have to create with others. Yet, if you do not open your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole. A chief characteristic of this courage is that it requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum. The emptiness within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic. When we focus our attention on the actual neurotic difficulties, we recognize that neuroses are generated not only by incidental individual experience, but also by the specific cultural conditions under which we live. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In fact the cultural conditions not only lend weight and color to the individual experiences but in the last analysis determine their particular form. It is an individual fate, for example, to have a domineering or self-sacrificing mother, but it is only under definite cultural conditions that we find domineering or self-sacrificing mothers, and it is also only because of these existing conditions that such an experience will have an influence on later life. Courage, however, is not to be confused with rashness. What masquerades as courage may turn out to be simply a bravado used to compensate for one’s unconscious fear and to prove one’s machismo, like the hot fliers in World War II. The ultimate end of such rashness is getting one’s self killed, or at least one’s head battered in with a police officer’s billy club—both of which are scarcely productive ways of exhibiting courage. When we realize the great import of cultural conditions on neuroses the biological and physiological conditions, which are considered by Dr. Freud to be their root, recede into the background. The influence of these latter factors should be considered only on the basis of well established evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes it possible for all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither aware into mere facsimiles of virtue. This orientation of mine has led to some new interpretations for a number of basic problems in neuroses. Though these interpretations refer to disparate questions such as the problem of masochism, the implications of the neurotic need for affection, the meaning of neurotic guilt feelings, they all have a common basis in an emphasis on the determining role that anxiety plays in bringing about neurotic character trends. In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. Assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality. This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of nature. The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The cute little puppy similarly becomes an intelligent and brave dog on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. However, a man or a woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. This is why courage is considered as ontological—it is essential to our being. If one believes that the essentials of psychoanalysis is possessed in certain basic trends of thought concerning the role of unconscious processes and the way in which they find expression, and in the form of therapeutic treatment that brings these processes to awareness, then what I present is psychoanalysis. If pursued one-sidedly and without foundations in the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud, even a productive insight into psychological processes can become sterile. We cannot escape the fact that all psychological problems are necessarily profoundly intricate and subtle. If there is anyone who is not willing to accept this fact one is warned not to read any further least one find oneself in a maze and be disappointed in one’s search for ready formulae. Unfortunately reading about one’s satiation will not cure one; in what one reads one may recognize others much more readily than oneself. We use the term neurotic quite freely today without always having, however, a clear conception of what it denotes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Often the term neurotic is hardly more than a slightly high-brow way of expressing disapproval: one who formerly would have been content to say lazy, sensitive, demanding or suspicious, is now likely to say instead neurotic. Yet we do have something in mind when we use the term, and without being quite aware of it we apply certain criteria to determine its choice. First of all, neurotic persons are different from the average individuals in their reactions. We should be inclined to consider neurotic, for example, a young lady who prefers to remain in the rank and file, refuses to accept and increased salary and does not wish to be identified with her superiors, or an artist who earns thirty dollars a week but could earn more if he gave me more time to his work, and who prefers instead to enjoy life as well as he can on that amount, to spend a good deal of his time in the company of women or in indulging in technical hobbies. The reason we should call such persons neurotic is that most of us are familiar, and exclusively familiar, with a behavior pattern that implies wanting to get ahead in the World, to get ahead of others, to earn more money than the bare minimum for existence. These examples show that one criterion we apply in designating a person as neurotic is whether one’s mode of living coincides with any of the recognized behavior patterns of out time. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If the girl without competitive drives, or at least without apparent competitive drives, lived in some Pueblo Indian culture, she would be considered entirely normal, or if the artist lived in a village in Southern Italy or in Mexico he, too, would be considered normal, because in these environments it is inconceivable that anyone should want to earn more money or to make any greater effort than is absolutely necessary to satisfy immediate needs. Going father back, in Greece the attitude of wanting to work more than one’s needs required would have been considered absolutely indecent. Thus the term neurotic, while originally medical, cannot be used now without its cultural implications. One can diagnose a broken leg without knowing the cultural background of the patient, but one would run a great risk in calling an Indian boy psychotic because he told us that he had visions in which he believed. In the particular culture of these Indians the experience of visions and hallucinations is regarded as a special gift, a blessing from spirits, and they are deliberately induced as conferring a certain prestige on the person who has them. With us a person would be neurotic or psychotic who talked by the hour with his deceased grandfather, whereas such communication with ancestors is a recognized pattern in some Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
A person who felt mortally offended if the name of a deceased relative were mentioned we should consider neurotic indeed, but one would be absolutely normal in the Jicarilla Apache culture. A man mortally frightened by the approach of a menstruating woman we should consider neurotic, while with many primitive tribes fear concerning menstruation is the average attitude. Another example, people who consider storming area 51 are neurotic for they do not know what dangers the government could be protecting us from. The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time. Today, for example, if a mature and independent woman were to consider herself a fallen woman, unworthy of the love of a decent man, because she had had pleasures of the flesh, she would be suspected of a neurosis, at least in many circles of society. Some one hundred and seventeen years ago, this attitude of guilt would have been considered normal. The conception of normality varies also with the different classes of society. Members of the feudal classes, for example, find it normal for a man to be lazy all the time, active only at hunting or warring, whereas a person of the small bourgeois class showing the same attitude would be considered decidedly abnormal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This variation is found also according to gender differences, as far as they exist in society, as they do in Western culture, where men and women are supposed to have different temperaments. For a woman to become obsessed with the dread of growing old as she approaches the forties is, again, normal, while a man getting jittery about age at that period of life would be neurotic. However, not necessarily in the age of information, with all the obstacles and increased competition. Nowadays, single men may worry about growing old around age forty also because their energy is fading and they never did anything they consider noteworthy to achieve the success they desire and still do not have kinds and know they are burning out. To some extent every educated person knows that there are variations in what is regarded as normal. We know that in China, many of the people have a different diet than Americans. We know that some cultures have different conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness; that the medicine-man has different ways of curing the sick from those used by the modern physician. That there are, however, variations not only in customs but also in drives and feelings, is less generally understood, though implicitly or explicitly it has been stated by anthropologists. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For good reasons every culture clings to the belief that its own feelings and drives are the one normal expressions of human nature, and psychology has not made an exception to this rule. It is also true that there is a legitimate need for more consumption as beings develop culturally and have more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, book and so forth. However, of crazing for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of beings. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give beings a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. With a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslaves beings. Many beings today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially new things. One is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Some are lovable because they admit to their human problems at every step and never pretend to artificial virtues. In some cases, we are aware that we have reached an impasse similar to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, a place that is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that reflects the gleams is gone, with tremulous cadence slow, and bringing the eternal note of sadness. We go astray from the straight road and awake to find ourselves alone in a dark wood. A dark World of not only sin but of ignorance. It becomes difficult to understand oneself or the purpose of one’s life and this may require some high ground, some elevation of perspective, by which to perceive the structure of one’s experience in its totality. Our sights may still be set high above the Mount Everest, the peak of joy, but we are unable to make our journey there by ourselves. In this sense, we become like a patient. On the mountainside our way is blocked by three beasts: the Lion of violence, the Leopard of malice, and the She-wolf of incontinence. And down the Lion’s track, a She-wolf drives upon us, a starved horror ravening and wasted beyond all belief. She seems a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving. Oh, the many souls she (the city of Sacramento) has brought to endless grief! #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
A person’s hell may consist of confronting the fact that his mother never loved him; or being stuck in a city where nothing but nightmares seem to happen; or it may consists of fantasies of destroying those a person loves most, like Medea destroying her children; or undergoing the hideous cruelty released in wartime when it becomes patriotic to hate and kill. The private hell of each one of us is there crying to be confronted, and we find ourselves powerless to make progress unassisted against these obstacles. Without qualified guidance, the labour of the aspirant becomes a process of trial and error, of experiment and adventure. It is inevitable, consequently, that one should sometimes make mistakes, and that these mistakes should sometimes be dramatic ones and at other times trivial ones. One should take their lessons to heart and wrest their significance from them. In that way they will contribute toward one’s growth spiritually. The duty of the aspirant to cultivate one’s moral character and to accept personal responsibility for one’s inner life cannot be evaded by given allegiance to any spiritual authority. When anyone begins to make real advance, one emerges into real need of an individual path unhampered by others, undeflected by their suggestions. The inner work must then proceed by the guidance of one’s own intuitive feeling together with the pointers given by outer circumstances as they appear. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The necessity of a teacher is much exaggerated. One’s own soul is there, ready to lead one to itself. For this, prayer, study, and right living will be enough to find its Grace. If one has sufficient faith in its reality and tries to be sensitive to its intuitive guidance one needs no external teacher. If one has sufficient inner resources from which to draw, it is not really necessary to have the guidance of an adept. For those who have such inner guidance, spiritual progress may be made quite satisfactorily. However. Each aspirant has in the end to find one’s own expressive way to one’s own individual illumination. Outside help is useful only to the extent that it does not attempt to impose an alien route upon one. Philosophy is more modest in its claim than mysticism. It makes no arrogant claim to lead beings to identify oneself with God. If the identity is a complete one, then reason alone tells us tat an absurd situation will immediately arise. If it is only a partial one, then no mystic has ever been specific enough to tell us which part of God one has become nor competent enough to distinguish the parts. The fact is that no being that we know of has ever done so, no being that we know of could ever do so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Those mystics who talk of becoming united with God have fallen into the dualistic fallacy. They talk as though God were separate and apart from themselves. The truth is that they already exist within God and do not need to become united with him. What they need is to become conscious of God—which is a different matter. Beings are not God, God is not human, but there exists and unbreakable relation between the two. The pantheist who is so intoxicated by one’s discovery of the truth that God is everywhere present and consequently in oneself too, that one does on to the pseudo-discovery that one and God are one, is simply one who is too vain to acquiesce in one’s own limitations. This danger of misinterpreting one’s own experience besets the mystic at this stage. Because one feels oneself to be in the presence of Deity, one believes the one is Deity. However, the finite can never contain the Infinite. Deity transcends human beings. The danger of being’s deifying themselves afflicts the mystic path. This mind-madness must first be frankly admitted as a danger, for then only can it be guarded against. We are only linked with the divine. We are but a small token of the greater Mind which spawned us. We are but the merest hint of That which is behind one in the present, was in the past, and shall be in the future. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The true explanation of mystical ecstasy is not union with God but union with the Soul. When consciousness is successfully turned in on its own deepest state, which is serene, impersonal, and unchanging, it receives the experience of the divine Soul, not of the Godhead. It brings us nearer to the Godhead but does not transform us into it. We discover the divine ray within, we do not become the Sun itself. The mystic attains knowledge and experience of one’s own soul. This is not the same as knowledge of the ultimate Reality. The two are akin, of course—much more closely than the little ego and the Real are skin. However, the Godhead is the Flame of which the soul is only a spark; to claim complete union with it seems blasphemous. When a being says that one has communed with God, be one a great prophet in trance or a humble person in prayer, like when Abraham says God told him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, the truth is that one as really communed with something within oneself which is so closely related to God that one may perhaps be pardoned for one’s error. However, still it is not God. It is one’s soul of the Overself. When one believes one is communing with God one is actually communing with one’s own inner reality. The enlightenment that seems to come from outside actually comes from inside oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In one’s great ecstasy one feels oneself to be a supernormal, super-powerful, super-wise, and preternatural. If one rashly declares that one is God, one is to be pardoned. The human being cannot go farther in its pilgrimage than the discover of one’s own origin, one’s Overself. The soul constitutes both the connection between beings and God and the ultimate attainment of beings. The best a being can hope for, in rising above the ego and the World, is to rise into awareness of one’s true soul. This is valuable enough but it is not the same as looking into God’s mind or becoming untied with God’s being. Those theologians who describe the mine merely show us the capacity or quality of their speculations and imaginations. Those mystics who describe the being, really describe their own souls. Sometimes people feel they are totally disregarded because of who they are. For example, Mercedes feels no one cares for her feelings or rights; they assume she simply has none. Such situations which she reflects and creates in her reality would themselves suffice to destroy any nascent individual sense of self-esteem if it were present in here. Anything she does in trying to save her life is useless; this-is-the-way-the-World-is. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Since these same kinds of thoughts occur in many people almost at the beginning of therapy, we have to ponder if these are attitudes that Mercedes is really facing in her day to day life, or if we are in someway alienating her. Mercedes seems like a nice person, docile, and a harmonizer in the community. When I first saw Mercedes, a young woman, she looked like a West Indian, striking and exotic in appearance. She explained that she was one-quarter Cherokee Indian, one-quarter Scotch, and the remaining half African American. She is married to a European professional man. She went to college—and I.Q test gave her a score of 140. At college she joined a sorority where she went through all the proper motions and emotions. However, a strange logic of injustice is present in person who are forced to accept the fact that others have all the rights and they have none. He mother not only knew what was going on—but actively abets it. Shortly after Mercedes began therapy, she became pregnant by her husband. Then I noted a tremendously interesting phenomenon. Every couple of weeks when she came in reporting that she had begun to bleed vaginally-which was in her judgment as well as medically a symptom predicting a miscarriage—she would also report a dream. She was having premonitions people were attacking and trying to kill her. The consistent simultaneity of this kind of dream and the bleeding as a harbinger of a miscarriage was what struck me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
At first I tried to draw out the anger I assumed the young woman must feel toward her assassins. She would sit there mildly agreeing with me but feeling nothing at all. It was clear that she was totally unable to muster any conscious rage toward those who were out to kill her. This, again, contradicts all logic: when someone is out to kill you, you ought to feel rage; that is what anger is for biologically—an emotional reaction to someone’s destroying your power to be. She believed that having her baby was inviting death at her hands. We were confronted with the likelihood of spontaneous abortion. Some rage had to be expressed, and I was the only other person in the room. So I decided, not wholly consciously, to express my rage in place of hers. Each time she began vaginal bleeding and brought in such an episode, I would verbally counterattack those who were trying to kill her. What did these blankety-blank people mean by trying to kill her for having a baby? That gossip bitch must have known what was going on and pushed her into it. She was continually sacrificing Mercedes on the altar of homage to her master, to keep him—or for whatever Godforsaken other exploitative reason. Mercedes had done her best to work her and be honest. And there these people still have the power to prohibit her from having the one thing she wants, a baby! #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Eventually, the baby was safely born at its appointed time, to the great joy of Mercedes and her husband. They picked out a nice family name that signifies a ne beginning in the history of the World. She and her husband were totally unconscious, so far as I could determine, of this significance. However, I thought it fitting, indeed—a new race of man was born! Like Prometheus, against all odds, they stole fire from the gods and gave it life. Our relationship in therapy was a magnetic force. Some rage was required against the destroyers. We were playing for keeps—to keep a fetus in her womb. This was not mere catharsis or abreaction in the usual sense of those words. The stakes were life itself—her baby’s. Mercedes was also fighting for the right to exist, to exist as a person with the autonomy and freedom that are inseparably bound up with being a person. She is fighting for her right to be—if I may use the verb in its full and powerful meaning—and to be, if necessary, against the whole Universe. Mercedes later stated she would not have made it without therapy—“I got my strength from you to stand against those looking to harm me”—but obviously it was her strength when she got it, and it was she who did the standing. The realization of the Overself enables us to taste something of the flavor of the World-Mind’s life. We are made in the image of God, but we are not the full measure of God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Randolph Harris II International Institute 