If the aged are increasingly isolated from community life, theirs is a fate which many groups share in an urban civilization. Not only does the city weaken the traditional kinship group; it also tends to atomize the individual by freeing one from old bonds. The anonymity and hence the alienation of the city dweller have never been more graphically described than by the following words: The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of most major cities. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only—that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glace for one’s neighbors in the streets. The more that city folk are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
The reason people do not believe you sometimes, it not because you are a liar, but because of their ego. They feel they are superior to you, and therefore you could not be having experiences that are more advanced than theirs. However, they would likely believe the same experiences if someone else were to have them without question. To the householder taking on a family life is a joy; to the monk it is an encumbrance. Neither person is wrong. It is all in the point of view. Each has inherited one’s own attitude from one’s former selves. One is not abandon the householder’s life unless the divine command tells one to do so. They are not necessarily strong and heroic who stay in the World and disdain flight from it. It may be that pleasures and possession keep them there. Equally, those who has nothing wroth renouncing—the poor, the unlucky, the disappointed, and the frail—make so sacrifice in passing the cloister’s shelter, the monastery’s peace. There are those who flee the World, its futile tumults and doings; they do well. However, we who hold to philosophy may flee or stay, just as we choose. For we can make of it a pathway to the Ever-Peaceful. Closely related to, indeed part of, the consumption process is the way modern mortals use their leisure time, if they have any. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
The qualification is overlooked by many writers commenting in contemporary leisure behavior who assume that there have been gains in leisure for all working people. We have an extremely uneven distribution of leisure. The average person’s gain in leisure with economic growth has been exaggerated. Estimates of annual and life-time leisure suggest that the skilled urban worker may have gained the position of their thirteenth century counterpart. Upper strata have, in fact, lost out. Even through their work lives are shorter and vacations longer, these people work many steady hours week after week—sometimes reaching a truly startling total. Many who do have leisure, on the other hand, are forced into it because they are marginal to the economy; and if they could, they would give up their leisure for work. The shorter work-week, instead of increasing opportunities for leisure, has simply encouraged growing numbers of men and women to take on second jobs. Most critical evaluations of leisure and its uses apply more to a beckoning future (when, presumably, all of us will have joined the leisure class) than to the present. Nevertheless, work has declined as a central activity, even if more mortals still work hard; a big split has taken place between work and leisure. Instead of being closely integrated with work, as in the past, the pursuit of leisure has become a desperate escape from work which is increasingly meaningless. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Small wonder that the idols of leisure have replaced the idols of work for so many. However, leisure itself has become meaningless, a packaged mass activity, its values provided by the entertainment industry. And although mortals are trained for work, they are not trained to spend leisure creatively. If some achieve freedom for an hour or a day, many of them find only a great emptiness. Escaping from work, they escape also from themselves. The alienating influences of the modern work force extend far beyond the individual worker; they touch with equal force upon one’s family and one’s community. Of the many effects of the corporate World on the family, perhaps the most important is the breakdown of the extended kinship group which, as we saw, had been the primary productive and social unit in the pre-industrial age. As the old crafts declined, and labor became increasingly divided and specialized, the economic and social base of the large family was destroyed. Lost were the customs and skills that had been passed on from one generation to another. Gone were the close bond between young and old, and especially the respect that youth had previously given to age. Into the new World class cities poured millions who had been cut off from their traditional family roots. These are the most visible consequences for the family in the corporate World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
However, considerably less is known about the more subtle psychological effects of globalization and corporate influence. There are many long-range and hidden influences which may not appear until generations later. It must be remembered that most of the long-industrialized countries of the West are still heavily burdened by the as yet uncompensated disservices of the earlier stages of their economic growth. Viewed in terms of the long-drawn cycle of family life, the violent industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century, the poverty, the unemployment, the social indiscipline, the authoritarianism of people and the cruelties to children, are by no means as remote today in their consequences as some economists and historians would have us believe. Thus the cult of human relations in industry and office to which we referred earlier ignores the fact the morale is not just a function of working conditions; but also of life outside the workplace. Yet what society expects of men and women outside the factory or office is considerably different from what is demanded inside. For example, while “stability” is heavily valued in family life, industrial conditions in the Western World has been marked by unemployment the displacement of old skills, the increasing mechanization of rationalization of work and especially by changes—often loss—of status and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
There is fundamental conflict between the values or norms of expected behavior in the workplace and those norms which prevail in the wider society and which are expected to influence the worker or employee in one’s role as a husband and father or wife and mother. In these roles, society tends increasingly to expect one not to submit to life as it happens but to consciously control one’s affairs, to think about their children’s tomorrow, to rationally and not blindly influence their behavior, and to accord to one’s spouse a greater measure of tolerance, respect, and understanding than many partners have given their spouses in the past. However, if workers cannot achieve stability or self-respect on the job, or have little conception of their place in the scheme of things, how can they perform satisfactorily as husbands and fathers or as wives and mothers? The answer is they cannot. With changes in family function, especially the decline of large kinship group as an operating unit, have come significant changes in structure. Perhaps most important, work is now increasingly separated from family life; parents disappear during the day, leaving the children to grow up chiefly with their peers and the television. Related to this break is the enormous suburban trend, distinguished by what sociologist call the nuclear family, that is, the small core unit of two parents and their children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
High divorce rates in countries such as the United States are only the most dramatic evidence of the many serious strains to which the new family is exposed. Most affected by the breakdown of the extended family or kinship group, however, are the aged. That breakdown has been accompanied by a tremendous increase in life expectancy. Just 200 years ago, the average person lived to be 40.5, now people are living to be 80.0 years old. Also, early retirement is causing issues. In North America and Western Europe a growing number of the aged finds itself increasingly cut off from meaningful purists. And sometimes I wonder if these people are happy living so long, only to be parked in a nursing home with other aged people, waiting for whatever is to come next. A recent American survey shows that the overwhelming majority of our citizens oppose the idea of having older persons live with their children. As these trends continue—the prolongation of life, early retirement, breakdown of the extended family—the aged become outcasts in a society like ours that places such emphasis on youth and its energies. Separate housing, even separate cities—this is the lot of our elderly citizens. In their twilight World there is only fleeting contact with the community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
No one can doubt that a new electronic technology is fast revolutionizing our economic and communication systems. Religious practices are also involved in profound change. One age is dead and the other not yet born—ours, which includes both youth and age, is in limbo. To what extent, we must finally ask, is technology used as the scapegoat from our present situation and, therefore, an escape from responsibility? Like, some people only participate in protests and demonstrations, not because they care about the cause, but be they want to voice their anger and destroy things. One young man admitted that during a protest, when one guy shouted: Let’s get the computer!” The young man, who was a student at the time, remarked “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a computer.” Now, on my college tours, when I tell that story, the students unfailingly burst into laughter, and it is the kind of laughter that indicates that some unconscious urge in them has been released, but this behavior also explains why it is so easy to yoke people into attacking people who have never done anything to them, they have never met, and know nothing about. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
So anyway, why this animosity, this spirit of revenge, against technology? For one thing, young people are entirely aware of the disastrous effects of technology—as, for instance, in the galloping pollution of air, Earth, and water. They see that technological progress seems in so many instance to lead straight into disaster; that the proliferation of techniques and machines, far from threatening only certain classes with unemployment, menaces the very existence of whole nations and conceivably of all humankind. This is surely true. However, a serious citing of it would also lead to the opposite statement, that technology has far-reaching values for nations and conceivable all humankind. Why, then, the refusal on the part of young adults to accept, or at least see, the latter? I believe that this refusal us used to protect their own consciousness. Technology consist of a complex system of tools that ought to extend human consciousness. A simple example of this may be illustrated by a chimpanzee fastening two sticks together to pull into his cage a banana that he cannot reach with one stick. However, in our day—so the younger generation feels—technology does just the opposite: it shrinks, dries up, depersonalizes human existence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Young people have discovered in their own bitter experience how the juggernaut of technology overrides them without paying the slightest attention to their protests. They find themselves crying, both silently and aloud: “Stop the machinery!” It is interesting that this metaphor from Charles Reich is identical with that of Mario Savio back in the first rebellion in 1964 in Berkeley: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop…” There are various ways of accomplishing this arresting of the machinery: prayer and movements back to nature. However, most important of all, there has arisen a new understanding of the value of subjectivity, to redress our gross overemphasis upon objectivity. Dedicated to the machine makes us tend to act in a machine-like manner. Whoever does one’s business in the manner of a machine develops a machine heart. Whoever has a machine heart in one’s chest loses one’s simplicity. Whoever loses one’s simplicity becomes uncertain in the impulses of one’s spirit. Uncertainty in the impulses of the spirit is something that is incompatible with truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
On the one side is the spirit that has already entered the World and now can be perceived in it by means of our senses; on the other, the spirit has not yet entered the World, but is ready to do so and now becomes present to us. This distinction is founded on the fact that I can show you the spiritual forms that have already entered the World, but not the others. The spiritual forms that are at hand in our common World, no less than a thing or natural being, I can point out to you as something actually or potentially accessible to you. If I am asked here, too, in the case of this borderland, where one is supposed to find mutuality, I can only point indirectly to certain scarcely describable events in human life where spirit was encountered; and if this indirect procedure proves inadequate, nothing remains to me in the end but an appeal to the testimony of your own mysteries, which may be buried under debris but are presumably still accessible to you. If, in the power and passion of such an ultimate concern, we can look at our finite concerns. Everything seems the same and yet everything is changed. We are still concerned about all these things but differently—the anxiety is gone! It still exists and tries to return. However, its power is broken; it cannot destroy us any more. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
One who is grasped by the one thing that is needed has the many things under one’s feet. They concern one but not ultimately, and when one loses them one thing one needs and that cannot be taken from one. They will hear a voice, perhaps none too clearly at first, that is identical with the voice that speaks to them through other genuine sayings of the same master. Now they will not ne able any longer to do what they did as long as they treated the saying as an object: they will not be able to separate out content and rhythm; they receive nothing but the indivisible wholeness of something spoken. However, here we are still dealing with a person and the manifestation of a person in one’s words. What I have in mind, however, is not limited to the continued presence of some personal existence in words. Hence I must supplement this account by pointing to an example in which there is no longer anything personal. What has to be achieved was what I was able to achieve: to confront and endure this spiritual form there that has passed through the mind and hand of man and become incarnate. Does the concept of mutuality disappear here? It merely merges into the darkness behind it—or it changes into a concrete state of affairs, coldly rejecting concepthood, but bright and reliable. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
From here we may also look across into that other realm where that which is not at hand belongs, the contact with spiritual beings, the genesis of word and form. Jesus’ use of the metaphor, the Son and the Father, was intended to point out that mortals, in one’s inner self, were born of, and is still in relation to, the Higher power, God. The innermost being of mortals and the cosmos is ever at rest, and single. The incarnate being of both is ever in movement, and dual. The inner is the Real, Changeless; the other is the Appearance, and subject to the play of two opposed but interpenetrating active forces. Because it is the quintessence of consciousness and intelligence, I call the first Mind. It is without shape, infinite and untouchable by mortals, but because it is, universes are able to appear, expand, disintegrate, and reincarnate. This activity is directly due to the agency of the first entity to appear, which I call the World-Mind. From the latter flows ceaselessly the energy which is at the heart of every atom, the life-force which is at the heart of every mortal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
World-Mind and Mind are for us the twin sides—a crude but simple, understandable metaphor—of God. The human being draws breath, exists, and thinks with awareness only because of this relationship. If one declares oneself an atheist, sees oneself only as an animal, rejects any divine basis to one’s mind, one testifies thereby to a failure on one’s own part: one has failed to seek and find, or because of prejudice—that is, of prejudgment—has sought wrongly. Jesus gave two helps in this matter: seek the kingdom of Heaven first, and seek it within. It is open to anyone to test this truth that one is related to God. However, if one does not bring certain qualities into the work, such as patience and humility, the going may be too hard, the result disappointing. Something of that Mind is in us, as a parent has left some legacy in the child, but at the same time we are also in that Mind. Gospel of John, chapter 17, verse 21: “As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee.” An ever-active Mind within an ever-still Mind—that is the real truth, not only about God but also about mortals. The World-Mind reproduces something of itself in each individual entity we call the soul, or Overself. The soul in mortals, the Overself, is linked with, or rooted in, the soul in the Universe, the World-Mind. The Infinite Mind is centered within its finite expression, the human ego. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Spirit become word, spirit become form—whoever has been touched by the spirit and did not close oneself off knows to some extent of the fundamental fact: neither germinates and grows in the human World without having been sown; both issue from encounters with the other. Encounters not with Platonic Ideas (of which I have no direct knowledge whatever and which I am incapable of understanding as having any being) but with the spirit that blows around us and inspires us. Again I am reminded of the strange confession of Nietzsche who circumscribed the process of inspiration by saying that one accepts without asking who gives. That may be so—one does not ask, but one gives thanks. Those who know the spirit’s breath commit a transgression if they wish to gain power over the spirit or to determine its nature. However, they are also unfaithful if they ascribe this gift to themselves. Sometimes it seems the devil is rampant. The entire city of Sacramento seems to be under the influence of the devil. It is like nothing will save this city but an exorcism, prayer, and fasting. Because we have all—yes! sinners as well as saints—come forth from the divine substance in our bodies and from the divine mind in our entities, there is something God-like in each of us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
We moved slowly across the dark court, my distress almost unbearable. People entering the labor market today not only face the prospect of disorderly work careers, but also of work for no significant reason beyond consumption. Most people no longer produce useful things; they do make wasted and wasteful commodities and services. (In the Untied States today there are actually more people employed in providing services than in the production of goods.) The impact of these conditions on rising generations is that economically and vocationally, a very large proportion of the young people are in a more drastic plight than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. However, is our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. Useless because as crafts and craftsmanship have declined, the job opportunities open to them have increasingly become variations on the theme of boondoggling—whether they become organized people or, more likely, semi-skilled retail operatives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In any case, the work available to them in unlikely to ennoble them or their society. It is hard to grow up when there is not enough work to sustain a household. Will it be any easier to grow up in the future? As the age of automation is underway, promising untold wealth and leisure, the forces separating humans from the means and end of work will inevitably grow stronger. Indeed, as far as conditions of work are concerned, the submission of workers to machines will be complete. Today, a person can stop a machine or wreck it: one has the remnants of power over it. However, with automation that power will be lost for good, expect perhaps for a small elite of engineers who will be busy designing and tending the machines of the future. Modern mortals have already depersonalized themselves so effectively that they are no longer human enough to stand up to their machines. Looking ahead, by the perfection of the automaton mortal will become completely alienated from their World and reduced to nullity—the kingdom and the power and the glory now belong to the machine. Everyone expects to witness scientific advance made in these modern times, but only a few have the mental courage to expect spiritual advances let alone seek it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Fantasy? Already the uncanny power of machines has entered into the delusions that mark psychotic disturbances. In time past, delusions took either human or superhuman forms; but today what is so new in the hopes and fears of the machine age are that the savior and destroyer are no longer clothed in the image of mortals; no longer are the figure that we imagine can save and destroy us direct projections of our human experiences. What we not hope will save us, and what in our delusions we fear will destroy us, is something that no longer has human qualities. That device or projection is the machine, and not surprisingly psychoanalysts refer to a characteristic delusion, the influencing machine, a device which some insane persons believe exerts an extraordinary and evil power over them against their will. The psychotic person ends up feeling controlled by mechanical devices that no longer resemble anything human or even animal-like. Thus modern mortals, when one is haunted, whether sane or profoundly disturbed, is no longer haunted by other mortals or grandiose projections of mortals, but by machines like Alexa smart home devices, robots replacing TV News anchors, self-check out in the supermarket, and driverless cars. This, while at the same time relying for one’s protection or salvation on machines. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
If we have placed such great stress on our machine age an on the conditions and purposes of work, it is not because we accept the metaphysical view that mortal’s self is most crucially expressed in work-activity. Rather, it is because of the fundamental break in our society between work and other activities. This break has had enormous consequences. Mortals are dehumanized not only by the work situation but also by the ends for which our society uses work, chiefly consumption of its own sake. As capitalism began to accumulate greater surpluses of wealth (especially for those on top) the unproductive acquisition and accumulation of goods became the primary means of achieving social status in the community. Ownership has grown into a human institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the development. Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis between mortal and mortal reaches fuller consciousness, the prosperity for achievement—the instinct of workmanship—tend more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel other in pecuniary achievement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
If consumption then becomes conspicuous it was become in an increasingly heterogeneous and differentiated society there is no other ready means of achieving status expect by spending money and acquiring goods. However, such consumption is essentially wasteful and in conflict with what is considered a universal trait in mortals, the instinct of workmanship. The industrial revolution replaced all workmanship with labor and the result has been that the things of the modern World have becomes labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. The process of consumption, reaching its highest form in the United State, is alienating in still another way. We are surrounded by things whose nature and origin we know nothing. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal. Moreover, the volume of consumption is determined to a large extent by the artificial stimulants of a giant advertising industry; and if consumers learn to manipulate things, they in turn manipulated by the propagandist of commerce. The strategy of planned obsolescence—by which things are made to wear out quickly and then be replaced—may stimulate the economy, but it can hardly be said to serve human needs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Working chiefly to consume, consuming to achieve status, accumulating things that have no meaning, wasting on a gigantic scale—these are the conditions in which we live. The result is a wasteland of junk and of human aspirations. However, what other important forces shape the architecture of our lives? We have to be prepared with rational plans and sensible blueprints to guide progressions of seemingly orderly experiences in the direction of wise decisions. We must look at the very structure of human existence for keys to unlock the resources human beings need to confront the recurring cries in our lives. Those keys are fabricated in the mold of phenomenology. Understanding comes through sharing the perspective of the experiencing person, entering into the life space of the tenant, so to speak, rather than identifying with the authoritative analysis of the landlord. Phenomenology created a subjective, descriptive context for beginning to make sense of the vicissitudes of being and becoming. Its tower of understanding stands alongside the traditional social scientists’ tower of objectivity and quantifiability, deemed essential for erecting a science of prediction and control. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
As psychological science advances models drawn from physics and biology, the phenomenological rush of existentialism is more toward humanities, philosophy, and the arts. The former probes human nature vertically, the latter explores its horizontal connections to illuminate the breadth of humanity. Existential-humanist psychology refuses either to reduce the complexity of human beings to ever more refined variable or to glorify them as masters of their destiny. This approach recognizes that we are all vulnerable to powerful yet subtle situational forces that can bend—and sometimes break—the will of the best and the brightest of us. Interestingly, this view is echoed by social psychologists who contend that social psychology’s major take-home message is that situation exert more powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, vales, and actions than we acknowledge or dare to recognize. This view does not make us pawns of environmental forces or autumn leaves at the mercy of existential winds. Humans are negotiating continually between realities and illusions, old paths and new destinations, given clouds, constraints and freedoms, calibrations and creations. How are human experiences challenged and charged by the perils and the prizes of every day existence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Obviously, no sweeping answer can be given to this question. Instead of considering nature as a single whole, as we usually do, we must consider its different realms separately. Mortals once tamed animals, and they are still capable o bringing off this strange feat. One draws animal into one’s own sphere and moves them to accept them, a stranger, in an elementary manner and to accede to one’s ways. One obtains from them an often astonishing active response to one’s approach, to one’s address—and on the whole this response is the stronger and more direct, the more one’s relation amounts to a genuine You-saying. Not infrequently animals, like children, see through feigned tenderness. However, outside the tamed circles, too, we occasionally encounter a similar contact between mortals and animals: some mortals have deep down in their being a potential partnership with animals—most often persons who are by no means animalic by nature but rather spiritual. Animals are not twofold, like mortals: the twofoldness of the basic words I-You and I-It is alien to them although they can both turn toward another being and contemplate objects. We may say that in them twofoldness is latent. In the perspective of our You-saying to animas, we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot reply. Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual being but a reciprocity of being itself—a reciprocity that has nothing expect being. The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies itself to the eye, not matter how keen, of anyone who merely investigates, while it manifest to those who say You, is present when they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it, and now the tree that had being manifest it. Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by our attitude and flashes toward us from which has being. What matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the prethreshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold. #RandolpHarris 9 of 18
The notion that one who marries, has children, lives across the same road, and catches the commuter’s train is unfit to receive the grace of God, whereas a mortal who wear a priest’s dress or a monk’s robe is alone fit, is one of those idea sedulously fostered by priests and monks themselves. The fact is that grace is no respecter of clothes, status, or social activities, that is happens to alight on those whose hearts and minds seek it most, and in the right way; that today Christ is militant, is working inside mortals wherever one may be and whatever garments one wears and however one easily distinguishable by any outer labels, but are easily measurable by their own conscience, in their degree of consciousness. They are not professional exhibitionists eager to display their spirituality, to talk about it and impress other with it. They may be passive in a monastery or in an office—that is not the point. What is going on inside them? There is no special superiority in either of the two conditions of life—the monastic or the householding. Whoever praises the monk’s state as being the highest open to human beings, errs. Whoever praises the householder’s as being the best, also errs. What can right be said is that for certain persons at certain times and under certain circumstances, one or the other state is better. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
For the same person at different times and in different circumstances either may be worse. So it is the setting up of universality, the claiming that one alone is the most spiritual or the mot satisfactory ideal, which is wrong. Each must find the way uniquely ordained for one, and not passively, imitatively, accept the way ordained for another mortal. Although it is true that some have realized the goal while living a normal life in the World, married and active, others have been able to do so only while freed from the World’s ways. It I therefore essential for one to be oneself, an individual, and let one’s own inner voice guide one to the particular path suited on one’s destiny. The common explanation of the contemporary unrest as due to a failure to preserve law and order, the favorite rallying cry of politicians. It illustrates our innocence in two ways. One, that each act of violence or aggression can be dealt with by the tried-and-true method, following the nineteenth-century myth in America, of throwing in more hardware and personnel in the form of police, national guard, and soldiers. The naivete of this is shown by our experience in the Middle East, to continual shock to our own narcissism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The second and more important expression of innocence is possessed in the bland identification of law with the particular order that happens to exist at the moment in the society. My order becomes, therefore, right; it is as eternal as the law with which it is coupled; it is God’s will. Law can also be used, when coupled with injustice, as a creative set of principles unfolding continuously toward greater public good. However, law coupled with order, in the shibboleth law and order, becomes regularly a justification to the status quo. And in a transitional age such as ours, the one thing that must, at all costs, be avoided is rigid adherence to the status quo; for that is just what has to be changed and reformed by the transition. The only way to live out a transitional period is with flexibility to adapt to change—and, unfortunately, that is what most people, in their anxiety at the dizzy speed of change, feel they do not have. Emphasis on law and order can be destructive to a person’s self-esteem and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
When President proposed a greater effort to get crime off the streets by building a wall along the board of Mexico to halt illegal immigration, he received the largest and loudest ovation of any time in the whole speech; which means that law and order, which is the meaning of Trump’s phrase, appeals tremendously to congressional members of both houses. However, the emphasis on law and order can itself contribute to violence and can be one of the things that makes an ultimate revolution more bloody. Human pride and esteem are offended by a show of force. One of the things that can abet a riot is precisely the lining up of a hundred law enforcement officers on a street. It offends both those who are being protected and those who are protected against; for it makes u all faceless Others.” The bitterness that goes into the phrase law and order often has as one of its sources a reaction formation to one’s own guilt. For example, some may have acquired their money by questionable quasi-legal means, and now they come out as a staunch citizen for law and order to prevent others from taking it away from them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
In its best sense and by itself, order ought to mean the forms and conventions by which we live and work together; order ideally is freedom from disturbing interruption of peace, physical safety which in turn gives the psychological security for the pursuit of intellectual, emotional and spiritual aims. However, when coupled with law, it implies a rigid clinging to old forms of acting, a prevention of the very changes made necessary by our transitional age. It is primarily the older generation that adheres to law and order so innocently. However, innocence is obviously used by the new generation as well as a way to avoid facing its powerlessness. There are so many absurd aspect of the so-called battle between the generations—youth’s continuous confession of the sins of teachers and parents, the endless blaming of others, the over thirty shibboleth—that one is in danger of overlooking the deeper meaning of the conflict. Now that the younger generation has not plenty of reason for accusing its elders. People inherited from their parents’ generation the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics—they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps, about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, does it not confuse the whole picture to make this conflict of youth versus age? What would they have done in their father’s place, given the historical situation in which their fathers were born and working with what they had to use? It is an anti-historical viewpoint to insist that the mere fact of having been born a generation later guarantees any rightness in itself. Furthermore, it is a taking over, in masqueraded form, of one of the least noble of our culture’s myths—the adulation of youth, the falsehood of believing that everything is better in earlier years. However, all our concerns eventually come to an end; they are all finite. The span of our lives many of them have already disappeared and new ones have emerged which also will disappear. Many great concerns of the past have vanished and more will come to an end, sooner or later. The melancholy law of transitoriness governs even our most passionate concerns. The anxiety of the end dwells in the happiness they give. Both the things about which we are concerned and we ourselves come to an end. There will be a moment—and perhaps it is not far away—when we shall no longer be concerned about any of these concerns, when their finitude—of our own end. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
However, we maintain our preliminary concerns as if the were ultimate. And if we try to free ourselves from them, they keep us in their grasp. When young people are pressed for a statement of their values, and one asks what they would make the center of a new World, one is often left with picayune or self-revolving items like never stepping on insects or never throwing away anything made of plastic. This is a blatant use of innocence. We look—often in vain—for a serious, responsible confrontation with the real problems: power, organization in national groups, fidelity in personal life. One feels that the younger generation gets particular gratification out of simply attacking the establishment as such. Is it a reaction-formation to their own unease at the affluence of their parents and to their own guilt at their dependency on their parents for sustenance? However, if for no other reason than that the establishment is dying anyway, this is an uneasy battle. The present college generation was born in an era when practically all mooring post—for instance, in pleasures of the flesh, in marriage, in religion—are threatened or already lost. We have a new morality, most obviously in the areas of pleasures of the flesh, marriage, and the role of woman. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Every concern is tyrannical and wants our whole heart and our whole mind and our whole strength. Every concern tries to become our ultimate concern, our god. The concern about our work often succeeds in becoming our god, as does the concern about another human being, or about pleasure. The concern about science has succeeded in becoming the god of the whole era in history, the concern about money has become an ever more important god of all. However, these concerns are finite, they conflict with each other, they burden our consciences because we cannot do justice to all of them. We may try to dismiss all concerns and to maintain a cynical unconcern. We determine that nothing shall concern us any more, expect perhaps casually, but certainly not seriously. We try to be unconcerned about ourselves and others, about our work and our pleasures, about necessities and luxuries, about social and political matter, about knowledge and beauty. We may even feel that this unconcern has something heroic about it. And one thing is true: It is the only alternative to having an ultimate concern, Unconcern or ultimate concern—those are the only alternatives. The cynic is concerned, passionately concerned, about one thing, namely, one’s unconcern. This is the inner contradiction of all unconcern. Therefore, there is only one alternative, which is ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Here we get what cannot fail to be recognized as firsthand, insider’s account of that goal which makes sense of spiritual aspiration and inspires continued rational effort, day by day, toward stable and honest self-realization. Here we see a wisdom nourished, rather than challenged, by facts; a serenity comprehending, rather than at odds with, efficient practicality. Here, one can feel a need to complete enlightenment by a vivid updating, from modern mentalities, of what a mind continually attuned to God is like and offers its society, a convincing testimony that much of what the highest attainment means when it is working inside the human being. Power is not our own and is not human and is using us as its human instrument. We see plenty of evidence that the Universe is not mindless, and therefore there is a Universal Mind related to it—that is to say, related to us, who are parts of the whole. It might well be said that I am connected with God on the one hand, with the World on the other hand, but both connections are highly ingenious inventions. God is literally in me. His “I” makes my “I” possible. My own sense of being is immersed in God’s archetypal thought. The individual mind not only exists within the World-Mind, it is born of the World-Mind. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
I held fast against him. Instinctively. I felt my eyes becoming opaque as if a wall had gone up to seal off the windows of my thoughts. And yet I felt such a longing for him, such a longing to fall into him and follow him and be led by him, that all my longings of the past seemed noting at all. He was all mystery to me as Magnus had been. Only he was beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and there seemed in him an infinite complexity and depth which Magnus had not possessed. While people like Hegal saw alienation as a metaphysical problem, Marx gave it a sociological frame of reference. In his essay of 1844 he wrote that under the system of private property the worker was alienated from the product of his labor and also from the means of production—both of which had become things “not belonging to one.” The worker thus separated from his product is alienated from oneself, since one’s labors are no longer one’s own but the property of another. Finally, one is alienated from other mortals, since one’s chief link with them now is the commodities they exchange or produce. Marx was the first to describe this process of reification (or converting an abstraction into something real) by which capitalist society transforms all personal relations between mortals into objective relations between things or money for the substitute for commodities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Later, in Captial, Marx referred to this process as the fetishism of commodities and wrote: “The labor of the individual asserts itself as part of the labor of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relationships between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.” According to Marx, the disintegrative or negative character of capitalist society ay chiefly in its alienation of human labor and in its denial of opportunities for mortals to fulfill themselves in meaningful work. The industrial revolution and its subsequent transformation of human labor into a commodity are among the manor alienating forces in the capitalist World. However, our picture of that World is not complete. To administer their complex technology and labor markets mortals developed elaborate social structures or bureaucracies which are no less impersonal in their effects than machines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Indeed, that is their aim; and the attempt further to rationalize the conduct of human affairs by subjecting it to rules, regularity and a hierarchy of command—the distinguishing characteristics of bureaucracy as described by Max Weber—has enormously increased the power of alien forces over mortals. Marx’s analysis of the new conditions of labor under capitalism was complemented half a century late by Weber’s studies of bureaucracy. As Weber wrote, bureaucracy became particularly appropriate for capitalism because “the more bureaucracy depersonalizes itself, the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks. In the place of the old-type ruler who is moved by sympathy, favor, grace and gratitude, modern culture requires for its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally detached, and hence rigorously professional expert.” Bureaucracies typify not only government—as many believe—but also industry, armies and navies, education, philanthropy, banking, communications media, and all other activities that require organized effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
For the increasing numbers who work in bureaucratic settings, the consequences are much the same as for persons directly involved in the machine process. Thus Weber extended the concept of alienated labor to all organized or institutionalize work situations and one described a universal bureaucratic trend in which soldiers, scientists, civil servants—all “were separated or alienated from their respective means of production or administration in the same way as capitalist enterprise has separated the workers from theirs.” However, bureaucracy is not just significant because of its impersonal character or because it transforms a means—efficiency—into an end. Precisely because it represents a concentration of power, its effect, as C. Wright Mills observes, is to coerce, to manipulate. “Organized irresponsibility, in this impersonal sense, is a leading characteristic of modern industrial societies everywhere. On every hand the individual is confronted with seemingly remote organizations; he feels dwarfed and helpless before the managerial cadres and their manipulated and manipulating minions.” How industrial and bureaucratic machines alienate mortals can be seen most clearly in modern conditions of work. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Although there has been considerable amelioration of the harsh conditions of early capitalism, thanks to the drive for a shorter working day and the abolition of child labor, the alienation of mortals from the means and ends of work as described by Marx and Weber characterizes most modern industrial societies. Increasing division of labor, greater mechanization, the growth of giant industrial and financial enterprises—these are the agents of our economic power and also of individual powerlessness. For evidence we need only look at mortals on the job. They must work, but how and for what? Few of them have known the pursuit of individual crafts. However, millions of men and women labor in large scale enterprises where work is monotonous and repetitious and where the decreasing need for skilled workers and an increasing division of labor place both in process and the products of work far beyond their control. To illustrate, in a recent survey workers’ attitudes it has been shown that work is not a central life interest. Nor do many of them value the informal associations with fellow workers that jobs offer. Not only is the workplace relatively unimportant as a place of preferred primary human relationships, but it cannot even evoke significant sentiments and emotions in its occupants. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Other observers of work life have made it abundantly clear that most workers are not happy in their jobs, that they feel trapped and degraded by their working conditions, that they have a powerful desire to escape from their careers, and that what drives them on is the incessant demands of our consumption economy. However, far from escaping, growing numbers of workers and their families are forced to take on additional jobs in order to keep up with the rising costs of living. The result has been a serious fall in morale. It is a measure of the boring conditions of work in modern industry that management now gives so much attention to human relations. For many years it was believed that if mortals could not obtain satisfaction in their job, then their informal associations with follow workers would make up for the loss. The famous Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric seemed to show that increases or decreases in output were related not to physical conditions but rather to the strength of informal associations or cliques among workers. To raise morale and increase efficiency (the real goal) desperate and sometime ludicrous measure were taken by management. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Thus in one American factor a picture of the finished product was installed on the assembly line so that worker performing their restricted tasks might better identify themselves with it! However, despite the great stress placed by management on human relations, evidence of workers’ continued dissatisfaction multiplies. It is reflected in restriction of output, wildcat strikes, outright sabotage and, perhaps most common, in feelings of detachment from the entire work process. There is a growing number of workers who find themselves alienate from work. There is an army of salaried or white-collar workers facing conditions which is more pleasant physically are no less disruptive psychologically. The powerlessness of blue collar workers is matched by the powerlessness of white collars. However, bureaucracy must not be seen as alienating only when it is huge, or because it aims at ever greater efficiency. A cruel work situation is bound to evoke anger or rage, however repressed. But even under ideal conditions of bureaucratic order—where there are neither great creative incentives nor disruptive tensions—the result is an isolated, remote Word of conformists, or what Mills calls the “cheerful robots.” Like industrial management, bureaucracy does not simply turn men and women into automations; it also wants them to like the process and to co-operate in it. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Since many giant bureaucracies are chiefly selling and marketing institutions, it is not just brain work that is being consumed but personalities as well. Here in the personality market, bureaucracy goes mere industry one better in making a commodity of mortals. The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all-pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one mortal to another in transient contact has been made subtle in dozen ways and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the sales person’s ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. Mortals are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of oneself, and is estranged from it also. Modern conditions of work under capitalism are alienating largely because the individual worker has lost—or is unable to gain—control over one’s technical and social machines. However, there is more to it. Mortals who experience disorder in their careers must inevitably find disorder in the community life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Most people never experience the joys of a life plan because most work situations do not afford the necessary stable progression over the worklife. There is a good deal of chaos in modern labor markets, chaos intrinsic to urban-industrial society. Rapid technological change dilutes old skills, makes others obsolete and creates demand for new ones; a related decentralization of industry displaces millions, creating the paradox of depressed areas in prosperous economies; metropolitan deconcentration shifts the clientele of service establishments, sometimes smashing or restructuring careers; recurrent crises such as wars, depressions, recession, coupled with the acceleration of fad and fashion in consumption, add a note of unpredictability to the whole. The result is retreat from both work and community. We are concerned about our work; it is the basis of our existence. We may love it or hate it; we may fulfill it as a duty or as a hard necessity. However, anxiety grasps us whenever we feel the limits of our strength, our lack of efficiency, the struggle with our laziness, the danger of failure. We are concerned about our relationships to others. We cannot imagine living without their benevolence, their friendship, their love, their communion in body and soul. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
However, when we think about indifference, the outburst of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as in those we love, we are worried and often in utter despair. The anxiety about losing them, about having hurt them, about not being worthy of them, creeps into our hearts an makes our love restless. We are concerned about ourselves. We feel responsible for our development towards maturity, towards strength in life, wisdom in mind, and perfection in spirit. At the same time, we are striving for happiness, we are concerned about our pleasures about having a good time, a concern which ranks very high with us. However, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of self-scrutiny or of the judgments of others, our anxiety strikes us. We feel that we have made the wrong decision, that we have started on the wrong road, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. Yet, someone may ask, do we not have higher concerns than those of our daily life? And does not Jesus himself witness to them? When he is moved by the misery of the masses does Christ not consecrate the social concern which has grasped many people in our time, liberating them from many worries of their daily lives? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
When Jesus is moved by pity for the sick and heals them, does he not thereby consecrate the concern shared by medical and spiritual healers? When Christ gathers around him a small group in order to establish community with it, does he not thereby consecrate the concern about all communal life? When Jesus says he has come to bear witness to the truth, does he not consecrate the concern for truth, and the passion for knowledge which is such a driving force in our time? When Jesus is teaching the masses and his disciples, does he not consecrate the concern for leaning and education? And when he tells the parables, and when he pictures the beauty of nature and creates sentences of classic perfection, does he not consecrate the concern for beauty, and the elevation of mind it gives, and the peace after the restlessness of our daily concerns? However, are those noble concerns the one thing that is needed and the right thing that Mary has chosen? Or are they perhaps the highest forms of what Martha represents? Are we will, like Martha, concerned about many things even when we are concerned about great and noble things? Are we really beyond anxiety when we are socially concerned and when the mass of misery and social injustice, contrasted with our own favored position, falls upon our conscience and prevents us from breathing freely and happily while we are forced to heave the sighs of hundreds of people all over the World? #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
And do you know the agony of those who want to heal but know it is too late; of those who want to educate and meet with stupidity, wickedness and hatred; of those who are obliged to lead and are worn out by people’s ignorance, by the ambitions of their opponents, by bad institutions and bad luck? These anxieties are greater than those about our daily life. And do you know what tremendous anxiety is connected with every honest inquiry, the anxiety about falling into error, especially when one takes new and untrod paths of thought? When you turned from a great work of art to the demands, ugliness and worries of your daily life, have you ever experienced the almost intolerable feeling of emptiness? Even this is not the one thing we need as Jesus indicated when he spoke of the beauties of the Temple being doomed to destruction. Modern Europe has learned that the millennia of human creativity of which it boasted were not that one thing needful, for the monuments of these millennia now lie in ruins. Why are the many things about which we are concerned connected with worry and anxiety? We give them our devotion, our strength, our passion and we must do so; otherwise we would not achieve anything. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Why, then, do they make us restless in the deepest ground of our hearts, and why does Jesus dismiss them as not ultimately needed? Degeneration of religions means the degeneration of prayer in them: the relational power in them is buried more and more by objecthood; they find it ever more difficult to say You with their whole undivided being; and eventually mortals must leave their false security for the risk of the infinite in order to recover this ability, going from the community over which one sees only the vaulting dome of the temple and no longer the firmament into the ultimate solitude. This impulse is most profoundly misunderstood when it is ascribed to subjectivism: life before the countenance is life in the one actuality, the only true objectivum; and the mortal that goes forth desires to find refuge in that which has true being, before the merely apparent, illusory objectivum that one flees has disturbed one’s truth. Subjectivism is psychologization while objectivism is reification of God; one a false fixation, the other a false liberation; both departures from the way of actuality, both attempts to find a substitute for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
God is close to his forms when mortals do not remove them from him. However, when the spreading movement of religion holds down the movement of return and removes the form from God, then the countenance of the form is extinguished, its lips are dead, its hands hang down, God does not know it any more, and the house of the World built around its altar, the human cosmos crumbles. The decomposition of the word has occurred. The word is present in revelation, at work in the life of the form, and becomes valid in the dominion of the dead form. Thus the path and counter-path of the eternal and eternally present word in history. The ages in which the living word appears are those in which the association of I and World is renewed. The ages in which the active and effective word reigns are those in which the understanding between I and World is preserved; the ages in which the word becomes valid are those in which the deactualization, the alienation of I and World, the emergence of doom takes place—until the great shudder appears, the holding of breath in the dark, and the preparatory silence. However, the path is not a circle. It is the way. Doom becomes more oppressive in every new eon, and the return more explosive. #RandolpHarris 14 of 15
And the theophany comes ever closer, it comes ever closer to the sphere between beings—comes closer to the realm that hides in our midst, in the between. History is a mysterious approach to closeness. Every spiral of its path leads us into deeper corruption and at the same time into more fundamental return. However, the God-side of the event whose World-side is called return is called redemption. Whether a mortal stays within the household and secular society or whether one enters the monastic and ascetic one, one’s enlightenment is neither guaranteed by the second choice nor blocked by the first one. The God within one is one’s secret watcher, be one layperson or hermit. One can defile or purify oneself in either state, grasp the truth or miss the point whether active in the World (as most of us have to be) or enclosed in a religious order, ashram, or temple. “And they are as the Angels of God, and if they shall ray unto the Father in the name of Jesus they can show themselves unto whatsoever mortal it seemeth them good. Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day when all people must surely stand before the judgment-seat of Christ,” reports 3 Nephi 28.30-31. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
I will see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened corners of the World. And I will know people like you, people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we will sit in cafes and we will drink together and we will clash with each other violently in words, and we will talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement. In America, pseudoinnocence has a history as long as the country’s. A “Chosen People” set sail from England, turning its back on a Europe that, for it, stood for sin, injustice, aristocratic exploitation, and religious persecution. These people sought to establish in America a land that would embody the opposites: righteousness, justice, democracy, and freedom of conscience. The very founding of the new nation was an enactment of the myth of the New Jerusalem, not in some distant future but already an actuality before the eyes of the “Chosen.” America began with a belief in perfection, and then it became devoted to progress. However, how do you progress beyond perfection? What about the religious persecution that soon sprang up even in New England? What about the beginning genocide of the Indians? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Necessarily, then, there began the long struggle between ideals and reality, a battle in which the idealistic America, which was the approximate of the perfect state, the new Garden of Eden with no snakes in the grass, was pitted against the reality of persecution and extermination of the Indians. An ethical dilemma, indeed! The confusion and hypocrisy to which this led is shown ironically in Benjamin Franklin’s writings: “If it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that run may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoasts.” Mr. Franklin shows how the citizens identify the design of Providence, the will of God, with their own and their countrymen’s self-interest. Americans are the “cultivators of the Earth,” and genocide of the Indians—an enterprise the guilt for which we have not yet confronted—is the will of God. This is the hallmark of pseudoinnocence: always identify your self-interest with the design of Providence. Probably all nations are given to a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection that makes unpleasant traumas of the past. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Certainly Americans since the Puritans have historically regarded themselves as a latter-day “Chosen People” sent on a holy errand to the wilderness, there to create a New Jerusalem. The framers of the Constitution were, furthermore, deathly afraid of exploitative power, as Americans have always been. They formulated their Articles with the intention that no group would ever gain this power; so afraid were they of being exploited that, in the Articles, they stretched its meaning to include all power. Americans now had the difficult ethical task of believing overtly that they did not want power, that their capacity for moral thinking and for serving their fellow mortals obviated their need for power. They saw themselves as the saviors of the needy from Europe. The Statue of Liberty still promises, through the inscription on its base: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I life my lamp beside the golden door. However, since America is no longer a population building nation, some believe the statuette of limitations on the invitation from the Statue of Liberty has expired. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
In this country the Garden of Eden myth, along with the open denial of power, has continuously coexisted with a great amount of violence. The homicide rate here is three to ten times that of European countries; we have had one of the bloodiest labor histories of any of the large powers; the majority of Americas in the large cities seem to be afraid nowadays to walk on the streets at night or hand the cashier a one hundred dollar bill. The essential American soul is hard, isolated, stoic and a killer. This violence exists, oddly enough, side by side with a remarkable tenderness and warmth in the American character. We cannot escape the conclusion that some special conflicts must be present in the consciousness of Americans to account for the simultaneous existence of violence and tenderness. I propose that, primarily, the violence and, second, the tenderness are connected with our conscious denial of power and the pseudoinnocence that accompanies this denial. Violence comes from the powerlessness; it is the explosion of impotence. The denial of our desires for power, when it occurs in the endeavor to cover up an actually high degree of power, sets up an inner contradiction: power then does not allay our feelings of powerlessness. It does not lead to the sense of responsibility that actual power ought to entail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We cannot act upon our power directly, for we always carry an element of guilt at having it. If we were to admit it, we would have to confront our guilt. That is why power is customarily translated into money in America. At least money is external. Cold cash we give to other people and nations; we share it profusely with charities, indicating out guilt in possessing it. So we behave like a nation of wolves in rabbits’ skins. As a nation America has also failed to develop a viable sense of tragedy, which would serve, through making for empathy with our enemies, to mitigate our cruelty. One has only to read the reports of the men who fly the bombers over Indochina (“I do not think of the women and children below,) the fliers say. “I think only I have a job to do, and I get a joy out of doing it well.”) to find proof of our insulation of the evil of the World. “Two World wars have not induced in [Americans] either a sense of sin or that awareness of evil almost instinctive with Old World peoples.” Lacking this sense of our own complicity, most Americas also lack the element of mercy, which may well turn out to be a sine qua non of living in the World with an attitude of humanity. We tend to have sympathy with the aims and the spirits of people who are driven by success for the corporate state is rich and important. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Many rightly see the American dream and even the problem of innocence in the first centuries of America’s history. We can appreciate the manner in which the sense of powerlessness eats away at the confidence of our people and their capacity to act, the willful ignorance in American life, and our tendency to try to get rid of evil by forbidding it. However, ironically, the promise to the young people and to all of us in the second half is pseudoinnocence writ large. “There are no enemies…There is nothing on the other side…Nobody wants war except the machine…And even business people, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the Sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in American.” Woodstock is cited as a myth of the new age now realized in all its ease and splendor, with no recognition at all of its aftermath, namely Altamont, where Hell’s Angels, brought in as bodyguards for singers, committed murder. It is an impressionistic painting of the Garden of Eden, with all of the glow of innocence and the ease and delight of children romping in the fields to rock music, the age before the fall, before the sense of anxiety or guilt intruded. However, alas! It is for children and not for adults. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Far from Consciousness III being an answer, it would be no consciousness at all, for it lacks the dialectic movement between “yes” and “no,” good and evil, which gives birth to consciousness of any sort. The hard questions—if by that it meant political and economic organizations—are insignificant, even irrelevant. All will be done by Consciousness III, which will not require violence. We are then lulled into a blissful ease that is remarkably similar to those pictures on ancient Greek vases of gods lolling on Mount Olympus. Are there really no enemies? Can we call to mind the Berrigan bothers and think of that? Or the Soledad brothers? Or Angela Davis? Or the convicts at Attica, who, after the slaughter, were forced to run the gantlet naked? Or Vietnam—yes, the defoliation and dehumanized cruelty of Vietnam? Some have no understanding of the creeping fascism already discernible in our country: the turning of youth against their fathers, the anti-intellectualism, the growth of violence coupled with the sense of powerlessness of the mass of people, the tendencies of bureaucracies to make decision on the basis of what works mechanically with all human sense drowned in opportunism. It could be that some lack an understanding of the isolation, the loneliness, the despair that motivates many young people, especially in the drug scenes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
At Coachella I once went to a hipster wedding; everybody was colorfully dressed as a stage set for the Beyonce Black Greek life step show along with strolling by pledges. However, I could not escape seeing the isolation in practically everyone’s eyes, each young person seeming alienated and lonely even in the crowd devoted to innocence and joy. With alienation we must be careful to prohibit and reduce violence so that people do not become apathetic. Once I was sitting at breakfast with a young man, one of a group of flower children, perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a clear, open face and guileless blue eyes. In the course of our talk he showed me a letter he had written and was sending to his chancellor at his college. In this confident letter that he composed, Klaus would be thereby excused from the final exams. Addressing the chancellor by his first name, the letter stated: “I do not believe in taking tests”; then several more sentences to the same effect; and finally the signature, “Klaus.” I asked Klaus if he had made a copy of the letter. “No, I don’t think it is necessary—the chancellor will read this one.” As I looked at him now, his eyes and face seemed too clear and too open—I felt the doom toward which he and his comrades were marching; I felt the heavy books under which they felt their brains were being crushed by, crushed like flowers indeed, with the students feeling no more than books could feel. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I saw how much importance these youngster placed on their academic performance, and although it is for their own good, I felt like crying out: “Harmless as doves you are, but where is your wisdom of serpents?” Some people always equate power to the corporate state, the power of the military; totalitarianism is defined as pure power. They never look at the good power. In their minds it always corrupts. However, it is the misuse of power that is the evil; the very existence of power is a good thing. You need power to get out of bed and use the restroom. You need power to control your own life and get an education. You need power to have control over your own behavior. You need power to have self-esteem to accept yourself and not bother others. Innocence in our day is the hope that there are no enemies, that we can move into a new Garden of Eden, a community characterized by freedom from all want, guilt, and anxiety. However, this also means freedom from responsibility; it means going back prior to the birth f consciousness, for guilt is the only other side of moral consciousness—we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
We valiantly try to persuade ourselves that if we only find the key, we can easily create a society in which vulnerability, guilt, anxiety will all be things of the unmourned past. Unmourned and unstudied—here is possessed the contemporary uninterest in history and the refusal to study it. To hang to this picture of innocence, you must deny this history. For history is the record, among other things, of mortal’s sins and evils, of wars and confrontations of power, and all the other manifestations of mortal’s struggle toward an enlarged and deepened consciousness. Hence so many of the new generation turn their backs on history as irrelevant; they do not like it, they are not part of it, they insist we are in a brand-new ball game with new rules. And they are completely unaware that this is the ultimate act of hubris. Such innocence is particularly tempting in America because we actually ack a long history. We have very little sense of the sacredness of place, of roots, of homeland. In the Untied States of American, many people build houses in which to spend their old age, and they sell them before the roof is on. They settle in a place, which they soon afterwards leave to carry their changeable longings elsewhere. One will travel fifteen hundred miles to shake off one’s happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
This, in contrast to Europeans who have lived in the same city for a thousand years, and whose very walls around the city bespeak the centuries of struggle by which they earned their convictions and their culture. However, the United States is waking up again. Many people want to come to the United States of America because we are a nation of Law and Order and protect our citizen. The cry not to build a wall to protect our boards is only enflaming the nation to make the realize we need one. People are drowning to sneak into the Untied State of America. There are also others who are legally waiting in line to get here and not being allowed entrance because a quota has been met. There are also security concerns when we do not know who is coming into America or where they are living. Why do so many people want to be American? Because they also believe in Manifest Destiny. That Americans are ordained by God to expand their boarders. If some many people want to be American and want Americans to take care of them, it means that they also want our government to expand, so we can institute Law and Order in their countries, create jobs and safe housing for their people so they do not have to flee. Many people would love to go back to their home country, the land they love, the land of their ancestors, but it is not safe for them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
It is important to also understand that it is what we expect from ourselves that will be more effective than what someone else expects from one. Rules and regulations thrust upon them from outside which one is unwilling or unable to enforce will be of much less use. As human beings, one of the things that we do to understand our World is to create systems of meaning that help us organize the sensations, experience, and objects we encounter. However, too often we use these seemingly descriptive systems to determine the worth of others. These human-made hierarchies of value can cause division, contention, and skewed understanding of self-worth. Conversely, God’s system of valuing us promotes connection, compassion, and love. We are God’s children. He loves us unconditionally, eternally, and unchangingly. Our worth is infinite because are his sons and daughters. No one spirit is more valuable then others. There are some people who still use an intricate set of codes, such as the very wealthy, to dictate behavior and measure worth. However, as the children of God we are also expected to abide by certain standards—to be loving, honest, show respect, and be slow to anger. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We are also supposed to have joy in our lives. Even though we cannot yet control those external forces that impact our lives here on Earth, as we strive to become father disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can find peace, joy, and happiness despite the Worldly troubles that swirl around us. The scriptures teach us that Satan desires to lead people into darkness. His every effort is to shut out the light and truth of Jesus Christ and his gospel. The Devil seeks that all people might be miserable like unto himself. If Heavenly Father’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of men and women, Lucifer’s work is to bring to pass the misery and endless woe of God’s children. Sin and transgression dim the Light of Christ in our lives. That is why our quest is to bask in the Light of Christ, which brings peace, joy, and happiness. The way to full realization of God may be possessed through a monastery or a nunnery for one person and through a family home or a career in the World for another. If any mortal assets that it must be possessed solely through a particular one of these two, one is mistaken. If one insists on forcing this idea on all aspirants, one is sinning. If one claims illumination as authority, it could be only a partial, limited, and incomplete illumination. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
And gradually I realized that I possessed a new concept of loneliness, a new method of measuring a silence that stretched to the end of the World. And all I had to interrupt it were those menacing recorded preternatural voices which carried no images as their virulency increased. It is always and forever the struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to ne borne. It is much more reassuring to see the World in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. However, what is the most innocent place in any country? It is not the insane asylum? The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. Rocklin charmed me, subdued me somewhat. Almost Venetian, it seemed, the somber multicolored mansions rising wall to wall over the narrow black streets. Irresistible the lights sprinkled over hilltop and value; and the brilliant manicured lawns and plush trees shooting up like a fairy-tale forest into a misty blue sky. We live at the end of an era. The age that began with the Renaissance, born out of the twilight of the Middle Ages, is now at a close. The era that emphasized rationalism and individualism is suffering an inner and outer transition; and there are as yet only dim harbingers, only partly conscious, of what the new age will be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Recall those towering individuals of the Renaissance, explorers of the Earth like Columbus and Magellan, and explorers of the Heavens like Copernicus. Our comparable exploration is the recent trips to the Moon and robots deployed on Mars. However, practically no one remembers the names of the astronauts who walked on the Moon. What we do remember is the machinery; the hero of the moon trip was not an individual but a projectile, and the mortals were tenders of this projectile. Let no one conclude from this, however, that in the new age mortals will be subordinate to technology. It may be just the opposite: the development of technology, filling a role similar to that of the ancient slaves, may force us to find intellectual and spiritual content to fill the vacuum of our days and nights. In the present gap between ages, power is disengaged from its hereditary lines, confused, and up for grabs. Those who have occupied the numbing position of subordinate groups—the African Americans, and Chicanos, women, the less affluent, students, mental patients, convicts—are springing to life, announcing their existence, and presenting their demands. Power becomes a new and urgent issue not only for these groups, but for every individual in our culture who is trying to get one’s bearings and fine one’s pace amid the turbulence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Power lessens in such periods—often called by its alternate names, alienation and helplessness—become very painful. There is one way, however, of confronting one’s powerlessness by making it a seeming virtue. This is the conscious divesting on the part of an individual of one’s power; it is then a virtue not to have it. I call this innocence. The word is derived from the Latin in and nocens, literally, not harmful, to be free from guilt or sin, guileless, pure; and in actions it means without evil influence or effect, or not arising from evil intention. To start with, we must distinguish between two kinds of innocence. One is innocence as a quality of imagination, the innocence of the poet or artist. It is the preservation of a childlike clarity in adulthood. Everything has a freshness, a purity, newness, and color. From this innocence spring awe and wonder. It leads toward spirituality: it is the innocence of Saint Francis in his Sermon to the Birds. When Jesus said: “Only as ye become like little children shall ye enter the kingdom of Heaven,” it is assumedly what he had in mind. It is the preservation of childlike attitudes into maturity without sacrificing the realism of one’s perception of evil, one’s complicity with evil. This is authentic innocence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Such innocence can be a real protection in time of need. If one would keep free from influences that would take away the ideals which one has specifically set up for it to follow, one must try to keep one’s own life in one’ own hands. If one values freedom one must refuse to put one’s self in a position where one will be compelled to echo the views of those who do not share one’s ideas. One may have to choose between the trials of sturdy independence and the temptations of enervating security. It does not ask one to make harsh sacrifices but it does ask one to make reasonable ones. If they seem harsh to one that is only because one has been kept until then in a state of so-called normality by the powerful suggestions of organized society. His normality is merely the pooling of common ignorance and the sharing of common weakness. If the mind is to engage with success in the quest for truth, it must be unfettered and then unprejudiced. It requires moral strength or mental power to refuse the gregarious support of the crowd—be it sectarian church, a mystical group, or some other combination. It requires faith in oneself and the courage to resist the pull of others and be an individual. To venture so far afield from the common way and yet keep quite sane and practical, and not become a human oddity, a social freak, is something indeed. One has to pick one’s way through mistaken teachings, among provisional standpoints, and between ambitious gurus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There is another kind of innocence. A type of innocence which does not lead to spirituality but rather consists of blinders—Pseudoinnocence, in other words. Capitalizing on naivete, it consists of a childhood that is never outgrown, a kind of fixation on the past. It is childishness rather than childlikeness. When we face questions too big and too horrendous to contemplate, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb, we tend to shrink into this kind of innocence and make a virtue of powerlessness, weakness, and helplessness. This pseudoinnocence leads to utopianism; we do not then need to see the real dangers. With unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade our unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade ourselves that we have escaped it. This kind of innocence does not make things bright and clear, as does the first kind; it only makes them seem simple and easy. It wilts before our complicity with evil. It is this innocence that cannot come to terms with the destructiveness in one’s self or others; and hence, it actually become self-destructive. Innocence that cannot include the soul because it becomes evil. This parallels the innocence in neurosis. It is a fixation in childhood, never lived through but clung to as the only protection against hostile, unloving, or dominating parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
A young man in therapy, who had developed an intricate pattern of capitalizing on such weakness, once dreamed himself as a rabbit being chased by wolves. It turned out that he had been a wolf in rabbit’s skin. Often the only strategy available to such persons, learned by necessity in childhood, consists of accepting the overt powerlessness their situation requires and then getting their power by covert means. In this sense, the perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. There in the insane asylum people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. However, it may not be an inability to see into themselves. Nor is it being truly innocent. Only when viewed from the outside it is an innocence. In their detached innocence, they talk with spirit because they cannot find anyone else who is willing and able to understand them. The tremendous growth of mechanical power since the eighteenth century—first steam, then electricity, and now atomic power—made possible a great increase, albeit not necessarily an equitable distribution, of social wealth. While the early stages of the industrial revolution actually improvised millions, by almost any material standards we are today better off then were our ancestors. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
New mechanical power produced new wealth; but it also imposed rigid controls over human behavior. Thorstein Veblen was one of the first sociologist to interpret the broad cultural implications of mechanization: “Within the range of…machine-guided work, and within the range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the courses of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect.” Most directly affected are people who work with machines. Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that one adjust the natural rhythm of one’s body to their mechanical movement. However, this discipline extends far beyond the workplace, affecting not only factory workers but the whole of society. Indeed, the clock rather than the steam engine became the foundation of the modern industrial system, for once machines were regulated by mechanical, or non-human, time, an impersonal new discipline was imposed on mortals. Today our lives are increasingly regulated by machines which set standards or performance and product, telling us when to start working, when to stop, what to do and how to do it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Also, the measure of our submission to mechanical controls is that we are largely unconscious of their influence. However, of their influence there can be no doubt. Historically, one of the first major results of mechanization was to transform labor: what had formerly been an integral part of human life became a means to an end. To feed and operate the machines of the new civilization required not just raw materials but free labor. Since industrialism was pioneered by capitalist this meant a special kind of freedom. This is described as the working principle of the early capitalist market economy: Production is interaction of mortals and nature; if this process is to be organized through a self-regulating mechanism of barter and exchange, then morals and nature must be brought into its orbit; they must be subject to supply and demand, this is, be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale. However, for mortals to be treated as a commodity, a brutal operation was required: the freeing of labor from traditional bonds of craft, family and community. Thus one of the many tragic ironies of the early capitalist market economy: expected automatically to produce general welfare, it split the community in ways which survive to this day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one. When labor became a mechanically regulated commodity, mortals lost part of themselves. This returns to our major theme of alienation. The worker, having lost control over both the conditions of one’s labor and the fruit of one’s labor, became alienated from their soul. The spirit (or human mind) is at war with itself; in consequence, it has to overcome itself as its own most formidable obstacle. That development which in the sphere of Nature is a peaceful growth, is for the spirit, a severe, a mighty conflict with itself. What spirit really strives for is the realization of its Ideal being; but in doing so, it hides that goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation. Therefore, mortal’s own intellectual creations become independent of their creator and hence alienated to one. Human achievement is a dialectical process in which mortals can advance to higher forms only by overcoming or mastering oneself and cultural forces that one creates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Therefore, the history of mortals is a history of their alienation or frustration, and of one’s self-realization through the conquest of these frustrations. The self-sufficiency of one’s ideal, its remoteness from popular ways, may be boldly and openly expressed in action or kept as an interior and hidden thing. For most the first way may prove to be an imprudent course but for others it may be a necessity. Mentally one cannot fit oneself into any of the accepted categories which the society of one’s place and time provide, so an independent and solitary path attracts one. Physically, one may have to make an uneasy compromise with society, with the result that both benefit by their mutual services. Thus without doing violence to one’s chief principles one yet finds a way to live among those who have no use for them. “Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has eft me to serve along? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about may things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,’” reports Luke 10.38-42. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Before anyone can carry out an independent investigation of truth, one must first possess the capacity to do so. To develop this capacity where it is lacking, the philosophic discipline is prescribed. The words Jesus spoke to Martha belong to the most famous of all the words in the Bible. Martha and Mary have become symbols for two possible attitudes towards life, for two forces in mortal and humankind as a whole, for two kinds of concern. Martha is concerned about many things, but all of them are finite, preliminary, transitory. Mary is concerned about one thing, which is infinite, ultimate, lasting. Martha’s way is not contemptible. On the contrary, it is the way which keeps the World running. It is driving force which preserves and enriches life and culture. Without it Jesus could not have talked to Mary and Mary could not have listened to Jesus. Once I heard a sermon dedicated to the justification and glorification of Martha. This can be done. There are innumerable concerns in our lives and in human life generally which demand attention, devotion, passion. However, they do not demand infinite attention, unconditional devotion, ultimate passion. They are important, often very important for you and for me and for the whole of humankind. However, they are not ultimately important. And therefore Jesus praises not Martha, but Mary. She has chosen the right thing, the one thing mortals need, the only thing of ultimate concern for ever mortal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The hour of a church service and every hour of prayer and reading is dedicated to listening in the way Mary listened. Something is being said to us, to the speaker as well as to the listeners, something about which we may become infinitely concerned. This is the meaning of every sermon. It shall awaken infinite concern. What does it mean to be concerned about something? It means that we are involved in it, that a part of ourselves is in it, that we participate with our hearts. And it means even more than that. It points to the way in which we are involved, namely, anxiously. The wisdom of our language often identifies concern wit anxiety. Wherever we are involved we feel anxiety. There are many things which interest us, which provoke our compassion or horror. However, they are not our real concern; they do not produce this driving, torturing anxiety which is present when we are genuinely and seriously concerned. In out story, Martha was seriously concerned. Let us try to remember what gives us concern in the course f an average day, from the moment of awakening to the last moment before falling asleep, and even beyond that, when our anxieties appear in our dreams. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
We are concerned about our work; it is the basis of our existence. We may love it or hate it; we may fulfill it as a duty or as a hard necessity. However, anxiety grasps us whenever we feel the limits of our strength, our lack of efficiency, the struggle with our laziness, the danger of failure. We are concerned about our relationships to others. We cannot imagine living without their benevolence, their friendship, their love, their communion in body and soul. However, when we think about the indifference, the outbursts of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as those we love, we are worried and often in utter despair. The anxiety about losing them, about having hurt them, about not being worthy of them, creeps into our hearts and makes our love restless. We are concerned about ourselves. We feel responsible for our development towards maturity, towards strength in life, wisdom in mind, and perfection in spirit. At the same time, we are striving for happiness, we are concerned about our pleasures and about having a good time, a concern which ranks very high with us. However, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of self-scrutiny or of the judgments of others, our anxiety strikes us. We feel that we have made the wrong decisions, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
We compare ourselves with others and feel inferior to them, and we are depressed and frustrated. We believe that we have wasted our happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness with pleasure or by not being courageous enough to grasp the right moment for a decision which might have brought happiness. We cannot forget the most natural and most universal concern of everything that lives, the concern for the preservation of life—for our daily bread. There was a time in recent history in which large groups in the Western World had almost forgotten this concern. Today, the simple concern for food and clothing and shelter is so overwhelming in the greater part of humankind that it has almost suppressed most of the other human concerns, and it has absorbed the minds of all classes of people. However, there is a qualitative difference between historical ages. There are times of ripening when the true elements of the human spirit, held down and buried, grows ready underground with such pressures and such tensions that it merely waits to be touched by one who will touch it—and then erupts. The revelation that then appears seizes the whole ready element in all its suchness, recasts it and produced a form, a new form of God in the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Ever new regions of the World and the spirit are thus lifted up into form, called divine form, in the course of history, in the transformations of the human element. Ever new spheres become the place of a theophany. It is not mortal’s own power that is at work here, neither is it merely God passing through; it is a mixture of the divine and the human. Whoever is sent forth in a revelation takes with one in one’s eyes an image of God; however supra-sensible it may be, one takes it along in the eyes of one’s spirit, in the altogether not metaphorical but entirely real visual power of one’s spirit. The spirit also answers by beholding. Although we on Earth never behold God without World but only the World in God, by beholding we eternally form God’s form. Form is a mixture of You and It, too. In faith and cult it an freeze into an object; but from the gist of the relation that survives in it, it turns ever again into presence. God is near his forms as long as mortals do not remove them from him. In true prayer, cult and faith are unified and purified into living relation. That true prayer lives in religions testifies to their true life; as long as it lives in them, they live. “And they did remember his words; and therefore they went forth, keeping the commandments of God, to teach the word f God among all the people,” reports Helaman 5.14. #RandolphHarris 15 or 15
Even his unusual beauty and unfailing charm were something of a secret to him. But I had always wanted many things. What accounted for the duration of the life many of us live? Why do we last so long? I purpose that there are five levels of power present as potentialities in ever human being’s life. The first is the power to be. This power can be seen in the newborn infant—he can cry and violently wave his arms as signs of discomfort within himself, demanding that his hunger or other needs be met. Whether we like it or not, power is central in the development in this infant of what we call personality. Every infant becomes an adult in ways that reflect the vicissitudes of power—that is, how one has been able to find his or her power and use it—indeed, how to be it. It is given in the act of birth, not by the culture as such but by the sheer fact that the infant lives. If the infant is denied the experience that one’s actions can get a response from those around him or her—as show in Rene Spitz’s studies of the pitiable infant orphans in Puerto Rico who were given no attention by nurses or other mother substitutes—the infant withdraws into a corner of his or her bed, does not walk or develop in other ways, and literally wither away physiologically and psychologically. The ultimate in impotence is death. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The power to be is neither good nor evil; it is prior to them. However, it is not neutral. It must be lived out or neurosis, psychosis, or violence will result. The second phase is self-affirmation. Every being has the need not only to be but to affirm one’s own being. This is especially significant for the human organism, for it is gifted with, or condemned to, self-consciousness. This consciousness is not inborn but begins to develop in the infant after a few weeks, is not fully developed for several years, and, indeed continues developing throughout one’s life. The question of significance then emerges, and the long and crucially important quest for self-esteem or substitutes for it, accompanied by grief with the lack of it. With human beings, mere physical survival is now no longer the main issue, but survival with some esteem. The cry for recognition becomes the central cry in this need for self-affirmation. If significance and recognition are granted as a matter of course in the family, the child simply assumes them and turns one’s attention to other things. However, if—as too often the case in our disrupted day when parents as well as children are radically confused—self-affirmation is blocked, it becomes a compulsive need which drives the person all of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Or the child’s affirming of oneself may be made difficult in the face of one’s parents’ pattern of “We love you only if you obey us.” The child this get caught in the destructive aspects of competitiveness, the buying and selling of oneself and the World: one’s self-affirmation is taken by others to be a diminishing of them, and one is diminished in turn by theirs. In these or many other ways one’s self-affirmation is distorted or blocked outright. When self-affirmation meets resistance we make greater effort, we give power to our stance, making clear what we are and what we believe; we state it now against opposition. This is self-assertion, the third phase. It is a stronger form of behavior, more overt than self-affirmation. It is potentiality in all of us that we react to attack. We make it unavoidable that the others see us as we cry: “Here I am; I demand that you notice me!” The speech of Willy Loman’s wife in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is a good example of this: “Attention must be paid…” Even though “Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the papers…he’s a human being…So attention must be paid.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fact that her assertion was nominally for someone else does not change the fact that she was doing the asserting. When we are doing it for someone else, some of us can assert ourselves more firmly. That is merely another form of self-assertion—often made necessary by canons of politeness or not “blowing one’s own horn.” The fourth phase is aggression. When self-assertion is blocked over a period of time—as it was for the Jewish people for many years, as it is for every underrepresented group of people—this stronger form of reaction tends to develop. When I spent three years in Salonika, I found that the 100, 000 Sephardic Jewish people living there—one third of the population of the city—actually made up the cultured intelligentia of the city. There was a complete absence of anti-Semitic prejudice such as existed in the rest of Europe and America. There was so a complete absence of the aggressiveness associated in this country with Jewish people Indeed, the motto in Salonika was: “It takes two Jews to outwit a Greek, and two Greek to outwit an Armenian.” The Armenians, the group less represented, were the ones in whom aggression and a sharp bargaining sense had developed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In contrast to self-assertion, which is drawing a line at a certain point and insisting “This is me; this is mine,” aggression is a moving into the positions of power or prestige or the territory of another and taking possession of some of it for one’s self. The motives may be righteous enough—to right an ancient wrong, as with the natives in Africa about whom Frantz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, writes; or passion for liberation; or pride; or any one of a thousand other things. Motive does not concern us at the moment; we only emphasize that this is a phase of behavior that in every person exists a potentiality, and in the right situation it can be whipped into action. When aggressive tendencies are completely denied to the individual over a period of time, they take their toll in a zombielike deadening of consciousness, neurosis, psychosis, or violence. Finally, when all the efforts towards aggression are ineffective, there occurs the ultimate explosion known as violence. Violence is largely physical because the other phases, which can involve reasoning or persuasion, have been ipso facto blocked off. In typical cases, the stimulus transmitted from the environment to the individual is translated directly into violent impulse to strike, with the cerebrum being bypassed. This is why when a mortal erupts in a violent temper, one often does not fully realize what one has done until afterward. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is tragic, indeed, when whole peoples are placed in a situation where significance becomes almost impossible to achieve. The African Americans are, of has met with a lot of opposition. The central crime of the early Americans is that they placed the Africans, during several centuries of slavery and one century of physical freedom but psychological oppression, in situations where self-affirmation was impossible. In physical slavery, and later in psychological slavery, every one of the nonviolent phases was difficult or impossible. They were permitted to affirm themselves only as singer, dancers, and entertainers for the titillation of the majority group, or as tillers of fields owned by others, and later, in the construction of automobiles. That this would lead to widespread apathy and, later on, to radical explosions should no longer surprise anyone. An illustration comes from the remark of an African American man in Harlem: “When the times comes, it is going to be too late. Everything will explode because the people they live under tension now; they going to a point where they can’t stand it no more. When they get to that point…” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
He dangles the end of the sentence, correctly letting us simply imagine what might come, because—as indicated above—before the violent explosion we cannot realize what may happen. For as long a people feel forced to remain in such a semihuman state, there will be aggression and violence. If the other phases of behavior are blocked, then the explosion into violence may be the only way individual or groups can get release from unbearable tension and achieve a sense of significance. We often speak of the tendency toward violence as a building up inside the individual, but it is also a response to the outside conditions. The source of violence must be seen in both its internal and external manifestations, a response to a situation which is felt to block off all other ways to response. However, it seems that people in positions of authority are not always willing to address nor resolve situations where people are being exposed to semihuman conditions because they are part of the problem and do not want to get in legal or civil trouble, so they hope that the person reaching out for help resorts to violence as a way to abdicate themselves of any illegal, unethical, or immoral ties to the situation. Their defense will be the person has a problem and erupted in violence and there was nothing we could do to prevent this from happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The five phases above are ontological ones—that is, they are part of the human being as human. It is the endeavor of ontology to describe the characteristics of being as being—in our case the human beings as human. A child of three may erupt in violence that takes the form of a temper tantrum as many a mortal of sixty; and although we may judge the latter more harshly, the action is potentially present in both. The ontological view does not deny development, but takes its inquiry down to a deeper level. It is not to be identified with the nature theory of violence any more than with the nurture theories discussed earlier. Ontological inquiry is directed at the structure in which both nature and nurture are rooted. I believer that the psychotherapeutic approach provides one of the most fruitful avenues for the investigation of violence and aggression. When pondering the condition of Juan Carlos Chapa Jr., Adel Sambrano Ramos, or Dylann Storm Roof, we can see the seeds and roots of the madness and the violence in our nation. I am aware of the dangers of identifying too closely the society with the individual, but to entirely avoid a relationship between the two is just as erroneous. Social problems and psychological problems can no longer be isolated from each other. I believe it is valuable to try to understand modern social aggression and violence in the context, for example, that we can learn from Elliot Rodger and other persons in dire need of power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Medieval mortals were conscious of themselves only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. The duty of pioneers, if they are to be successful pioneers, it to realize they will need courage to forget outworn ideas and to free themselves from dying traditions so as to cope with the new conditions which are arising. In this connection, if it were practicable, the suggestion that it is also a duty to cooperate with existing spiritual movements would be acceptable; but experience will show that most of these movements are unable to enter that deep union of hearts which alone can guarantee success to any external union. Such a plan would end in failure and it is better for them to pursue their own independent course than waste time and force in attempting what would not succeed and is not really needed. With the Renaissance emerges the individual as we know them. If one’s entrance upon the scene was gradual rather than dramatic, it is indicated nonetheless clearly by important changes in language. In the Middle Ages the word “individual” means “inseparable”; and it was used chiefly in theological arguments about the Holy Trinity or to indicate a member of some group, kinds of species. The complexity of the term is at once apparent in this history, for it is the unit that is being defined, yet defined in terms of its membership of a class. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The separable entity is being defined by a word that has meant inseparable. The crucial history of the modern description is a change in emphasis which enabled us to think of the individual as a kind of absolute, without immediate reference to the group of which one is a member. This change took pace in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; and since then we have come to speak of the individual in one’s own right, whereas previously to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which one was a member, and so to offer a particular description of that group and of the relationships within it. This semantic change reflected profound changes in the social order after the medieval period, particularly the breakup of the feudal caste system. When mortals found that they could change their status and social mobility increased, the idea grew of being an individual apart from one’s social role. Also important, as we shall see, was mortal’s new detachment from power over nature: when mortal (as subject) divorced one’s self from nature (as object) in order to understand and control it, individualism was given further impetus. It is the historical emergence of the individual as we now know one, of mortal alone, that makes alienation so crucially a modern problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In the past, as we saw, when they lost their status that identified them and offered them some security, mortals particularly felt anxiety or despair. However, when the medieval system collapsed, the likelihood of alienation increased appreciably. Indeed, only with the release of the individual from medieval bonds could alienation become a widespread social problem. The breakdown of the feudal order forced mortals to fall back upon themselves; they had to learn how to cope with countless problems and decision that were once taken care of my Worldly and spiritual hierarchies. However, together with the anxieties generated by this new autonomy mortals sensed a great promise, for in the period of the formation of the national state and the development of a mercantile economy one’s own future seemed to have infinite possibilities. At the end of the curve, in our own century, mortals begin to feel threatened by the encroachment of powerful social forces emanating not only from one’s own corner of the Earth but from every part of a contracting World. If mortals today fear freedom or wish to escape from it, this was not always so—certainly not for the optimistic of the political and scientific enlightenment. However, then alienation is not only an accompaniment of individualism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Perhaps above all, as we have suggested, alienation is a response to fearful new powers that mortals themselves have created and that threaten their hard-won freedom. Foremost among them are the machine and the social structures which administer it. The freedom to command one’s life in one’s own way can be got only by first getting the fearlessness to disregard the criticism and to ignore the expectations of other people. One who would follow an independent path must, to some extent, be fearless. One must refuse to be intimidated by the power, prestige, claims, or size of established organizations, just as one must refuse to be deluded by the idealizations of themselves which they hold before the public. Few people know what a free existence really is; most people live caged in by fear of, or enslavement to, the opinion of others. Even the rich do not know it for their cages are gilt and comfortable. Even the spiritual do not know it for they mere echo back what these others want them to think about God. Complete freedom is possible only to those who have special character, one that is devoid of tyrannizing ambitions and despotic cravings, and even of unworldly strivings. Such is the strange paradox of the quest that on the one hand one must foster determined self-reliance but on the other yield to a feeling of utter dependence on the power of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Those who are self-sufficient and prefer to learn and develop by themselves, are those who especially need to practise this inward listening and waiting. What we mean is that modern mortals have to become more self-reliant, has to throw off the remnants of tribal consciousness which still rule one, has to learn to think for one’s self. However, it one must stand aloof to one’s own way, with one’s own free thoughts, it remains a benevolent, amiable independence. One wishes all beings well while knowing they receive, suffer, or enjoy the results of their own physical, emotional, or mental action. Ones desire to express individual views, character, and personality must be respected so long as one does not try to impose them aggressively or tyrannically on others. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. The genuine guarantee of duration is that the pure relation can be filled as the beings become You, as they are elevated to the You, so that the holy basic word sounds through all of them. Thus the time of human life cannot and ought not to overcome the It-relation, it then becomes so permeated by relation that this gains a radiant and penetrating constancy in it. The moments of supreme encounter are no mere flashes of lightning in the dark but like a rising Moon in a clear starry night. And thus the genuine guarantee of spatial constancy consists in this the mortal’s relations to their You, being radii that lead from all I-points to the center, create a circle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Not the periphery, not the community comes first, but the radii, the common relation to the center. That alone assures the genuine existence of a community. The anchoring of time in relation-oriented life of salvation and the anchoring of space in a community unified by a common center: only when both of these come to be and only as long as both continue to be, a human cosmos (shelter for mortals, a houselike World) comes to be and continues to be around the invisible altar, grasped in the spirit out of the World stuff on the eon. The encounter with God does not come to mortals in order that one may henceforth attend to God but in order that one may prove its meaning in action in the World. All revelation is calling and a mission. However, again and again mortals shun actualization and bends back toward the revealer: one would rather attend to God than to the World. Now that one has bent back, however, one is no longer confronted by a You; one can do nothing but place a divine It in the realm of things, believe that one knows about God as an It, and talk about him. It is not necessary to be surly and irritable in order to be an individualist. One can still be affable, genial, civil, and courteous—even radiant with good will It is a matter of inner equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
One must refuse to violate one’s intellectual integrity or sacrifice one’s spiritual independence. Even as the egomaniac does not live anything directly, whether it be a perception or an affection, but reflect on one’s perceiving or affectionate I and thus misses truth of the process, thus the theomaniac (who incidentally, can get along very well with egomaniac in the very same soul) will not let the gift take full effect but reflects instead on that which gives, and misses both. When you are sent forth, God remains presence of you; whoever walks in one’s mission always has God before one: the more faith the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, one cannot attention to God, touching oneself all over with God, but one can converse with God. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the World movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the World movement of turning toward. For the two basic metacosmic movement of the World—its expansion into its own being returning to association [with God]—attain their supreme and conciliation, their mixture and separation, in the history of mortal’s relation to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
It is in the return that the word is born on Earth; in spreading out it enter the chrysalis of religion; in a new return it is reborn with new wings. Not caprice is at work here, although the movement toward the It may at times go so far that it holds down the movement of going forth again t the You and threatens to suffocate it. The powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the same as the quiet one that occurs everywhere and at all times. The powerful revelations that stand at the beginnings of great communities, at the turning points of human time, are nothing else than the eternal revelation. However, revelation does not pour into the World through its recipient as if one were a funnel: it confers itself upon one, it seizes one’s whole element in all of its suchness and fuses with it. Even the more who is mouth is precisely that and not a mouthpiece—not an instrument but an organ, an autonomous, sounding organ; and to sound means to modify sound. If one is unable to continue in this quest without the association, encouragement, or sympathies of others who are also following it, then one had better not enter it at all, for quite obviously one is not ready for it not sufficiently appreciative of its values. If being different is an honest result of the search for higher truth, it must be acceptable. However, when it is merely a disguised egocentric exhibitionism, it becomes reprehensible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
I showed my power to understand. Yes, illusions before, I admit it, but the thing I have spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. “Lie awake watching you run through my head, I am alone again, but not for long my friend. We face another day and distance has come and taken you far away again, but I will see you soon my friend, and then I will sing you my song. I cannot go home alone again. No I cannot my friend. Until then, eyes, I recognize taking me back familiar to me from some other time or maybe another life. Remember out times, and know who I am. The memory stays, until we can breathe as one again,” Until then by Sully Erna. Power and the sense of significance, I have said, are intertwined. One is the objective form and the other the subjective form of the same experience. While power is typically extrovert, significance may not be extrovert at all but may be shown (and achieved) by prayer or other introvert, subjective methods. It is nevertheless experienced by the person as a sense of power in that it helps one integrate oneself and subsequently makes one more effective in one’s relations with others. Power is always interpersonal; is it is purely personal we call it strength. Power is social and consists of person in groups acting in concert. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
This is why the interpersonal view point, the tap root of the cultural school of psychoanalysis, is so important. If one believes the feeling of power in the sense of having influence in interpersonal relations with significant others is crucial for the maintenance of self-esteem and for the process of maturity, when the sense of significance is lost, the individual shift one’s attention to different, and often perverted or neurotic, forms of power to get some substitute for significance. “Here I am, what a nice place to be. I never thought I would see the skies separate for me and here I am. What a nice surprise. If only I had known what life was like on this side. You always bring me light, and you help me find my way. A gentle kiss goodnight is the innocence I crave. Here I am humbled and amazed. This beautiful little miracle of life was gifted to me, and here I am. I never thought I would say, if I could live my life again, I would live it your way. You always brought me life, and you have helped me find my way. I will never waste you time, I will never cause you pain. I will love you all my life, I will love you everyday. Under the light you shine on me, I promise I will be there for you baby. I would never want to leave you anyway, you have become my light. I cross my heart that is in your hands with hope that you will always be my best friend. I promise I will be there until the end,” My Light by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence. A situation in our day more tragic than the violence about us is that so many people feel they do not and cannot have power, that even self-affirmation is denied them, that they have nothing left to assert, and hence that there is no solution short of a violent explosion. Consider a recurring nightmare from a radical student at Columbia University. In this dream, the student Salvatore, came home from school and rand the bell to his house. He was told by his mother that she did not know him and that he did not belong there. He went to his cousin’s house and they told him the same thing. Finally he walked across the country to his father’s house in California and was told by his father that he did not know him and he did not belong there. The dream ended with him disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. “In separation, we come together. It never ends, change has just begun. Believing as we release the departed to know, what no one else could know. A way, into the unexplained. Redeem my soul into my body. To think my souls have been damned again, and again and again,” The Departed by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Judging from how often this kind of dream—“My parents did not recognize me; they closed the door in my face,” “I do not belong to any place”—comes up in therapy, it seems to be an important clue to understanding our times. The student who had that dream was a member of the revolutionary movement not by accident. Violence, or acts close to it, gives one a sense of counting, of mattering, of power (whether the feeling be ersatz or not is unimportant at the moment). This in turn gives the individual a sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of one’s own significance. Whether one gets it by shooting a haphazard victim on the street, or by constructive work, or by rebellion, or by psychotic demands in a hospital, or by Walter Mitty fantasies, one must be able to feel this I-count-for-something and be able to live out that felt significance. It is the lack of this sense of significance, and the struggles for it, that underlies much violence. Writing in the Report to the Nation Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed by the president after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the historian Richard Maxwell Brown makes sobering statements about American violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“The first and must obvious conclusion is that there has been a huge amount of it. We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since become a trigger happy people. It is not merely that violence has been mixed with the negative features of our history such as criminal activity, lynch mobs, and family feuds. On the contrary, violence has formed a seamless web with some of the noblest and most constructive chapters of American history.” The aftermath of the 1968 political assassination saw a bevvy of opinions and researches spring up on the causes of violence and its cures, consisting largely of debates between those emphasizing nature, and those emphasizing nurture. The former (stemming back, in the main, to Dr. Freud) held the general viewpoint that aggression is instinctive, part of the genetic equipment of mortals, and human beings are inherently aggressive. According to this view, it is a cross we must bear, an expression of the old Adam inevitably tainting human beings, and the most we can hope for is to control this evil in our hearts or let it out in wars and other culturally approved forms of violence. The other chief view, nurture, claims that aggression is a cultural phenomenon, caused—or at least augmented—by mass communication, faulty education, and especially TV. It is to be attacked and gotten rid of by changing our educational methods and controlling programs on TV. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
What all too often is tiresomely ignored is that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Aggression is part of the basic equipment of mortals, but it is also culturally formed, exacerbated, and can be, at least in part, redirected. Out culture is not simply a given, but is also us. We “homo called sapiens,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it in her sonnet, are the kind of creatures who create a vast TV and other forms of mass communication and, using these means, covertly teach aggression to our children. At the same time we endlessly sermonize against aggression. The contradiction this creates adds to the impotence everyone feels and to the hypocrisy with which we surround the issue of power in our culture. However, the real argument against many of these either/or explanation is that they leave out of the discussion exactly what is most important in the problem—that is, the question of the values, rooted in both nature and nurture, that link the two and are bound up with aggression and violence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Richard Maxwell Brown concludes his part of the Report to the Commission on Violence by citing two problems which confront us: “One is the problem of self-knowledge…When that is done…we must realize that violence has not been the action only of roughnecks and racists among us but has been the tactic of the must upright and respected of our people. Having gained this self-knowledge, the next problem becomes the ridding of violence, once and for all, from the real (but unacknowledged) American value system.” However, is there not a flagrant contradiction in this? If violence has been part and parcel of “our highest and most idealistic endeavors” and had been the tactic of the “most upright and respected” people, should we not inquire whether these people find something, perhaps unconsciously, in violence that they value? Furthermore, one can never change a value system by willing it changed or by other conscious means, as though plucking weeds from a garden. The roots of values lie deep in the archetypal and unconscious symbols and myths of the society. Changing the values system first of all requires a probing into the questions: What does violence do for the individual? What purposes does one achieve through aggression and violence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be. If it were successful, it would breed a race of docile, passive eunuchs and would lay the groundwork for an explosion in violence that would dwarf all those that have occurred so far. Thus oversimplifying the issue, we talk as though our choice were only between aggression on the one hand and a race of eunuchs on the other. Caught in the contradiction which this breeds, it is not surprising that we wake up with bad dreams, sensing that the essence of ourselves, the self-affirmation and self-assertion that makes us persons and without which we have no reason for living, is taken from us. What we have failed to see is that aggression has been, on the beneficial side, in the service of those values of life which would, if discarded, leave us bereft, indeed. “How many ways can you break my spirit down…again and how many times have I peeled my face up off the ground…for you. In case that you are starting to think you can run my life…I would think again. Or cripple my faith, when you judge and criticize me…but I am still standing. I do not know if I can say I have lived through everything, but I have walked this Earth with bare feet broken in the snow and my father said to me it never seems to be a simple walk down an icy cold broken road. I will fight with what is inside of me…this warrior spirit inside of me,” Broken Road by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It has long been my belief that understanding aggression and violence requires that power be seen as basic to the problem. I believe, also, that the data given to us by depth psychology cast an especially revealing light on the springs of human power and on aggression and violence. In my concern with power, I am tying to reach a level below both the nature and nurture theories, below both the instinct and culture arguments. I am seeking the answer to the question: What does individual person achieve through aggression and violence? If the pre-industrial World was in many ways no less insecure than our own, at least work and community life were ordered on a human scale. First of all, most mortals lived in small, tightly knit communities in which the family was the productive unit. Second, the tools that mortals used, the pace of work, the distribution of things that were made—all of those were controlled by human capacities and needs. Perhaps most important, instead of being separated from what we now call leisure activities, work itself—ordinarily some craft—was closely integrated in the total life of individuals and communities. Some call this the World we have lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It was by no means an idyllic Word, but time was, and it was all time up to 250 years ago when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, know and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. Different chiefly because of the technological revolution with its transformation of working conditions, the communities in which mortal life, and the whole complex social order that governs our lives. What happened, however, was companying change in human personality or character; and companying change in human personality or character; and it is the characterological revolution which must be understood if we are to determine whether alienation today differs in form and degree from the miseries of which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which is accompanied, this characterological change had no sudden beginning or point in time at which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which it accompanied, this characterological change had n sudden beginning or point in time at which spontaneously modern mortals replaced feudal mortals. History here is inadequate, and our evidence largely intuitive, or derived from literary works with their descriptions of social types, or from language itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As much as anything else, one needs personal freedom in this search after truth. Every form of interference and obstruction comes from sources which have acquired only a partial or false insight into truth. However, such freedom is permitted only insofar as one is good enough, wise enough, balanced enough, judicious enough, and discriminating enough to use it properly. Otherwise it leads to non-truth and self-deception. One must learn to think for oneself and to practise discrimination for oneself, if one want to find one’s way to truth. “A veil of sparkling white soothes and bathes me in the light, it feels me with the Suns and visions of the ancient ones. Descend to me, and sooth my disarray, and so it is done—hear my words Avalon. Fields are swaying like dancers in the Moonlight, rivers field with dreams-Unbroken and still promising. Warm inside-open the way in flat into the night—embrace what is to be, Avalon” Avalon by Sully Erna. Avalon is the mythical island, in Arthurian legend. The island’s legendary healing powers were said to restore King Arthur after he was injured in a major battle. His sword, Excalibur, was forged there too. It is a utopian paradise where the legends of English knights and political wholeness unite in a kingdom lost in the mists of time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
If a seeker find no one in one’s surroundings, contacts, or society near enough to one’s level of spiritual interests, then one must accept one’s loneliness, because one has chosen to draw away from the common preoccupation. For in order to be a working philosopher, a mortal must go one’s own way. This demand for individuality requires courage and wisdom. If one lack higher knowledge, intuitional feeling, and intellect—whose combination is wisdom—then one must seek to develop them and this demands works. Meanwhile, one can take help from personal guides and superior books. Without wisdom, or at least genuine efforts to work towards it, one’s course could be wrongly set to arrive at disaster. To withdraw from sectarian community life and walk alone requires qualities that only few possess. There is security, comfort, mortal and Worldly support in it. To be able to abandon these things a mortal must have strong inner urge as well as a continuous clear perception of philosophy’s meaning. “Breathe deep, bracing and strong, coming alive. Take back all that is lost, honour your pride. Time stops, silence is now, moving around hands raised fading to black, fall to the ground. From within, you will begin to feel the rise!” (The Rise by Sully Erna) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The weakling cannot walk this path. A mortal needs strength to follow out what one’s deep intuition tells one to do, especially where it departs from the allegedly rational or the socially conventional. If one’s guided attitude or actions meets with criticism or opposition, what is that to one? One is not answerable for what other people think about one. That is their responsibility. One is answerable only for what one oneself thinks and does. Only the mortal who has a passion to acquire the certainty of truth, who has the courage to hold unorthodox views and come to independent conclusions, who lives in an atmosphere of original thought, and to whom the charge of heresy is no charge at all, is at all likely to find one’s way to the truth. In truth, however, the pure relation can be built up into spatiotemporal continuity only be becoming embodied in the whole stuff of life. It cannot be preserved but only put to the proof in action; it can only be done, poured into life. Mortals can do justice to the relation to God that has been given to one only by actualizing God in the World in accordance with one’s ability and the measure of each day, daily. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. “Time is so wasted it wastes away, resurrect me Jesus Christ, I am so lonely for you. Taken away the innocence of live. Deliver me. Deliver me out of this pain and I will live through you again,” Eyes of a Child by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I went into my chamber and in the incandescent light rising from the sea, I unlocked the violin case and I looked at the Stradivarius violin. Of course I did not know how to play it, but we are powerful mimics. We have superior concentration and superior skills. And I had seen Nicki do it so often. I tightened the bow now and subbed the horsehair with the little piece of resin, as I had seen him do. Now I took it out of its case and I carried it through the house. It made a sound, did it not, that no one had ever heard in the ancient World, a sound so human and so powerfully affecting that people thought the violin the work of the devil and accused its finest players of being possessed. That is what a $16,000,000.00 violin sounds like. It is a 1715 ex-Bazzini – De Vito violin, made by Antonio Stradivari. This 304-year-old instrument can speak and tell something to all the people, not only people who understand the music, but all people. The light of the lamps danced in a thousand tiny specks of gold in the murals. I looked down at the violin and tried to remember my idea, and I ran my fingers along the wood and wondered what this thing looked like to them. In a hushed voice I explained what it was, that I wanted them to hear it, that I did not really know how to pay it but that I was going to try. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
I was not speaking loud enough to hear myself, but surely they could it if they chose to listen. And I lifted the violin to my shoulder, braced it under my chin, and lifted the bow. I closed my eyes and I remembered music, Nicki’s music, the way that his body had moved with it and his fingers came down with the pressure of hammers and he let the message travel to his fingers from his soul. I plunged into it, the music suddenly wailing upwards and ripping down again as my fingers danced. It was a song, all right, I could make a song. The tones were pure and rich as they echoed off the close walls with a resounding volume, an incredible chemistry occurred creating the wailing beseeching voice that only the violin can make. I think every violin has its own soul, and the soul has been imprinted by a previous performer. So I definitely feel the soul of Nicki on this violin. If the violin is not played for a few months, it goes to sleep. I went on madly with it, rocking back, back, fourth, and fourth, forgetting Nicki, forgetting everything but the feel of my fingers stabbing at the soundboard and the realization that I was making this perfect sound that has mystified experts for centuries, and it plummeted and climbed and overflowed ever louder and louder as I bore down upon it with the frantic sawing of the bow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Violins mimic aspects of the human voice, I was singing with it, I was humming and then singing loudly, and all harmonic tones corresponded to resonances in the vocal tract, and the gold of the little room was a blur. This Stradivari violin has a brightness and brilliance, and suddenly it seemed my own voice became louder, inexplicably louder, wit a pure high note which I knew that I myself could not possibly sing. Yet it was there, this beautiful note, steady and unchanging and growing even louder until it was hurting my ears. I played harder, more frantically, and I heard my own gasps coming, and I knew suddenly that I was not the one making this strange high note! It was a tone that rivaled the most perfect female voice. Without out stopping the music, without giving in to the pain that was splitting my head, I looked forward and I saw Akasha had risen and her eyes were very wide and she appeared to be singing, her voice was lively and sweet, and she was moving off the steps of the tabernacle toward me with her arms outstretched and the note pierced my eardrum, and a modern instrument could not compare to the magic of this sound. The moment healed my wounded body and soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Sheer will has shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic. God still exists and damnation and salvation have established the boundaries of a small and hopeless World, allowing one to see over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low Heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds. I was weeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the damp wind against my face. As some may know, the follower of a labelled cause, movement, or part tends to become unfair to competing causes, exaggerating their weak points but minimizing or even shutting one’s eyes to those of one’s own. One who refuses to attach oneself but remains independence is more likely to judge without prejudice and after a genuine investigation of both sides. The advantages of being in a position of intellectual and social, religious and personal independence are several. If it is luckily found, the chance of finding truth and, of expressing it, is surely large. Still, drug addiction is another possible effect of powerlessness. The conviction of powerlessness is especially profound with young people, and this is also where drug addiction is most prevalent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Their addiction is a form of violence, first of all, in that the individual violates one’s own mind—which, indeed, is the purpose of the drug; and there follows later all the petty crime and greater crime that drug addicts get into. The basis of addiction is a lot of weakness and a blocked anger. The weakness takes the form of I cannot meet the demands of my family; I cannot get a job; I am impotent in pleasures of the flesh; I am a no person. The anger takes the form of the addict’s revenge upon one’s family and the World for forcing one into this painful position of powerlessness. Impotence in pleasures of the flesh is present before taking the drugs; a large majority of addicts report that they had suffered from premature or quick climaxes or had great difficultly in standing at attention at all. Their fear is that they were not man enough to satisfy a woman. The heroin wipes away all this discomfort of perpetually feeling weak. It anesthetizes the person, partly through chemical and partly through psychological means, and gives complete relief in place of the original profound and continuous pain. No more inferiority, no more worry about being a failure in the working World, no more fear of being a coward in battle, no more disappointing one’s parents—all these oppressive feelings evaporate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A typical case of an affluent drug addict is roughly as follows: he grows up in the lace curtain suburbs, where the scents are so strong you smell the raw green leaves as well as the pink and yellow blossoms. His father works at a white shoe firm, comes from a long line of feudal lords who licked their fingers and threw the bones over their shoulders to the dogs as they dined, and his mother quells her own anxiety by feeding him (the “Eat, baby, eat. It is proof you love me” syndrome). His father is successful financially but otherwise could be stronger; he has two Cadillacs but can only throw his weight around the house by boisterous swearing or some other way of expressing his frustration. The son is enlists and goes to Vietnam. On his way back, he throws his medals into the Pacific as a symbol of freedom. Back home he gets a position as a Criminal Investigator with in the Office of Investigation at the United States Post Office, leading complex federal criminal, civil and administrative investigations. Feeling increasingly social, he meets some new friends in the music scene and they convince him to take a shot of heroin. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Finding it gives him great comfort and that is all his friends do on their spare time, he soon also finds he has to pick up this habit to fit in, as it gives them a purpose in life. His friends start also stealing money from him for the drug. His employers find out and dismiss him from his job, telling him to come back when he is clean. Throughout the whole sorry account, he gets a divorce, his wife gets custody of his daughter and keeps the custom house in the hills, and there emerges most clearly the young man’s powerlessness and loss of purpose. The origin of this sense of powerlessness is generally the young person’s lack of a relationship with a strong father. (Sometimes it is attributable to his relationship with the mother, but not as often.) Having no male figure with whom he can identify, he has no direction, no structure which the father is supposed to bring in from the outside World, no set of values by which to direct oneself or against which to rebel. In less affluent household, this lack of a strong father is taken for granted. Sometimes less affluent people have more realistic reasons for taking heroin—their problems are externalized, and hence drug addiction does not represent such a serious illness as it does for the affluent. The affluent drug addict seems not to have the oedipal motive of striving to surpass his father, which can give a constructive dynamic for development; but the son will take revenge upon the father by means of the addiction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Heroin addiction gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, one’s structure now consists of how to escape the police, how to get the money one needs, where to get one’s next fix—all these give one a new web of energy in place of one’s previous structureless World. The treatment method comes out of this situation of powerlessness. In the home of a good church, a great deal of power is let loose in sessions and Bible study, power that is directed toward the demand for absolute authenticity. These groups are encouraged to be as direct as possible with each other (without being rude or physical violence) in insisting on honesty. The phrase dope fiend is used, for example, because there is no euphemism in it; they insist on not covering up the cold truth in how they handle their affairs. However, when we spend so much time describing the attacking serpent that we fail to see the source of healing, we are no different than a dope fiend. We do not have to focus on the serpents or the pain of their venomous bites or their fear of death in order to be healed. We simply have to look to the source of healing: our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Obviously this gives a structure that cannot be evaded; the strong substitute father comes out in our faith in Christ. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We know from the scriptures and the teachings of latter-day prophets that genuine repentance requires feeling sincere remorse. However, focusing too much on the negative can lead to fear, loss of hope, and diminishing self-worth—in the words of Nephi, we begin to “droop in sin” (2 Nephi 4.28). Those who struggle with sin sometimes lie and rationalize in an attempt to minimize the consequences of their behavior. However, somewhere inside themselves, they are aware of that they have done and know they are accountable for it. They know they are in spiritual bondage. Almost everyone I have met struggling with addiction suffers from a terrible sense of shame and a belief that he or she is broken, defective, and beyond the love and grace of God. However, this belief, in my experience, is far from the truth. Usually I find that those who struggle with addictions are warriors with tenacity, courage, and a strong desire to be clean. They win far more battles than they lose as they march toward recovery. This seems to boil down to a rediscovery of one’s power and how to use it. The notorious permissiveness that was so completely followed in the Clinton and Obama era is out, and what is in is what gives personal power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
This may be hard for some to comprehend—if people are so strong, why is overcoming addiction so difficult? Addiction is often misunderstood, and some believe that if a person would simply choose to recover or work harder at stopping, he or she would be able to. However, the nature of addiction—and all sin, for that matter—is such that we cannot heal ourselves from it. The children of Israel could not heal themselves from the bites of the fiery serpents, and we cannot simply wish or even work addiction away. We must find our hope of healing in Christ. On the anvil on which the treatment is hammered out, all things are used that will recover some sense of power in the addict, which is necessary for one’s cure. The addict’s anger and one’s energy are connected; the angrier one can becomes—which means direct, not expressed in revenge or in other indirect ways—the more likely one is to get cured. The addict is a person of much energy, but it has been blunted by one’s drugs. When one comes off drugs, one is apt to have a good deal of anger; it is on this angry energy that one’s rehabilitation depends. However, it is the social side of power that is stressed. The desired emphasis seems to Dr. Alfred Adler’s concept of social interest; we all have one basic desire and goal: to belong and to feel significant. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Consider the experience of those who struggle with addiction and how it brings heavy burdens of secrets and pain. Repentance may involve an emotional and physical process. Both repentance and recovery may take time. Even though a person may have some initial success, further emotional healing may be necessary to completely repent and recover. It takes faith, hope, love, support, time, and prayer to heal from the patterns of self-deception. In its panorama of disorder and change, history offers plentiful evidence that mortals in times past also felt no small uncertainty about themselves and their identities, suffered no little anguish of gloom, despair and feelings of detachment. Great and small people are saying they wish they had never been born. No public office stands open where it should, and the masses are like river hogs, eating whatever is insight, without think about their Saviour. Artists have ceases to ply their art. The few slay the many. One who yesterday was indigent I now wealthy, and the sometime rich overwhelm one with adulation. Impudence is rife. Oh that man cease to be, that women should no longer conceive and give birth. Then, at length, the World would find peace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
There was a similar moral collapse in Greece during the Peloponnesian war. As for medieval Europe, Huizinga reminds us that the Middle Ages were essentially violent in character: wars, class struggles, hysterical crowd behavior, vice and crime (on an unparalleled scale, particularly in university towns), plagues, scarcity, superstition, the conviction that the World was coming to an end—such was the “black” background of medieval life. The unattached person during the Middle Ages was one either condemned to exile or domed to death: if alive, one immediately sought to attach oneself, at least to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security expect in association, and no freedom that did not recognize the obligations of a corporate life. One lived and died in the style of one’s class and corporation. People had known a kind of psychological security; they took for granted all the actual insecurity of life in a vale of tears. If one has to analyse problems for oneself and has no one else to do it for one, the endeavour may help one to learn discrimination and good judgement. It is better to make one’s own decisions independently. This is not the case, however, if one feels too incapable of thinking out an issue, or too illiformed about it, or too vacillating to make up one’s mind on its pros and cons. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
If one’s understanding of this teaching delivers one from excessive dependence on another mortal or on external methods, it will clear one’s path and help one’s self-reliance. However, if it outruns itself and makes one cocksure, proud, arrogant, and irreverent towards one’s Saviour, then it has degenerated into misunderstanding. This will block one’s path. Joy is more than pleasure; and it is more than happiness. Happiness is a state of mind which lasts for a longer and shorter time and is dependent on many conditions, external and internal. In the ancient view it is a gift of the gods which they give and take away again. In the American Constitution, “the pursuit of happiness” is a basic human right. In economic theory the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of people is the purpose of human action. In the fairy tale, “they live happily ever after.” Happiness can stand a large amount of pain and lack of pleasure. However, happiness cannot stand the lack of joy. For joy is the expression of our essential and central fulfillment. No peripheral fulfillments and no favorable conditions can be substituted for the central fulfillment. Even in an unhappy state a great joy can transform unhappiness into happiness. What, then is you? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Let us first ask what is its opposite. It is sorrow. Sorrow is the feeling that we are deprived of our central fulfillment, by being deprived of something that belongs to us and is necessary to our fulfillment. We may be deprived of relatives and friends nearest to us, of a creative work and a supporting community which gave us a meaning of life, of our home, of honor, of love, of bodily or mental health, of unity of our person, of a good conscience. All this brings sorrow in manifold forms, the sorrow of sadness, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of depression, the sorrow of self-accusation. However, it is precisely this kind of situation in which Jesus tells his disciples that his joy shall be with them and that their joy shall be full. Sorrow can be the Sorrow of the World which ends in death of final despair, and it can be Divine sorrow which leads to transformation and joy. For joy has something within itself which is beyond joy and sorrow. This something is called blessedness. Blessedness is the eternal element in joy, that which makes it possible for joy to include in itself the sorrow out of which it arises, and which it takes into itself. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls the less affluent, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst, those who have been persecuted blessed. And he says unto them: “Rejoice and be glad!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Joy within sorrow is possible to those who are blessed, to those in whom joy has the dimension of the eternal. By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited; because by its very nature it cannot be grasped as a sum of qualities, not even as an infinite sum of qualities that have been raised to transcendence; because it is not to be found either in or outside the World; because it cannot be experienced; because it cannot be thought; because we transgress against it, against that which has being, if we say: “I believe that he is”—even “he” is still a metaphor, while “you” is not. And yet we reduce the eternal You ever again to an It, to something, turning God into a thing, in accordance with our nature. Not capriciously. The history of God as a thing, the way of the God-thing through religion and its marginal forms, through its illuminations and eclipses, the times when it heightened and when it destroyed life, the way from the living God and back to him again, the metamorphoses of the present, of embedment in forms, of objectification, of conceptualization, dissolution, and renewal are one way, the way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Here we must once more reply to those who attack Christianity because they believe that it destroys the joy of life. In the view of the Beatitudes they say that Christianity undercut the joy of life by pointing to and preparing for another life. They even challenge the blessedness in the promised life as a refined form of seeking for pleasure in the future life. Again we must confess that in many Christians, joy in the way is postponed till after death, and that there are Biblical words which seem to support this answer. Nevertheless, it is wrong. Jesus will give his joy to his disciples now. They shall get it after he has left them, which means in this life. And Paul asks the Philippians to have joy now. This cannot be otherwise, for blessedness is the expression of God’s eternal fulfillment. Blessed are those who participate in this fulfillment here and now. Certainly eternal fulfillment must be seen not only as eternal which is present, but also as eternal which is future. However, if it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all. This joy which has in itself the depth of blessedness is asked for and promised in the Bible. It preserves in itself its opposite, sorrow. This blessed joy provides the foundation for happiness and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Blessed joy which is promised in the Bible for this lifetime on Earth presents in all levels of mortal’s striving for fulfillment. It consecrates and directs them. It does not diminish or weaken them. It does not take away the risks and dangers of the joy of life. It makes the joy of life possible in pleasure and pain, in happiness and unhappiness, in ecstasy and sorrow. Where there is joy, there is fulfillment. And were there is fulfillment, there is joy. In fulfillment and joy the inner aim of life, the meaning of creation, and the end of salvation, are attained. The asserted knowledge and the posited action of the religions—whence do they come? The presence and strength of revelation (for all of them necessarily invoke some sort of revelation, whether verbal, natural, or psychic—there are, strictly speaking, only revealed religions), the presence and strength that mortals received through revelation—how do they become a content? The explanation has two levels. The exoteric, psychic level is known when a mortal is considered by oneself, apart from history. The esoteric, factual one, the primal phenomenon of religion, when we afterward place one in history again. Both belong together. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mortals desires to have God; one desires to have God continually in space and time. One is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of the meaning; one wants to see it spread out as something that one can take out handle again and again—a continuum unbroken in space and times that insures life for one at every point and moment. A mortal can achieve one’s independence by grades without rebellion but one is seldom so wise as to do so. More often, one lacks patience, takes the more foolish violent way, and attains one’s freedom at a cost, to oneself and to others, that could have been much less for the same result by evolutionary ways. The passionate contempt for organized authority, or its complete rejection, may be only a cover for weakness: the inability to undergo a course of discipline, much less undertake it for oneself. The danger of walking alone is also the danger of identifying one’s own private judgments, impulses, desires, and thoughts as intuitions from the higher self. However, independence of mind as its own perils, for it may lead to stubbornness in error, to arrogance in behaviour, and to fanaticism in attitude. One who depends upon one’s own personal intellect and personal strength alone, deprives oneself of the protection which God could give one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The endeavor after independence can achieve only a partial success, never a total one. We find that we are tied to other people. Life’s rhythm of pure relation, the alternation of actuality and a latency in which only our strength to relate and hence also the presence, but not the primal presence, wanes, does not suffice mortal’s thirst for continuity. One thirsts, thirst, pain as clear as light for something spread out in time, for duration. Thus God becomes an object of faith. Originally, faith fills the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a substitute for these acts. The ever new movement of being through concentration and going forth is supplanted by coming to rest in an It in which one has faith. The trust-in-spite-of-all of the fighter who knows the remoteness and nearness of God is transformed ever more completely into the profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to one because one has faith that there is One who would not permit anything to happen to one. The life-structure of the pure relation, the lonesomeness of the I before the You, the law that mortals, however one may include the World in one’s encounter, can still go forth only as a person to encounter God—all this also does not satisfy mortal’s thirst for continuity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The magic of faith leaves something stronger than memory of the circuit of the blood of Christ through us. One thirsts for something spread out in space, for the representation in which the community of the faithful is united with God. Thus God becomes a cult object. The cult, too, originally supplements the acts of relation, by fitting the living prayer, the immediate You-saying into a spatial context of great plastic and power and connecting it with the life of the senses. And the cult, too, gradually becomes a substitute, as the personal prayer is no longer support but rather pushed aside by communal prayer; and as the essential deed simply does not permit any rules, it is supplanted by devotions that follow rules. We can fully trust in a loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help us become the person he knows we can become. Our Father in Heaven has given us not only one but two physical eyes. We can see adequately with only one eye, but the second eye provides us with another perspective. When both perspectives are put together in our brains, they produce a three-dimensional image of our surrounding. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. We have a loving Father in Heaven, and we all agreed to come to this Earth as part of a divine plan. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
But no matter, only so many children can be made by one in a century. And new offspring will be weak. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The rule of the old covens had wisdom in it that strength should come with time. And then again, there is the old truth: you might make titans or imbeciles, no one knows why or how. Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company. Make sure before you select a mate that they have some lifetime before you choose them. Never let loneliness drive you to fall in love with someone because their helplessness will be so completely your fault. Remember, beware of that power, and the power you have over those who are dying. Loneliness in us, and that sense of power can be a strong combination. What relation does this pattern of passivity/madness that we have seen in Treasure have to do with the violence in our society, which has become such a critical problem for contemporary men and women? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
A friend of mine, not in analysis or psychotic in any way, tells us how it feels to be in a rage after a quarrel with his wife: How close this rage is to a temporary psychosis! As I walk down the street on a sidewalk that seems very far away, I cannot think; I am in a daze. However, it is foggy only externally—inside I am hyperalive, hyperaware of every thought and feeling, as though I am in an illuminated World, everything very real. The only trouble is that this inner illumination has practically no connection with the outside World. I feel slightly ashamed in relation to the outside World—ashamed and defenseless. If people made fun of me or suddenly demanded something important of me (say an accident occurred on the street). I would not be able to respond. Or if I did respond, I would have to get out of my “mad”; it would be broken through. The streets are foreign; they seem empty though people are walking on them just as always. I do not know the streets very well (though I have seen them thousands of times). I walk on as though I am drunk, picking up my feet and self-consciously putting down. I go into a restaurant, Wan Li at Renaissance Beijing Wangfujing Hotel, afraid the cashier girl will not recognize me—I am in a different skin—or she will think something is wrong. (She does recognize me and is friendly as always. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
I go to the men’s room ; I read the graffiti over the urinal without any emotion. I am still afraid someone will require something of me, attack me, and I could not defend myself. I come back to my seat, staring out the window at the far end of the restaurant. I feel only a vague relation to the World. Food is brought me; I am not much interested in eating or taste; I go vaguely through the motions. I try to recall the details of our quarrel, without much success—two or three things stand out with great vividness; the rest is a jumble. I eat my favorite cuisine, a little chicken egg foo young, with rice and gravy, and a bit of my shrimp egg roll, as I sipped on a little jasmine tea. A waiter comes up, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman, and he says to me: “I can see you think too much,” he pointed to his forehead. “You got some problem?” I smiled and nodded. He went on: “These days everybody got some problem.” His words were strangely comforting. He went away, shaking his head. This was the first breakthrough of the outside World. It made me laugh to myself, and helped me much more than one would think. I could understand how, when this state is relatively permanent, people do themselves harm, step in front of a motor car for example. They do this mostly out of a lack of awareness of the real World about them. They do it also out of revenge. Or they get a gun and shoot somebody. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The experience of being caught up in such a rage is very close to the historical experience of being “mad.” What, for example, is the meaning of “mad” in such statements as the following made by a young African American man in Harlem: The White cops, they have a damn sadistic nature…We do not need them here in Harlem! They start more violence than any other people start…When we’re dancing on the street because we can’t go home, here comes one cop, he’ll want to chase everyone. And he gets mad. I mean he gets mad! He comes into the neighborhood aggravated and mad. In this statement, this African America man is saying that there is a relationship between the “mad” of the policeman and violence in Harlem. Does the policeman, by inciting a violent reaction, use his own rage as a stimulus to preserve what he feels is law and order? Is this one of the reasons a man would choose to become a police officer in the first place? Does he seize upon a culturally accepted psychosis and use it to ally himself with the status quo, thereby giving himself the right, in line of duty, to carry a club and gun with which to let out his own violence? #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In the verbatim reports in Violent Men, by professor of criminology Hans Toch, we can consider these questions in greater detail. Dr. Toch believes, for example, that: The African American and the European American officers and suspects—their pride, their fear, their isolation, their need to prove themselves, above all their demand for respect—are strangely alike: victims both, prisoners of an escalating conflict they did make and cannot control. As shown by their own reports, the policemen feel they have to uphold “law and order,” and they identify this with their own individual self-esteem and masculinity. Time after time it is clear that the policeman is fighting an impotence-potency battle within himself that he expands and projects on the concept of “law and order.” Affronts to themselves the police interpret as affronts to the law of the land. They have to insist, then, that the suspects respect their authority and power. They feel their manhood or womanhood is being challenged and their reputation, on which their self-respect is based, is at stake. However, this is understandable when you look at the record number of police killings in Brazil’s state of Rio de Janerio. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In 2016, out of 46,000 officers, 147 of them were killed and numbers are expected to climb. Majority of the killings happen in the less affluent areas. These figures help to illustrate an institutional failure to protect police, and they highlight the systematic shortcomings in training and the use of lethal force, which has made Brazil’s police a major actor in violence that plagues that country. Some people say that the conflict starts with a culture of physical and psychological torture in Brazil’s military police training, which has also directly impacted the way in which these officers serve society and in turn are treated by society. Military police officers in Brazil are critical of their training regimen, in which physical, psychological, and disciplinary abuses are allegedly committed by their superiors and are thought to be commonplace. “Sometime, it was lunchtime and my superiors would shout at me that I was a monster, a parasite,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes explains. “It was as if they were training a dog. A soldier is trained to only be afraid of his superiors. The training was just meant to mess with your feelings, so that you leave the barracks as a pit bull, wanting to bite someone.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
“How am I going to serve society being trained like that? It’s ridiculous,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes adds. “Police have to learn quick thinking, the ability to make decisions. But right now they train police as they would a dog for a street fight. The officers can do anything and the soldiers just have to bow their heads. You are only trained to be afraid of the officers, that’s it. A soldier who sees an officer, even from far off, trembles with fear.” The school of hard knocks is the rule rather than the exception when training military police officers. Courses are concerned with imprinting the military culture on the future soldiers, with little theoretical teaching on topics such as criminal law or human rights. Over 21,000 public security personnel from various federal agencies were interviewed, over 50 percent of whom were military police. Of these officers, 83 percent said they received a full year of training before beginning work; 39 percent said they were victims of physical or psychological torture during training; 64 percent stated they had been humiliated or disrespected by their superiors. However, officers are prohibited from talking about negative experiences, and they have little opportunity to report violations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The institutionalization of human rights violations within the military police during training has a direct impact on how police interact with the general population. A typical instance of an officer who, responds to a call of a family fight, sees a man sitting in a car who he thinks can tell him something about the altercation: The officer asks the man to step out of the car. The man response, “You can’t do this to me, I’m on private property.” He seemed obnoxious, the officer reported, his “attitude bothered me.” The man eventually got out of the car, but kept his hands in the pocket of his trench coat. This continued to bother the officer, who asked him to take his hands of out his pocket. Meeting with continued refusal, he called another policeman and they forced the hands out. The policeman sees this as an unforgivable defiance of his authority. He must assert police authority at all costs…(“I felt it was imperative that I take the man’s hands out of his pockets…He became abusive as we took hold of him…We arrested him and put him in the back seat of the patrol car, where he threatened to urinate on the seat, kicked and pounded on the glass.”) Police explain that they go out with batons in hand and wearing shorts and military police shirts, so that they can give the population a sense of security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, on the streets barbarism prevails: petty theft, harassment, weed-smoking, everything you can imagine. “When we got hold of the suspects, it was only beating, beating, beating, and pepper spray, a lot of pepper spray. That was the first time I came into contact with the torture techniques used by the military police,” says Rodrigo Nogueira Batista—a Navy graduate who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for several crimes, including attempted homicide—who had been chosen to participate in a summar operations, two months after joining the military police. The culture of violence is born through the dehumanization of the military police during training. The police are created in order to guarantee a hierarchy and discipline within the community and to create a certain image of the force. Some believe they were not made to protect neither the police nor the population. The man with his hands in his pockets we talked about earlier, saw the police as the arm of the government and the enemy of the people, and he was humiliated. And, indeed, he is right in the sense that the policeman must cow him to preserve his own authority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Blue Power in this instance is the opposite side of the coin of Power to the people. Each is engaged in protecting one’s own self-image, one’s own sense of being a human being. However, the police man, by virtue of one’s identification with law enforcement and one’s gun and badge, has a special advantage. However, there is also a special morality that police officers must follow even in their private lives. An officer cannot do things that most humans do: drink alcohol, tell a lie, fall into debt. An officer can actually be punished for these things. This creates the image of a superhuman that does not exist. The police are also forbidden from speaking in a foreign language, except when it is required as a function of their roles as an officer. The human rights of police officers are frequently violated with these rules. Yet we want them to respect the rights of the citizens when they do not have their own rights respected. Police cannot publish things on social media about the internal workings of the organization without having to respond to them. Some are under investigation and responding to various inquires for having expressed themselves on social media. Sometimes they are sent to Internal Affairs because of a comment that someone made on a website and it can be boring and embarrassing. The military police cannot question a superior. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Because of the way the police are trained and the history of the country, suspects regularly feel that the cards are stacked against them, that no matter what they say they are going to jail, will be found guilty or killed. Their opponent in the dual are protected with a badge and gun, and often the suspect will challenge the officer to take off his or her badge and settle differences “man to man.” The placing on of hands, the physical contact, and the other aspect of touching are especially significant. The suspect has to protect the inviolability of their body. The police officer feels he or she has to assert their authority. And when it comes to asking for identification, it is a highly personal thing. Psychologically, demanding identification is like requiring a person to undress physically; it gives a person who has already been told he or she is inferior an added feeling of personal humiliation. To provokes the suspect’s sense of outrage, and the police officers finds that these situations can sometimes be pushed to the brink of a riot over a simple proof of identity. Noteworthy in these events is that often the mortal who ends up in jail was simply trying, through one’s act, to defend one’s self-image or one’s reputation or one’s rights. Both officer and suspect and almost everyone else is struggling to some for or other to build or protect one’s self-esteem, one’s sense of significance as a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Both police and suspects are fighting an impotence-potency battle within themselves. Each interprets this in one’s own, though diametrically opposite, way. True, this power battle can be blown up to paranoid proportions, the offense simply being imagined; or it can take the infantile form of bullying or some other deviation. However, in order to see the roots of violence we must go below these psychological dynamics and seek its source in the individual’s struggle to establish and protect one’s self-esteem. This, in essence, a beneficial need—it is potentially constructive. Prisons do not deter criminals. Prisons unman and dehumanize; violence rests on exploitation and exploitativeness, and prison is a power-centered jungle. There seems to be growing evidence that the police and guards on one side and the incarcerated mortals on the other are of the same personality type. Our research indicated that ranks of law enforcement contain their share of violent men and women. The personalities, outlooks and actions of these officers are similar to those of the other people in our lives. They reflect the same fears and insecurities, the same fragile, self-centered perspectives. They display the same bluster and bluff, panic and punitiveness, rancor and revenge, pride and shame as do others. And whereas much police violence springs out of adaptation to police work rather than out of the problems of infancy, the result, in practice, is almost the same. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The need for potency, which is another way of phrasing the struggle for self-esteem, is common to all of us. We see its beneficial form in the rebellion at the Attica, New York, prison, where the leader of the revolting inmates proclaimed: “We don’t want to be treated any longer as statistics, as numbers…We want to be treated as human beings, we will be treated as human beings.” Another inmate, older than the first, took a more realistic view: “If we cannot live as people, we will at least try to die as men.” History records that twenty-eight of them did die several days later when the troopers charged into the prison, shooting. However—such is the strange partnership between guards and prisoners, both being in prison and both being of the same personality types—history records that some prisoner died using their bodies to protect their prison guards from the shots. It seems necessary therefore to distinguish between alienating conditions on the one hand and estranged states on the other, although the distinction may be difficult, there being no question here of a simple stimulus-response situation. It also seems appropriate to limit the term alienation to mean an individual feeling or state of dissociation from self, from others, and from the World at large. Such states, although functions of the conditions that produce them, should not be confused with the conditions themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Alienation refers to different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the later be other persons, or the natural World, or their own creations in art, science and society; and subjectively, the corresponding states of disequilibrium, disturbance, strangeness and anxiety. One of the concepts linked with alienation is the idea of anomie to describe the conditions of normlessness, the collapse of rules of conduct. The notion of anomie, like that of alienation itself, has been used to refer to a wide array of social and personal disorders. Anomie is a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. The breakdown of values causes people to respond to this conflict between ends and means in various deviant ways; and of those individual adaptations one in particular—retreat from the struggle to get ahead (as in the case of harlots of addicts)—is worth mentioning here. Anomie is a social condition rather than a psychological state, we can identify it as an important cause of alienation, particularly when the response takes the form of retreat; but we should not confuse it with alienation as a state of mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Similar considerations apply to other concepts which are often confused with alienation. For example, social isolation may lead to a state of estrangement, but not all isolates are alienated. Indeed, alienation may result from the social pressures of group, crowd or mass. By the same token alienation should not be confused with social disorganization, since, as we shall see, estrangement may also result in highly organized bureaucracies. Alienation is often associated with loneliness; but again, not all lonely people are estranged. Loneliness can be a creative part of human experience and another form of loneliness is self-rejection which is not really loneliness but anxiety; people who try to overcome or escape loneliness will end only by becoming self-alienated. What we have here are important conditions or correlates of alienation. Any one of these conditions may have different effects on men and women of varying personalities in different social situations, predisposing some more and others less to alienated states. Thus one mortal retreats from life, another rebels; and each of these in turn exhibits many different modes of behavior. Whatever the approach, central to the definition of alienation is that idea that mortals have lost their identity or selfhood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We acquire a self or identity through interaction with others. However, if one acquires a self by communicating with others, especially through language, then anxiety about or loss of selfhood is a social as well as an individual problem. What this means is that the person who experiences self-alienation is not only cut off from the springs of one’s own creativity, but is thereby also cut off from groups of which one would otherwise be a part; and one who fails to achieve a meaningful relationship with others is deprived of some part of oneself. The self can only be preserved by identification with God, godless mortal’s essential bread at being dominated by an alien power which threatens our dissolution—by which the anxiety that loss of self can be produced is realized. Despair about loss of self is called a sickness unto death. The World dominated by a giant technological and bureaucratic apparatus of one’s own creation has caused much of this alienation. The price we pay for progress is anxiety, a dread of life perhaps unparalleled in its intensity and increasing to such a pitch that the sufferer may feel oneself to be nothing more than a lost point in empty space, inasmuch as all human relationships appear to have no more than a temporary validity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Alienation is defined as loss of identity and is illustrated by men and women who trouble over the simple yet complex question, “Who am I?” In the Untied States of American today the literature of psychoanalysis is rich in its descriptions of such cases. Alienation is the remoteness of the neurotic from one’s own feelings, wishes, beliefs, and energies. It is the loss of the feeling of being an active, determining force in one’s own life. It is the loss of feeling oneself as an organic whole. Or, the alienated mortal is one who does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s act and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with oneself as one is out of touch with any other person. Implicit in most approaches to alienation is the ideal of an integrated mortal and of a cohesive society in which one will find meaning and satisfaction in one’s own productivity and in one’s relations with others. A person in solidarity society will no longer find the only aim of one’s conduct in oneself and, understanding that one is the instrument of a purpose greater than oneself, one will see that one is not without significance. We may well ask, was there ever such a society? Romantic notions about our own past or about primitive culture do not help us here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
I have an love of spiritual freedom and intellectual independence, and think it is important to keep away from all restrictive, limiting, and narrowing groups, organization, and institutions. I have seen so many lost to the cause of Truth by such constrictions of the mind and heart, so much of its good undone by this harm, that I shrink from the idea of becoming tagged as some one man’s disciple or as a member of some ashram, society, or church. If this man has found the Right, why not let one’s natural expression of it—whether in writing, art, or life—be enough? Why create a myth around one, to befog others and falsify the goal? Why not let well alone? Having no official connection with any group, sect, organization, or church leaves me free to help anyone, anywhere. A strongly individualistic temperament cannot be at ease in the collective membership of an organization where strict and rigid doctrines are set up like the Great Wall of China and where patriotism rejects salvation for those outside. Such a temperament needs the free air of unfettered thinking and uncircumscribed good will. It can sympathize intellectually with many different points of view without losing itself in any one of them, but it can do so only because it belongs to none. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The routine devotions of an institution do not appeal to this type of temperament—sensitive, moody, and independent as it is. The mortal who has seen the light and experienced its warmth will prefer one’s own way of living if it is the consequence of one’s awakening. One’s mind is bound by no religious doctrines, one’s conduct by no prohibitions or commandments. However, this does not mean one is free to do what one pleases. One mortal and one God are all the organizations needed. More is a superfluity. The seeker who cherishes one’s independent path and individual thought cannot comfortably fit into a group where all alike must be pressed into the same shape. It seems historically inevitable that every spiritual movement should sooner or later become organized and institutionalized. In that way it reflects the need and serves the tendency of average human nature. However, where a person is not average and refused to be taken up into it by that means, preferring to keep one’s independence and one’s allegiance, one is just as much entitled to do so. Those who feel tempted to do so, may study the public cults and listen to the public teachers but it would be imprudent to join any of the first or follow any of the second. It would be wiser to remain free and independent or they may be led astray from the philosophical path. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
By rejecting the easy way of joining a particular sect, a labeled group, one rejects at the same time the withdrawal of sympathy or understanding from all other groups which usually or often accompanies the joining. If the universal character of truth requires one to keep one’s mind uncorralled, the personal need of strength confirms the requirement. What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is mortal’s emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as one was when entering into it. The moment of encounter is not a living experience that stirs in the receptive soul and blissfully rounds itself out: something happens to mortals. At times it is like feeling a breath and at times like a wresting match; no matter: something happens. The mortal who steps out of the essential act of pure relation has something More in one’s being, something new has grown there of which one did not know before and for whose origin one lacks any suitable words. Whereever the scientific World orientation in its legitimate desire for a causal chain without gaps may place the origin of what is new here: for us, being concerned with the actual, no subconscious and no other psychic apparatus will do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Actually, we receive what we did not have before, in such a manner that we know: it has been given to us. In the language of the Bible: “Those who wait for God will receive strength in exchange.” Being faithful one accepts, one does not ask who gives. Mortals receives, and what one receives is not a content but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated with one is altogether unable to indicate what that is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us—it makes life heavier but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. Questions about the meaning of life has vanished. However, if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your sense. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of another life, but that of this our life, not that of a beyond but of this our World, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this World. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us. The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it wants to be born into the World by me. However, even as the meaning itself cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid generally acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not inscribed on a table that could be put up over everybody’s head. The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of one’s being and in the uniqueness of one’s life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new sense, to go from it. As we have nothing but a You on our lips that we are released from it into the World. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which an into which we life, the mystery—has remained what it was. It has become present for us, and through its presence it has made itself known to us as salvation; we have known it, but we have no knowledge of it that might diminish or extenuate its mysteriousness. We have come close to God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt salvation but no solution. We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in action. And even this is not what we ought to do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. I do not believe in God’s naming himself or in God’s defining himself before mortals. The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Randolph Harris II International Institute 