I talked to her like this now and I said I was grateful that I had been allowed to come near her and her ancient secrets, and this feeling became physical. It was all over the surface of my skin and at the roots of my hair. I could feel tension draining from my face. I could feel it leaving my body. I was light all over, and the incense and the flowers were enfolding my spirit as I looked into the black centers of her deep brown eyes. I could almost hear hymns in this place. I could hear chants and ancient invocations. And I was no longer afraid. The beauty was too soothing, too grand. No mortal comes to the knowledge of one’s divinity through a crowd of other mortals. No human entity can discover its own relation to God through any group method. The way to spiritual awareness is entirely individual, essentially lonely, inescapably within oneself. That is to say, it is mystical. Insofar as religion succeeds in showing the way, it ceases to be religion and becomes, or rather, consummates itself in, mysticism. All the old mysteries collected in me, arousing me and sharpening me. “Father, I thank thee that thou hast given the Holy Ghost unto these whom I have chosen; and it is because of their belief in me that I have chosen them out of the World,” reports 3 Nephi 19.20. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
There was a superpresence, a creature of impossible whiteness and perfection who was nevertheless connected to everything around him—the clothes he wore, the stone railing on which he laid his hand, even the moment itself in which a small cloud passed over the bright half Moon. Many have lost too much that was precious to them and they see and learn a great deal very fast. Information comes to some in other ways as well. There were messages all on the walls throughout Europe. One must try to work out interpretations of scripture and life for themselves, not remained tied to obligatory ones imposed from without. They must begin to stand on their own individual resources or they will never rise to the level of direct spiritual communion at all. The tendency to look to one mortal or one organization as the sole repository of spiritual wisdom may become dangerous to their further progress. The currents of evolution and the circumstances of modernity have created new cultural values which in turn have lessened the need of such dependence. One proof of this assertion lies in the fact that the same line of change may be seen also in the social, political, and economic spheres. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
To seek knowledge from unprejudiced sources is a rule hard to fulfill, because such sources are rare. The next best thing to be an unprejudiced seeker, and this is the ideal I have tried to follow. Sectarianism is everywhere, because institutions and organizations are everywhere. When flying the flag of independence, there is a better chance for the truth seeker. Civilization has at last created mortals who behave innocently. For the first time they look about themselves and say, “What the hell is all this!” Some people are creating great dark and evil systems of thought within themselves. Innocence is not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions. A love and respect for what is right before your eyes. We have come into being at the end of an era, at a time when the World faces changes undreamed of. Some were born and grew to adulthood in a time when the ancient World, as we call it now, was coming to a close. Old faiths are worn out. A new god is about to rise. It has taken over 2,000 years to come back to skepticism, the level of practicality that was our daily frame of mind back then. However, history is by no means repeating itself. That is the amazing thing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Look around you! Completely new things are happening in Europe. The value placed upon human life is higher than ever before. Wisdom and philosophy are coupled with new discoveries in science, new inventions which will completely alter the manner in which humans life. However, that is a story unto itself. That is the future. The point is that some were born on the cusp of the old way of seeing things. Many came of age without faith, and yet they are not cynical. We sprang up from a crack between faith and despair, as it were. We did not grow into adulthood expecting very much of others. And the burden of conscience is private, terrible though it might be. We never served the Christian god. That you can put in your mind right now. However, the forces of good and evil behind the names of Christ and Satan. The intolerance, the fanaticism of the narrower groups and religion has been brought in here too. Let the Western student of philosophy who takes it seriously enough to think, breathe in remembrance, and live actively by it, be warned and stay free, unjoined, unlabeled, spacious in outlook, understandingly tolerant in practice. Study both sympathetically and critically the other contemporary mystical movements but do not join them. Such is my general answer to the seeker who questions me about them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The people that made some of us were worshippers of gods, true. And they believed in things that we do not believe. However, their faith hearkened back to a time long before the temples of the Roman Empire, when the shedding of innocent human blood could be done on a massive scale in the name of God. And evil was the drought and the plague of the locust and the death of the crops. I was made what I am by these people in the name of good. One should certainly examine and study other teachings, not necessarily for one’s acceptance, but for one’s boarding. Be a good student, but a bad joiner! For one will find it difficult to recognize the lineaments of full perfection either in the teaching or the practice of any existing institution or movement. However, the danger where is that one may overconcentrate on their study or practice, elevate side-routes into the main one, and finally get so absorbed in them certain are reservations in my advice, a certain watchfulness is needed during such studies. One should take care to be only an enquirer into these cults and not a follower of them. One should be first a sympathetic enquirer and then only exercise the philosophical right of severely critical examination. “Father, I pray thee that thou wilt give the Holy Ghost unto all them that shall believe in their words,” reports 2 Nephi 19. 21. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
In the end, every aspirant must find one’s own. The path of another is dangerous. Unless a spiritual teaching has enough inspiration behind it to help one successfully tackle one’s gravest personal problems, it is not the right one—however much it may be so to others. For one needs grace, and does not call in vain. And it all seems more than ever the story of the Savage Garden, dancers in the Savage Garden, where no law prevails except the law of the garden, which was the aesthetic law. That the crops shall grow high, that the wheat shall be green and then yellow, that the Sun shall shine. Look at the perfectly shaped apple that the tree has made, fancy that! The villagers will run through the orchards with their burning brands from the Lenten bonfire, to make the apples grow. With so many cults, creeds, religious, sect, and societies claiming that their teaching is the only true one or that their path is the only path to salvation, the seeker will either get bewildered or be forced to do the right thing—which is to exercise one’s own independent judgement and not to accept any claim on its mere face value. “And behold, they began to pray; and they did pray unto Jesus, calling him their Lord and their God,” reports 3 Nephi 19.18. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Whoever loves truth in its fullness cannot put on the chains of a partisanship and stay confined in a church, a temple, or a mosque, a synagogue, a school of thought, a theism, or an atheism. Therefore one cannot become an adherent to any one belief only, a convert to any one religion, a member of any one group, or a follower of any one mortal but must remain an independent, that is to say, a philosopher (philo = liker or lover, sophia = wisdom). One sees that all doctrines, all ways of belief and thought are steps on the way, satisfy some need of some persons, and hence are of service at some time. However, one sees not only that truth’s fullness is allied to one’s own freedom: it is also allied to namelessness. As Christians we know our inner conflicts about accepting or rejecting joy. We are suspicious of the gifts of nature which contribute to joy, because we are suspicious of nature itself, although we confess that it is Divine creation, knowing what God has spoken about his creation: “Behold, it was very good!” We are suspicious of the creations of culture which contribute to joy because we are suspicious of mortal’s creativity, although we confess that God has commanded mortals to cultivate the garden of the Earth which he has made subject to him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
And even if we overcome our suspicious and affirm and accept the gifts of nature and the creations of culture, we often do so with an uneasy conscience. We know that we should be free for joy, that as Paul says, “all is ours,” but our courage is inferior to our knowledge. We do not dare to affirm our World and ourselves; and if we dare to, in a moment of courage, we try to atone for it by self-reproaches and self-punishments, and we draw upon ourselves malicious criticism by those who never had dared. Therefore, many Christians try to compromise. They try to hide their feeling of joy, or they try to avoid joys which are too intense, in order to avoid self-accusations which are too harsh. Such an experience of suppression of joy, and guilt about joy in Christian groups, almost drive me to a break with Christianity. What passes for joy in these groups is an emaciated, intentionally childish, unexciting, unecstatic thing, without color and danger, without heights and depths. It is difficult to deny that this is the state of things in many Christian churches. However, now we hear the question from both the Christian and the non-Christian sides: “Is not joy, as observed in the Bible, something completely different from the joy of life, which is lacking in many Christians? Do not the Psalmist and Paul and the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel speak of a joy which transcends the natural joy of life? Do they not speak about the joy in God? Is not the decision to be a Christian a decision for the joy in God instead of for the joy of life?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
The fellowship of philosophy requires no ritual, no immersion, no strict and rigid doctrine confessions, no creedal test. It is free and non-sectarian. It shuts no one in, no one out. Philosophy is for the free mind, willing to live without organizational bondage, and understanding that what it seeks must be found and grasped for itself. Since the real essence of philosophy has only an inner content, which must be felt intuitively and grasped intellectually, but no outer form, it cannot become material for a cult, and organized group. It must lead each person on one’s own individual way, letting one grow naturally from within. One’s quest will then take the independent course proper for one, not made to conform to one suitably only to others. One who can commune with one’s soul by oneself does not need a church, a labelled religion. Society has no right to impose it on one. In their naïve adolescent gropings, the young who discard their traditional form of religion, feel something of this truth. One who loves their Spirit, who feels Its goodwill which excludes nothing, associate oneself with an enclosed group or community which excludes everyone who is not an adherent of its particular faith? #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
The refusal to join any ecclesiastical church or religious society does not leave a mortal spiritually homeless. If one faithfully exercises oneself in prayer and seeks to practice the presence of God, what better home could one have? Life is God’s, and God is the creative Ground of life. He is infinitely more than any life process. However, he works creatively through all of them. Therefore, no conflict is necessary between the joy in God and the joy of life. However, this first answer, great and joyful as it is, is not sufficient; for joy of life can mean many things. Joy seems to be the opposite of pain. However, we know that pain and joy can exist together. Not joy but pleasure is the opposite of pain. There are people who believe that mortal’s life is a continuous flight from pain and a persistent search for pleasure. I have never seen a human being of whom that is true. It is only of the beings who have lost their humanity, either through complete disintegration or through mental illness. The ordinary human being is able to sacrifice pleasures and to take pain upon oneself for a cause, for somebody or something one loves and deems worthy of pain and pleasures because one is directed not towards one’s pleasure but toward the things one loves and with which one wants to unite. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Three are the spheres in which the World of relation is built. The first: life with nature, where the relation sticks to the threshold of language. The second: life with mortals, where it enters language. The third: life with spiritual beings, where it lacks but creates language. In every relational act, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner. All spheres are included in it, while it is included in none. Through all of them shines the one presence. However, we can take each out of the presence. Out of life with nature we can take the physical World, that of consistency; out of life with mortals, the physical World, that of affectability; out of life with spiritual beings, the nonetic World, that of validity. Now they have been deprived of their transparency and thus of sense; each has become usable and murky, and remains murky even if we endow it with shining names: cosmos, eros, logos. For in truth there is a cosmos for mortals only when the Universe becomes a home for one with a holy hearth where one sacrifices; and there is eros for one only when beings become for one images of the eternal, and community with them becomes revelation; and there is logos for one only when one addresses the mystery with works and service of the spirit. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
The demanding silence of forms, the loving speech of human beings, the eloquent muteness of creatures—all of these are gateways into the presence of the word. However, when the perfect encounter is to occur, the gates are unified into the one gate of actual life, and you no longer know through which one you have entered. Of these three spheres one is distinguished: life with mortals. Here language is perfected as a sequence and becomes speech and reply. Only here does the word, formed in language, encounter its reply. Only here does the basic word go back and forth in the same shape; that of the address and that of the reply are alive in the same tongue; I and You do not only stand in a relationship but also in firm honesty. The moments of relation are joined here, and only here, through the element of language in which they are immersed. Here that which confronts us has developed the full actuality of the You. Here alone beholding and being beheld, recognizing and being recognized, loving and being loved exist as an actuality that cannot be lost. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
This is the main portal into whose inclusive opening the two side portals lead. When a mortal is intimate with his life, the longing of the eternal hills wafts about them. The relation to a human being is the proper metaphor for the relation to God—as genuine address is here accorded a genuine answer. However, in God’s answer all, the All, reveals itself as language. If we desire something because of the pleasure we may get out of it, we may get the pleasure but we shall not get joy. If we try to find someone through whom we may get pleasures, we may get pleasure but we shall not have joy. If we search for something in order to avoid pain, we may avoid pain, but we shall not avoid sorrow. If we try to use someone to protect us from pain, one may protect us from pain but one will not protect us from sorrow. Pleasures can be provided and pain can be avoided, if we use or abuse other beings. However, joy cannot be attained and sorrow cannot be overcome in this way. Joy is possible only when we are driven toward things and persons because of what they are and not because of what we can get from them. When we perform it not because of what we produce but because of the pleasures with which it can provide us, or the pain against which it can protect us, the joy about our work is spoiled. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The pleasure about the fact that I am successful spoils the joy about the success itself. If we enjoy not the truth and the beauty, but the fact that it is I who enjoys them, our joy about knowing truth and experiencing beauty is spoiled. Only if it is free from the pleasure about having power, and if it is a method of something worthwhile, power can give joy. If we use the other one as a means for pleasure or as a means to escape pain, love relations, most conspicuously relations between the genders, remain without joy. It is not an external law which warns us about certain forms of these relations, but the wisdom born out of past experiences which tells us that some of these relations may give pleasure, but that they do not give joy. They do not give joy because they do not fulfill what we are, and that for which we strive. Every human relation is joyless in which the other person is not sought because of what one is in oneself, but because of the pleasures one can give us and the pain from which one can protect us. “And behold, I am the light and the life of the World; and I have drunk out of that bitter cup which the Father hath given me, and have glorified the Father in taking upon me the sins of the World, in the which I have suffered the will of the Father in all things from the beginning,” reports 3 Nephi 11. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the fact that he was now beside me. He was closing his arm round me, and pressing his forehead against my face. He gave that summons again, not the rich, thudding seduction of that moment in the Palais Royal, but the voice that had sung to me over the miles, and he told me there were things that two of us would know and understand as mortals never could. He told me that if I opened to him and gave him my strength and my secrets that he would give me his. He had been driven to try to destroy me, and he loved me all the more that he could not. That was a tantalizing thought. Yet I felt danger. The word that came unbidden to me was Beware. Still I wondered what could be the difference between joy and happiness? Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims; but those are exactly what many people have to give us. Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell, by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but stimulates one for exploration. #RandolpHarris 1 of 16
If a mortal is to remain forever the mere appendage of another mortal, if one’s minds is to echo back only that another mortal’s idea, the question arises: When will one come to oneself? For this is not the final purpose of our life here? One who has reached this stage when one must cease being the shadow of others, will not fall into proud deceptive self-assertion if one humbly yields and follows the inner voice. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to let go. All efforts that take one outside of one’s self are only halting and temporary concessions to human weakness. The soul being inside of the person’s being, one must in the end turn within. Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human spirit. In joy that is derived from pleasures of the flesh, the thrill of the two persons moving together toward in a climax, is the goal. Welcome truth on whatever horizon it appears, look for it in all four directions, and do not leave any of them unvisited. In short, do not become narrow-minded or fanatical. Let one not be intimidated by history and believe that truth has appeared only in the past, or by geography and look for it only in an Eastern location. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the most advanced stage in the development of life; happiness promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the three of new continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life. In whatever place you find truth, with whatever name it may be labelled, take it. Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our father did them. In one’s endeavours after a better life, one should welcome the help that could come to one from every right source. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown. One should always be receptive to ideas and practices which might enrich those one already knows. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the edge of boredom. No single path will lead of itself to the full truth. Happiness is success. However, joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents emerging within oneself. There is no one group which has captured the monopoly of truth, for its recognition is a universal experience. Let us refuse to listen to those who insists upon our travelling one way and one way alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Truth is not confined to any sect but fragments of it may be found scattered here and there. Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher happiness. We may learn from everything and everyone, from every event and happening something that is new or a confirmation of something that is old, something affirmative or something negative. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solve our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary break new frontiers. Tennyson portrays Ulysses from the point of view of joy; he sees the antiquated man scorning to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! When a teacher of a teaching, a book or mystical exercise is itself being used as the indirection expression of God’s own movements to shed grace, then it is sheer blindness to denounce it as useless. Why limit the help you are willing to receive to a single quarter? All mortals are your teachers. Truth, being infinite, has an infinite number of aspects. Each spiritual guide is inclined to emphasize some only and to neglect the others. The good life, obviously, includes both joy and happiness at different times. What I am emphasizing is the joy that follows rightly confronted despair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Inspiration has manifested itself in many lands and in different forms, through widely spaced centuries and various kinds of channels. Why limit culture to one contribution, one land, one form, one century, and one channel alone? This applies not only to intellectual and artistic culture, but also to its religious aspect. We may go even farther in this matter and apply the same idea to personal gurus. Must we always be moored to a single guru? Cannot we respect, appreciate, honor, venerate and receive light from other ones in addition? Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s identity. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. During his Egyptian studies Pythagoras visited every mortal celebrated for wisdom, so eager was he to learn. He did not follow the Indian custom of sitting sown only at one man’s feet. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open—as open as it was for Adam and Eve. In the beginning of human consciousness and all of the joys that open to us. Some natural tear they dropped, but wiped them soon; the World was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Study everything but join nothing is the best counsel. But alas! naïve enthusiasts seldom heed it. One must make a stubborn reservation of one’s ground and run the flag of independence in the quest of truth, of nonattachment in the relationships with the teachers of truth. One will humbly and gladly accept whatsoever good one can find in their teachings, but one will not do so under a contact of pledged discipleship. In this matter one must be eclectic, taking the best from every available source and not shutting out any source that as something worthwhile to offer. It may not be the way for most people, for they cannot walk alone, but it is the only way for one. Self-guidance also leads to the goal. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord had done great things for us; we are glad. Restore our Fortunes, O Lord, like the water courses in the Negeb! May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy! One that foes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing one’s sheaves with one,” reports Psalm 126. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
It is only through free, independent, truth-seeking research tat there is any hope of success in this Quest for ultimate truth. Naturally each vested interest tries to limit the search to its own fold for obvious reason, but one should refuse to limit one’s studies to any single school. If one keeps one’s intellectual liberty, one is less likely to fall into narrow sectarianism. Today, as in ancient Alexandria, one can study the World’s teachings, taking truth eclectically, but not making oneself a disciple. “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the World will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the World. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and one will take your joy from you,” reports John 16.20-22. Learn some of the basic truths each system contains without identifying with the system itself. Keep the mind open and free to acquire worthwhile ideas and practices from other cultures and avoid the closed-in sectarian attitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Such an isolated position, outside groups and without labels, offers this advantage, that one is able to take from all, to accept and reconcile fragments of widely different and apparently contradictory teachings. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full,” reports John 15.11. Take whatever is of value to you personally, in your present mental condition, from all these teachings and discard the rest. This is the eclectic way, and better than the commoner one of entering a single doctrinal cage and staying there. Hesitate well before committing yourself to join this or that organization. Remember that there are more aspects to truth than one, and it may well be worth keeping yourself free to learn something of these others. The Bible abounds in admonitions to rejoice. Paul’s word to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice,” represents an ever-present element in Testaments the lack of joy is a consequence of mortal’s separation from God, and the presence of joy is a consequence of the reunion with God. Joy is demanded, and it can be given. It is not a ting one simply has. It is not easy to attain. It is and always was a rare and precious thing. And it has always been a difficult problem among Christians. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Christians are accused of destroying the joy of life, this natural endowment of every creature. The greatest of the modern foes of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself the son of a Protestant minister, has expressed his judgment about Jesus in the words, “His disciples should look more redeemed.” We should subject ourselves to the piercing force of those words and should ask ourselves, “Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christian?” Perhaps we can defend ourselves convincingly against the criticism that we are people who despise life, whose behavior is a permanent accusation of life. Perhaps we can show that this is a distortion of the truth. However, let us be honest. Is there not enough foundation for criticism? Are not many Christians—ministers, students of theology, evangelists, missionaries, Christian educators and social workers, pious laymen and laywomen, even the children of such parents—surrounded by an air of heaviness, of oppressive sternness, of lack of humor and irony about themselves? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We cannot deny this. Our Critics outside the Church are right. And we ourselves should be even more critical than they, but critical on a deeper level. I have always recommended to those who feel strong enough to be able to do so, to refrain from joining any organization, to keep their freedom, while at the same time studying the doctrines of whatever organization interests them, whatever religions engage some of their attention. This freedom enables them to look anywhere, to study everything, to question courageously, to keep breadth of view, depth of thought. Only such independence can reach out to the new without losing what is worthwhile in the old; all others are committed, fettered, captive. By remaining open to truths from different sources, and fitting them together like mosaics, we get eventually some sort of pattern. That rotation of the World’s axis which introduces the relational process has been succeeded almost immediately by the nest, which concludes it. Just now the It-World has surrounded the terrestrial being in me, then the You-World radiates from the ground for the length of one glance, and now its light has died back into the It-World. It is for the sake of language of this barely perceptible rising and setting of the spirit Sun that I relate this minute occurrence that happened to me more than once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No other event has made so deeply aware of the evanescent actuality in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy of our lot, the fated lapse into It of every single You. For usually a day, albeit brief, separated from the morning and evening of the event; but here morning and evening merged cruelly, the bright You appeared and vanished: had the burden of the It-World really been taken from the terrestrial being and me for the length of one glance? At least I could still remember it, while the terrestrial being had sunk again from its stammering glance into speechless anxiety, almost devoid of memory. How powerful is he continuum of the It-World, and how tender the manifestation of the You! There is so much that can never break through the crust of thinghood! O fragment of mica, it was while contemplating you that I first understood that I is not something in me—yet I was associated wit you only in myself; it was only in me, not between you and me that it happened that time. However, when something does emerge from among things, something living, and become a being for me, and comes to me, near an eloquent, how unavoidably briefly it is for me nothing but You! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
It is not the relationship that necessarily wanes, but the actuality of its directness. Love itself cannot abide in a direct relation; it endures, but in the alternation of actuality and latency. Every You in the World is compelled by its nature to become a thing for us or at least to enter again and again into thinghood. Think about the morning I walked on the road one dim morning, saw a piece of mica lying there, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. The day was no longer dim: so much light was caught by the stone. And suddenly, as I looked away, I realized that while looking at it I had known nothing of the object and subject; as unity. I looked at it again, but unity did not return. Then something concentrated my strength, I entered into an association with my object, I raised the piece of mica into the realm of that which has being. And then, Lucas, only then did I feel: I; only then was I. He that had looked had not yet been I; only this, this being in association bore the name like a crown. Now I felt about this former unity as a marble image might feel about the block from which it has been carved: it was the undifferentiated, while I was the unification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
As yet, I did not understand myself. True unity cannot be found, it can only be done. Can the low tide say I? Or the high tide? However, attribute a spirit to the sea and include in it the unity of low tide and high tide: that could say I. The piece of mica could not; the man looking at it could not; and the undifferentiated state of the initial look was mere material. However, once their tension had taken form, that which had become associated could. What we ordinarily call I is a point of departure and makeshift—a grammatical fact. However, the I of the tension is a work and actuality. Only in one relationship, the all-embracing one, is even latency actuality. Only one You never ceases, in accordance with its nature to be You for us. To be sure, whoever knows God also knows God’s remoteness and the agony of drought upon a frightened heart, but not the loss of presence. Only we are not always there. The love of the Vita Nuova is right in usually saying Ella and only occasionally Voi. The visionary of the Paradiso speaks inauthentically, from poetic constraint, wen he says Colui, and he knows it. Whether one speaks of God as He or It, this is never more than allegory. However, when we say You to him, the unbroken truth of the World has been made word by mortal sense. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Every actual relationship in the World is exclusive; the other breaks into it to avenge its exclusion. Solely in the relation to God are unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness one in which the Universe is comprehended. Every actual relationship in the World rests upon individuation: that is its delight, for only thus is mutual recognition of those who are different granted—and that is its boundary, for thus is perfect recognition and being recognized denied. However, in the perfect relationship my You embraces myself without being it; my limited recognition is merged into a boundless being-recognized. Every actual relationship in the World alternates between actuality and latency; every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings again. In the pure relationship, however, latency is merely actuality drawing a deep breath during which the You remains present. The eternal You is You by its very nature; only our nature forces us to draw it into the It-World and It-speech. The It-World coheres in space and time. The You-World does not cohere in either. It coheres in the center in which the extended lines of relationships intersect: in the eternal You. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
In the great privilege of the pure relationship the privileges of the It-World are annulled. By virtue of it the You-World is continuous: the isolated moments of relationships join for a World life of association. By virtue of it the You-World has the power to give form: the spirit can permeate the It-World and change it. By virtue of it we are not abandoned to the alienation of the World and the deactualization of the I, nor are we overpowered by phantoms. Return signifies the re-cognition of center, turning back to it again. In this essential deed mortal’s buried power to relate is resurrected, the wave of all relational spheres surges up a living flood and renews our World. Perhaps not only ours. Dimly we apprehended this double movement—that turning away from the primal ground by virtue of which the Universe redeems itself in being—as the metacosmic primal form of duality that inheres in the World as a whole relation to that which is not World, and whose human form is the duality of attitudes, of basic words, and of the two aspects of the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Both movements are unfolded fatefully in time and enclosed, as by grace, in the timeless creation that, incomprehensibly, is at once release and preservation, at once bound and liberation. Our knowledge of duality is reduced to silence by paradox of the primal mystery. No mortal comes to the knowledge of one’s divinity through a crowd of other mortals. No human entity can discover its own relation to God through any group method. The way to spiritual awareness is entirely individual, essentially lonely, inescapably within oneself. That is to say, it is mystical. Insofar as religion succeeds in showing the way, it ceases to be religion and becomes, or rather, consummates itself in, mysticism. Nothing is final and absolute. All is relative. Nobody need obey any mandate to bind oneself forever to any single group of ideas, need follow any sectarian flag. If one is to surrender one’s allegiance at all, it can only be reasonably done to the perfect synthesis of all that is needed for human living in all its departments. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” reports I Nephi 3.19. If the mortal of letters is to hear and pronounce the word of truth, one must be independent of groups, organizations, parties, and institutions. One must be at liberty to play with many different points of view without committing oneself forever and finally to any of them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
When I turned around, Marius was gone. The sack was gone. However, Nicki’s violin and my valise of belongings lay on a stone table in the middle of the room. We know in psychotherapy that often despair is essential to the discovery on the part of the client of his or her hidden capacities and basic assets. The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic mortality. There are some misguided therapists who feel that they must reassure the patient at ever point of despair. However, if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel any profound emotion. Apropos of considering Voltaire’s remark “Despair has often gained battles,” a friend wrote this limerick: There once was a man named Voltaire who found his best hope in despair. If that sounds perverse, it could have been worse. Voltaire could declare, “I do not care.” There is surely value in the client’s experience that one has nothing more to lose anyway so one may as well take whatever leap life requires to make of one. I suggest that this is what is meant by that sentence in folklore “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 1 of
Since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair, it is important to remind ourselves of the points that despair and confidence both banish fear. Those who can feel healthy despair are often those who also can at the same time experience the most intense pleasure and joy. Sartre was talking about a life-enhancing despair when in his play The Flies, after Zeus has pointed out al the despair Orestes will face, Orestes asserts against Zeus, “Human life begins on the far side of despair!” He could as well have said that human freedom and human joy also begin on the far side of despair. This is why we believe more firmly in the dignity and the nobility of being human after seeing a performance of tragedy rather than comedy: the character and the tragic downfall of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or even Harry in The Iceman Cometh give us a conviction of the significance of life. As we leave the theater, we are not only relieved, we are inspired. The despair we have felt in the drama highlights its opposite, the nobility of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Despair is a desperate refusal to be oneself. There different levels of despair at not willing to be one’s self, or still lower, despair at not willing to be a self’ or lowest of all, despair at willing to be another then one’s true self. Despair is a failure of spirit, a spiritlessness. When mortals are characterized as a spirit-less has become a talking-machine, and there is nothing to prevent one from learning a philosophical rigmarole just as easily as a confession of faith and a political recitative repeated by rote. Again: Despair is a qualification of spirit, it is related to the eternal in mortals. In unconsciousness of being in despair a mortal is furthest from being conscious of oneself as spirit. This thing of despairing is inherent in mortals; but if one were not a synthesis of finite and infinite, and this is what makes despair possible. One also emphasizez that the worst condition of all is to boast about never having been in despair, for that means that the person has never been authentically conscious of oneself. This leads us to another characteristic of seeing, the most significant of all. We never see only what we see; we always see something else with it and through it! Seeing creates, seeing unites, and above all seeing goes beyond itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we look at a stone we see directly only the colors and forms of the side which is turned toward us. However, with and through this limited surface we are aware of the roundness, of the extension and mass of the structure of the whole thing. We see beyond what we see. If we look at an animal we see directly the colors and forms of its skin. However, with it and through it we are aware of the tension and power of its muscles, of its inner strivings which are covered as well as revealed by the skin. We see not color sports, but a living being. If we look at a human face, we see lines and shades, but with it and through it we see a unique, incomparable personality whose expressions are visible in one’s face, whose character and destiny has left traces which we understand and in which we can even read something of one’s future. With and through colors and forms and movements we see friendliness and coldness, hostility and devotion, anger and love, sadness and joy. We see infinitely more than we see when we look into a new depth. Again the language gives us a help when it speaks of con- templation. Con- templation means going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into deep roots of things, into their creative ground. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We see the mysterious powers which we call beauty and truth and goodness. We cannot see them as such, we can see them only in things and events. We see them with and through the shape of a rose and the movements of the stars and the image of a friend. We can see them, but it is not necessary that we see them. We can close our eyes, we can become blind. Some are blind to any beauty which is more than a pleasant feeling, some are blind to any truth which is more than correct observation and calculation, some are bind to any goodness which is more than usefulness. And some are blind to any ground which is the unity of these powers and which we call holy. It is the ultimate, the last which we can see with and through all things; and therefore it is the end of all seeing. It is the light itself and therefore it is darkness for our eyes. Only with and through can we see it, through things and mortals, through events and images. This seeing and not seeing at the same time is what we call faith. Nobody can see God; but we can see him with and through. Here the conflict ends between seeing and hearing. He word tells us where to see and when we have seen we pronounce what we have seen and heard. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In the state which we call faith, sound and vision are united and perhaps this is the reason why the holy likes to be expressed in music more than in any other medium. Music gives wings to both, word and image, and goes beyond both of them. However, for a second time we are called down from the flight above to the lowliness of our human situation. Our Gospel calls us blind, all of us. And Jesus says that we are blind because we believe we see and do not know that we are blind; and Christ then threatens that we shall be thrown into more blindness if we insist that we are seeing. The question is: Where of all places can and shall we see into the ground of all Being? Who can lead our contemplation into the temple, into the holy itself? Seeing gives us a World, the order and unity of the many. However, we see within this order, disorder; within the unity, conflict threatening to explode the World itself and to being back the old darkness of the chaos. And order and chaos are so mixed with each other that we often feel dizzy, without ground and meaning, desiring to keep our eyes closed. Seeing unites us with what we see. However, we see so many things and beings with which we do not want to be untied, towards which we are indifferent or hostile, which are indifferent or hostile to us, which are repulsive and which we hate to see just because every seeing unites, even if it is through hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And it may be even our own self that we do not want to see because we are repelled by our image and because we hate it if we see it. Not in love but in hate are we untied with ourselves, and perhaps we want to deprive ourselves of our eyes like Lestat in The Queen of the Damned, of our eyes which first did not see what they ought to see and now cannot stand to see what they must see. And is not that which we love to see and that which we hate to see so mixed that we often praise the poverty of not seeing? Seeing is seeing with and through beings into their depth, into the good and the true and into their holy ground. However, which are the beings and images that shall lead us to this temple? Those whom Jesus called blind believed they knew the way to the temple, to the holy and the holiest. Innumerable temples all over the World contain things and images with and through which we can see God. However, what we see are idols, fascinating, horrible, overwhelming in seductive beauty or destructive power, demanding what cannot be fulfilled, promising what cannot be given, giving what elevates and lowers at the same time. And this is so because they hold us fast to themselves and do not lead us beyond. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Our eyes are bound by them, often bound by the demonic fascination they exercise and with which they take possession of us. We contemplate them, we go into their temples, we unite with them in self-surrender, and we leave them emptied, despairing, destroyed. This is the great temptation of seeing. This is the reason why hearing was put against seeing. It is the reason why images were destroyed again and again and every image forbidden, why the temples were burned and God was called the Infinite Void. However, this cannot be the last word. Emptiness can be both light and darkness; and we want light, the lights which is life and vision. Jesus also could have become an idol, a national and religious hero, fascinating and destructive. This is what the disciples and the masses wanted Christ to be. They saw him the good and the true, the holy itself. However, the succumbed to the temptation of seeing. They kept to that which must be sacrificed if God shall be seen with and through any mortal being. And when Christ sacrificed himself, they looked away in despair like those who image and idol is destroyed. However, he was too strong; he drew their eyes back to him, but now to Christ crucified. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, of hum it is true. Certainly Christ is not the only one to look at intuition and contemplation. We are not asked to stare at Christ, as some do. We are not asked to look away from everything for his sake, as some do. We are not asked to give up the abundance of his creation as some do. We are not asked to refuse union with what we see as some do. However, we are asked to see wit and through everything into the which Christ shows the way. We shall see into it unimpeded by that which tries to keep us, away from the last dept. And when we are tired of seeing the abundance of the World with all its disorder, its hate and separation, its demonic destruction, and if we are also unable to look into the blinding light of the divine ground, then let us close our eyes. And then it might happen that we see the picture of someone who looks at us with eyes of infinite human depth and therefore of divine power and love. And those eyes say to us “Come and see.” Human’s religious situation, existence in the presence, is marked by its essential and indissoluble antinomies. That is these antinomies are indissoluble constitutes their very essence. Whoever affirms the thesis and repudiates the antithesis violates the sense of the situation. Whoever tires to think a synthesis destroys the sense of the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Whoever would settle the conflict between antinomies by some means short of one’s own life transgresses against the sense of the situation. It is the sense of the situation that it is to be lived in all its antinomies—only lived—and lived ever again, ever anew, unpredictably, without any possibility of anticipation or prescription. A comparison of the religious and the philosophical antinomy will make this clearer. We can relativize the philosophical conflict of freedom and necessity by relegating the latter to the World of appearance and the former to that of being, so that the two positions no longer really oppose one another but rather get along with one another as well as do the two World in which each is valid. However, when I mean freedom and necessity not in Worlds that are thought of but in the actuality in which I stand before God; when I know, I have been surrendered and know at the same time, it depends on me, then I may not try to escapes from the paradox I have to live by relegating the irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms; neither may I seek the assistance of some theological artifice to attain some conceptual reconciliation: I must take it upon myself to live both in one, and lived both are one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We regard Ralph Waldo Emerson as the perfect example of spiritual independence. He seems beholden to no mortal and draws all one’s light from within. How did he arrive at this condition? For in his early thirties, he wrote to his Aunt Mary, “A teacher–when will God send me one full of truth and boundless benevolence?” This question was written soon after he came to Europe. There were four literary heroes across the Atlantic among whom he hoped to find his teacher. They were Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. However, when he met them in the flesh, Landor severely disappointed him. The Coleridge visit was “of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity.” Emerson’s interview with Wordsworth was more successful but still so fruitless that he was glad to end it. The first glance at Carlyle made him believe that his search for a teacher was over, that there was his man. The actuality was the he found a lifelong friend, even a fellow-pilgrim and seeker. However, he did not become a pupil. He had gone in search of a master. He failed to find one. Indeed he tells his aunt as much, that he seeks a man who is wise and true but that he never gets used to men. “They always awaken expectations in me which they always disappoint.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Ralph Waldo Emerson left Europe, writing in his journal in his journal on shipboard the melancholy after-reflection, “I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore.” And it was there, in his little cabin, that he received the illumination which he could not find in Europe. He need look outside himself no more. Out of his illumination, whilst still afloat on the ocean he wrote down such sentences as these: “A man contains all that is needful within himself.” “Nothing can be given to him or take away from him but always there is a compensation.” “The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.” One’s attraction toward this or that teacher may weaken and die but one’s attraction toward the Inspirer of all teachers, God, will keep on growing stronger in one. One alone must answer this question, and one can best answer it by listening for and obeying that deep inner feeling which is called intuition. The rarity of competent teachers in the World, and especially in the Western World, forces seekers to practice self-reliance and cultivate independence, unless they are willing to accept substitutes for competence or join organizations making unsubstantiated claims. God will not neglect determined seekers and through circumstances, events, books, or otherwise gives them the particular guidance or instruction needed at a particular time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The aspirant of today who is thoroughly discriminating will generally fail to find the support of a competent teacher. Usually one will have to depend on the inner Self alone. If one will listen to the voice of the Silence and accept its invisible leadership, one need not accept any human leadership. What one learns from outside one’s self, from teacher or tradition, will never lead to one’s true fulfilment until one joins it with what one learns in the stillness from inside oneself. People tie themselves to some one mortal, living or dead, and worthy of one. Yet one is outside themselves, and the divine is within, themselves. They contemplate one’s form, surrender to one’s personality, refuse to look within. As long as they do this, so long does the Consciousness elude them. When a mortal recognizes that all one really needs come to one from the higher self, and not from other mortals, and in the measure that one uses one’s own efforts to complete one’s development and so come closer in consciousness to that self, in that measure will one gain what one needs. Books however sacred, ceremonies however impressive, lecture however learned, even Masters however wise are still only outer helps and as such must in the end be discarded. “The Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the things which the Lord have commanded us,” reports 1 Nephi 3.15. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
When I awoke, I was on board a ship. I could hear the creak of the boards, smell the sea. I could smell the scent of those who manned the ship. And I knew that it was the galley because I could hear the rhythm of the oars under the low rumbling of the giant canvas sails. I could not open my eyes, could not make my limbs move. Yet I was calm. I did not thirst. In fact, I experienced an extraordinary sense of peace. My body was warm as if I had only just fed, and it was pleasant to lie there, to dream waking dreams on the gentle undulation of the sea. The mind began to clear. I knew that we were slipping very fast through rather still waters. And that the Sun had just gone down. The early evening sky was darkening, the wind was dying away. And the sound of the oars dipping and rising was as soothing as it was clear. My eyes were open now. I did not turn away from life toward some mystical Nirvana. I forgot none of the joy, the effort, or the pain. I abandoned nothing. What I achieved was something much more wonderful than an old man’s serenity. I will take fate by the throat. It shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
God is the only true sense of the World: he does not have to copy others, only to express one’s own individuality, most his higher spirituality. God takes care to remain what he is, he is true to himself, high holy self. However, insofar as we let our happiness depend on another person and lose our independence, one becomes weakened. Even if the other gives one knowledge or love or support, one should still not cease to look within as deeply as one can for the idyllic Peace. In the end a mortal must come to oneself, one’s diviner self, one’s essential being. And where shall one look for it if not there where Jesus pointed within? Not outside, not to some other mortal, however high one’s repute as guru, not to some book, however sacrosanct its scriptural authority. Both mortal and book must, if loyal to the highest, also direct one inward. The Kingdom is within you, not somewhere else, not in an ashram, not even at the feet of a guru: Jesus’ declaration is literally accurate. One of the reasons we are so reluctant to confront the aspects of destiny called fate is that we are afraid it will lead us into despair. We Americans are taught always to wear a garment of optimism, and we believe that with despair all hope is lost. So we cling to any false hope we can conjure up to serve as a bulwark against despair, unaware that a hope that has to be striven for is no hope at all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong things. This beginning for some hope opens us to exploitation by any psychoreligious charlatan who appears on the horizon. All to escape the demon of despair! However, suppose that despair were basically a constructive emotion? Suppose despair is often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement? Not all seeing has this character of union. If we look at things and observe them merely to control and to use them, no real union takes place. We keep them at a distance. We try to bring them into our power, to use them for our purposes, as means for our ends. There is no long in this kind of seeing. We glimpse the beings that shall serve us coldly; we have for those which we use a look, curious or indifferent, sensational or aggressive, hostile or cruel. There is abuse in the looking at those which we use. It is a seeing that violates and separates. This is the look of masses who in medieval paintings are looking at the Crucified. However, even this kind of seeing creates some union, though union through separation. However, it is the seeing that really unites is different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Our language has a word for seeing that really unites: Intuition. This means seeing into. It is an intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped. It is a seeing shaped by love. Plato, the teacher of the centuries, whose visions and words have deeply influenced the Fourth Gospel and the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. He called the love which drives us to a genuine intuition the child of poverty and abundance. It is the love which fills our want with the abundance of our World. However, it fills us in such a way that the disrupted multitude is not the last we see—a view which disrupts ourselves. The last we see lies in that which unites, which is eternal in and above the transitory things. Into this view Plato wanted to initiate his followers. The individual seeker should take one’s own soul—one’s higher self—as one’s guide. By prayer and reading of the holy scriptures, one may attain glimpses of it occasionally and receive the needed guidance. This is safer than bonding oneself to any institution or a so-called master. If one can put as much faith in the existence and power of one’s soul as most seekers put into their blind following of these masters, one’s efforts should prove sufficiently effective. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When we annul suffering, it is a way of saying we are becoming and passing away—the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. Henceforth there is no recurrence is to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. However, if we do not know that there is recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible. Whether people will obtain the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly one leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. However, one leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the jungle of opinions, but also away from the deception of forms—which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for us simply belong to it) the reliable World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One’s path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when one bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what one means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does one lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. One’s inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You. Saying You to a mortal—that is clear from one’s greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with one’s disciples—but one does not teach it: to this love, which means boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become, the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of one’s silence one certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the gods whom one treats like disciples; it was from a relation process the became substance the one’s deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this one remains silent. One’s following among the nations, however, the great vehicle, denied one gloriously. They addressed the eternal You of mortals—using the name of God. And they expect as the coming of God, the last one of his eon, him, that shall fulfill love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in mortals. In truth it occurs from mortal—between mortal and what one is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, one must draw into mortal that which is not mortal, one must psychologize World and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit. In this fathom-sized, feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the World and the origin of the World and the annulment of the World and the path that leads to the annulment of the World. That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true. Certainly, the World dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. However, that does not mean that it is in me, just I am not in it. The World and I include each other reciprocally. This contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled by the You-relation which detaches me from the World in order to relate me to it. The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the World, I carry in myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion, the World carries in itself. However, this is not a thinkable will but the whole Worldliness of the World, just as the former is not a knowing subject but the whole I-likeness of the I. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No further reduction is valid here: whoever does not honor the ultimate unities thwarts the sense that is only comprehensible but not conceptual. The origin of the World and the annulment of the World are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. However, what it depends on is not whether I affirm or negate the World in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the World come to life, life that affects the World, actual life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. However, whoever merely has a living experience of one’s attitude and retains it in one’s soul may be as thoughtful as can be, one is Worldless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasm, and mysteries that happen within one do not touch the World’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in one’s self, one cannot do any good or harm to the World; one does not concern it. Only one that believes in the World achieves contact with it; and if one commits oneself one also cannot remain Godless. Let us love the actual World that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I know nothing of a World and of Worldly life that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-World, the life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the World, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful. God embrace but is not myself. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I an You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there, in eternity, the word. Let us look at the experience of a young man named Britain. He came into therapy feeling sad, hopeless, lonely, lost. He felt everybody had died—his mother, his sister Britney—and the relation with Celeste was nearly dead, and now, at the end of therapy, the relation with the therapist was dying. He was in clear, unadulterated despair. However, halfway through the session he began his recovery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The despair was essential in bringing Britain to the point where he could give up his previous neurotic ways of behaving in his overwork and in his failure to have full relationships with other people. This experience when he had been a young man had been one turning point in his life, just as he and I believed this therapy, ten concluding, would be a turning point in one’s overcoming his love bind with Celeste. Thus, despair can lead to highly constructive action. It can be a flushing out of the Augean stables. Despair can be a giving up and a letting go of neurotic problems that had been solidifying since one was an infant. In this sense despair plays the constructive role reserved for it in every psychotherapy. I am speaking of despair not as a cosmic pout nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair. Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It was once thought that when an ostrich was in danger it hid its head in the ground believing that if it could not see anyone, no one could see it. That has led to the idea that is people refuse to face painful facts or unpleasant truths, they play ostrich. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We have imposed on us a demand to face the reality of one’s life. The letting go that we noted in despair is a letting go of false hopes, of pretended loves, of infantilizing dependency, of empty conformism which serves only to make one behave like sheep huddling in a flock because they fear the wolves outside the circle. Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom. The Grand Inquisitor is right: we would not choose to go into despair if we consulted only our rational choices. However, there is no denying destiny or fate, and reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our natural lives, uninhibited by external influences, which may be toxic. It is well known that in successful therapy sessions, that organizations which are far and away the most effective in treating people, state frankly that the assistant for the injured or disabled or an individual with special needs cannot be cured until he or she is in complete despair. It is only then that the individual can give up the need for the source of their dependence as a solace for his or her forlorn hopes or to bolster his or her false expectations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Those who have been through a rehabilitation program and then help new members simply laugh outright at the predespair of unrealistic grandiosity, one’s pompous I-am-the-master-of-my-fate-attitude, and one’s vain resolutions to control one’s dependency by one’s own will power, come to understand that one has to find a higher faith in the power of God to resolve and heal situations. Then the Lord will let one see why there is none upon the Earth that can speak to my condition, namely, that one might give God all the glory. Because sometimes we hope for the wrong things, and hopes themselves can become the most seductive delusions. When a person reached the lowest point, state, or condition, for instance, when one has reached ultimate despair—one can then surrender to eternal forces; this process as giving up the delusion of false hopes and, thus, acknowledging fully the facts of destiny. Then and only then can this person begin to rebuild oneself. It is superb demonstration of the hypothesis that freedom begins only when we confront destiny. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The same was true of Synanon, the drug rehab turned violent cult, as the system became a nest for fraud. There was failure to define and enforce clear ethical standards governing their business practices, an it rendered the treatment program to become field of predator’s paradise. Synanon started in Santa Monica, California by Charles Dederich, and morphed into a utopian community, then a religion and a cult with more than $30 million in assets and upward of 1,300 followers. True believers shaved their heads, wore overalls, and lived together at Synanon compounds, professing and almost slavish obedience to Charles Dederich, no matter how brutal his methods. They were said to even kidnap people. Despite all the high idealistic talk of oneness, fraternity, and egolessness, each of us is still an individual, still has to dwell in a body of one’s own, to use a mind of one’s own and experience feelings of one’s own. To forget this is to practice self-deception. Each will come to God in the end but one will comes as a purified transformed and utterly changed person, lived in and used by God as one will live in and be conscious of the presence of God. “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is experiment in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
We even went in search of haunted houses together—a newfound pastime that excited us both. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be supposed to by possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. What, then, shall we do? The only answer is: Be compassionate. The universality of evil makes human compassion necessary. I often remark to the parents who are sad about the part they are played in the problems of their children. You and I—all of us who are human—are on the same yacht. Platitude through this is it often helps relieve them of the solitary, pariahlike quality that makes them feel they are alone in their mistakes and solitary in their evil. Mere rationalism can never solve the problem of life for the intellect no longer knows is from the ought, or known from the known—that is to say, ascents to Heaven; only the dead can be forgiven; but when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. However, there is an act of harmony between the two. I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought; measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the heart, we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
This is an exquisite description of what happens in the deeper sense of forgiveness toward oneself. The forgiveness extends, in the case of parents and children, to the sons and daughters as well; for the regrets are often bound up with what seems to be their opposite, resentment on the part of the parents at the son or daughter for causing him or her such perplexity and sufferings. Thus forgiveness of oneself permits one to forgive others. Forgiveness, which is one phase of compassion, puts deeper meaning into our human comedies, and enables us to get insight from our tragedies so that they become bearable. Forgiveness means to overcome the resentment—to cast out remorse—which is the curse that accumulates in most human relationships. Forgiving ourselves as well as others may be the only way of transcending this resentment. The health-enhancing aspect of the forgiving of others is that it helps wipe away the resentment toward oneself at the same time. Compassion gives us fresh perspective on what it means to be human, and helps us judge less harshly ourselves as well as the persons who impinge upon us. Paradoxical as it sounds, this gives us a point outside our remorse from which we can do more to correct it. We stop, then, condemning ourselves for being human, and we can at the same time stop condemning others for the same condition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old men. Nicolas de Lenfent lived to be thirty. Two hundred years ago, the people of Paris would have got him. He would not have had to burn himself. Got me too maybe. But I doubt it. No, there never would have been any witches place for me. He lives on in my mind now. Pious mortal phrase. And what kind of life is that? I do not like living here myself! What does it mean to live on in the mind of another? Nothing, I think. You are not really there, are you? This means that everybody needs all the clarity they can muster regarding their ignorance and finiteness, and all the support they can obtain in order to face the upsetting implications of what their clarity reveals to them. A compassionate person is one who, by virtue of accepting this situation, can provide others as well as self with such support. As a mortal walks through life keeping a secret loyalty to one’s inner spiritual self, one is likely to make a few friends among those who are keen-sighted enough to perceive this loyalty, and a few enemies among others who misconstrue one’s actions and misunderstand one’s motives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
And because one firmly believes in complete payment for all deeds by God sets over humankind, one will remain indifferent without resentment and without hatred to the latter, while silently returning a benign love to one’s friends. Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel. The less affluent and the rich are both equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris at night—this illustrates how freedom can turn into cruelty toward the less fortunate. Many of the crusades under the banner of freedom—and not merely the ones we read about in history books—have consisted of requiring the other person to accept one’s own concept of freedom. Thus, they have turned out to be tyrannical. This can be seen in some experiences of psychotherapy. The therapist may be convinced that one’s own form of freedom is the only thing that is good for the client, which then makes for coldness, rigidity, inhumanness in the therapist even though what one does may be technically correct. Mysticism is not concerned with those who depend on traditional forms of worship and current religious creeds for the satisfaction of all their inner needs. It is not for them and could do nothing for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
However, those to whom such dependence is mere incidental or mostly provisional may find further nutriment in mystical teachings and practices. Spiritual pride can take different forms. One of them is a studied intellectual independence, a refusal to be committed, the maintenance of a so-called open mind which never comes to a decision. Any good thing overdone becomes a bad thing and although independent judgment and thinking for oneself, if pushed to an extreme it merges into mere pride—egoistic pride. It is only as one gets released from all the self-pictured, self-made, much limited imaginations provided for one by less educated but well-meaning mortals that one can begin to let in the grace-bestowed new understanding of God. The person, young or mature, who has one’s mind set on higher things than pleasures of the moment and is willing to sacrifice a fragment of time, attention, and interest of such studies and such prayers, will find one’s refusal to conform to other people’s ways is repaid in inner growth on the quest. Attainment of sanctity may not be bought at the price of relinquishment of sanity. I once supervised a psychiatrist whose patient, a young woman of nineteen, was giving him a good deal of trouble. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The patient was constantly being irritated, changing the subject, and in general angry and petulant. I remarked in the supervisory hour that the young woman might be trying to get some sign of affection from the therapist. The psychiatrist in the next session, when the young woman was playing out her petulant drama, interrupted her with “You know, I like you.” The patient stopped talking, paused a moment and then said, “I guess that is what it is all about.” When the therapist reported this to me, I asked, “Do you like her?” And he answered, “No, I really do not.” There flashed before my mind a glimpse of the whole treatment collapsing, for there is no doubt that patients in therapy can sense this presence of lack of compassion, despite all pretenses. Surely enough, she broke off the therapy after a couple of sessions. Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name. When the level is basic as compassion, even if though they may not speak of it, patients will see through any pretense, since they are taught in our culture to pretend that they do not see such negative things. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If people would learn to accept the authority of the Voice of Inspiration whenever and wherever it spoke to them, they would not need to cramp and confine themselves within the narrowing walls of any sect or section, any cult or organization. The Real Self dwells above time and space, matter and form, inviolable in its perfect liberty. If that be the goal of ideal state, one must sooner or later make a beginning to come into closer relations to it and to grow by the radiance of its light. Therefore one does no wrong in standing aloof from the confinements of discipleship to one particular mortal, and the restrictions of membership in one organized group. No longer is one willing to accede to the World’s demand for one’s loyalty, for one’s conformity, for one’s surrender. One is recovering one’s own individual identity and is determined to keep it. It is to God that one must give one’s ultimate allegiance. If one’s mind is filled with other people’s teachings, it may give no attention to God’s teachings, leading, and intuitions. There is a teaching principle in every mortal which can provide one with whatever spiritual knowledge one needs. However, one must first take suitable measures to evoke it. These include cleansing of body and mind, aspiration of feeling and thought, silencing of intellect and ego. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
As an expression of the divine life-power, one is unique. In the end, one will always have to take one’s guidance from within, that is to say, direct from that life-power which has made one what one is. The independent seeker, uncommitted to any cult, may be a sheep without a fold but one is not necessarily without a shepherd. The inner voice can guide and care for one no less than a mortal in the flesh. A therapist colleague of mine was seeing regularly a patient whose manner was generally bombastic and insolent. One day the therapist’s daughter had been seriously hurt. Nothing was said by the therapist in the session about the accident, but the patient that day, as we heard on the tape, was tender, kind, and completely without his usual bombast, as though he were aware of the therapist’s tragedy—which he could not have known. Does this presuppose some degree of mental telepathy in therapy or some capacity to pick up the tiny cues such as the sound of one’s voice? I believe both are probably true. Dr. Freud was right, in my judgment, in his mortal theory of telepathy, stating that he had learned not to lie in therapy because he hand often enough experienced the fact that the patient would see through the lie n matter how hard Dr. Freud tried to cover it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some refuse to claim unity exists or does not exist. One who has passed though all the trials of immersion will persist in unity after death or one will not persist in it. This refusal, this noble silence, has been explained in two way. Theoretically: because perfection is said to elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the unveiling of such truths would not assist salvation. In truth both explanations belong together: whoever treats being as the object of an assertion, pulls it down into division, into the antitheses of the It-World—in which there is no salvation. When the view prevails that soul and body are identical, there is no salvation; when the view prevails that the soul is one and the body is another, then also there is no salvation. In the envisaged mystery, even as in lived actuality, neither this it is nor thus it is not prevails, neither being nor not being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided mystery undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We may follow the faithful to the truth of our encounter; going further would involve a betrayal of the actuality that we do not fetch from our own depths but that has been inspired in us and apportioned to us, we know: if this is merely one of the foals, then it cannot be ours; and if it is the goal, then it has been misnamed. And: if it is one of the goals, then the path may lead all the way to it; if it is the goal, then the path merely leads closer to it. Jesus says, “I came into this World, that those who do not see may see.” And the apostle says, “That which we have seen with out eyes, which we have looked upon—we proclaim to you.” Both speak not about the future, but about something they have seen and still see. And they certainly do not feel as do old and new theologians that there is a conflict between seeing and hearing, between seeing and believing. “That which we have seen and heard,” writes the apostle. “Everyone who see the Son and believes in him,” says Jesus. And most important and surprising: That which we have seen with our eyes according to our gospel is the Word, the eternal Word or Logos in whom God speaks, who can be seen through the words of creation and who is visible in the man Jesus. The Word can be seen, this is the highest unity of hearing and seeing, that is the truth which can bridge the Protestant and the Catholic half-truths. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The technique of treatment must be in yourself for the best therapist is one who has problems one’s self, but is aware of them and is working on them. In psychotherapy one cannot have compassion for another if one never has experienced psychological problems of one’s own. Note that I do not ay the same psychological problems as the clients—that is not necessary. However, the therapist must know what the struggle between self and soul really feels like through one’s own experience. This is why, in interviewing and selecting candidates for two different psychoanalytic training institutes, I would never consider the candidate who was “well adjusted” and who had not endured the wresting with one’s own destiny. I assumed—and I believe rightly so—that such persons would not empathize with and feel compassion for the patient or client. The two greatest therapists I ever knew personally, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan, had, individually, almost every problem you can imagine, and both had fantastic insight into the problems of their patents and corresponding compassion. One of the obvious and central functions of the didactic therapy that the trainee is required to go through is to sensitize oneself to the problems within oneself in order to have compassion for the other persons one is to work with. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The person who lack compassion does not grasp the whole circuit in one’s human relationships. When we speak of the importance of art, poetry, religion, and other right-brain functions, unassisted consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when one’s hardheaded policies return to plague inventor. The inadequacy of a solely ration point of view, for reason is pliable to every sense, and in practice reason is often a matter of truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that. It is our destiny to live always in some form of community. Even the frontiersman who counted it a matter of pride that all of twenty miles separated one from one’s nearest neighbor was still bound to that neighbor by a language no matter how rarely one spoke it, by one’s memory, by every thought, ad infinitum. The wolf child is an anomaly and, indeed, is a proof of what I am saying in that one became human only when one exhibited a communal morality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The fact that we belong to a community as well as being individual persons requires that we acknowledge this destiny and relate to each other with compassion. Compassion limits our freedom, but it renders freedom human at the same time. As we have seen, the refusal to admit destiny is to cut ourselves off from other. And now we can see its cruelty. Surely it is relevant: If I do not take care of myself, who else will? However, if one takes care only of oneself, one’s freedom can become cruelty to others. Love, of which compassion is the first step, keeps freedom from becoming tyrannical. The universality of evil also makes necessary human mercy, the gentle virtue, as Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, rightly insisted. Mercy not only drops like a soft Spring rain, but it is like forgiveness in that it blessed one who gives and one wo takes, Mercy is the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above this sceptered sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute to God himself, and Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice. Evil will not disappear of shrink away during the night. We will never wake up in the morning to find that evil has vanished from the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The purpose of human life is not to avoid mistakes, nor to show an unblemished escutcheon, but to rise to meet the challenges as our destiny reveals itself and to search out in freedom the challenges we wish to engage in. As I read the human tragicomedy, we will go on struggling, avoiding complete nuclear catastrophe by the skin of our teeth, trying to become aware of the pitfalls in ourselves and our society, so that we can make constructive choices whenever possible. In this tragicomedy forgiveness and mercy will season justice and make life bearable with the presence of beauty, the emotion of love, and the occasional experience of joy. Seeing is the most astonishing of our natural powers. It receives the light, the first of all that is created, and as the light does it conquers darkness and chaos. It creates for us an ordered World, things distinguished from each other and from us. Seeing shows us their unique countenance and the larger whole to which they belong. Whenever we see, a piece of the original chaos is transformed into creation. We distinguish, we recognize, we give a name, we know. I have seen—that means in Greek I know. From seeing, all science starts, to seeing it must always return. We want to ask those who have seen with their eyes and we ourselves want to see with our eyes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Only the human eye is able to see in this way, to see a World in every small thing and to see a Universe of all things. Therefore the human eye is infinite in reach and irresistible in power. It is the correlate to the light of creation. However, seeing means more than the creation of a World. Where we see we unite with what we see. Seeing is a kind of union. As poetry has described it, we drink colors and forms, forces and expression. They become part of ourselves. They give abundance to the poverty of our loneliness. Even when we are unaware of them they stream into us; but sometimes we notice them and welcome them and desire more of them. Those bewildered by the doctrinal differences between the established or traditional creeds, theologies, liturgies, and customs, yet still seeking some mental satisfaction, finding similar differences between the religious heresies, the non-established or modern cults, have a way out of their problem. This is to apply themselves to direct personal practices which can give them their own experience, their own teaching, from within. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
These standard practices include self-purification and prayer. For this inner work they do not have to join any group or organization, do not have to search for, follow or cling to any guide. The God within them becomes, with faith, patience, persistence, and practice, the light on their path. If one finds the same tenet in ten different religious creeds or metaphysical codes one is glad to get their repeated confirmation. However, in the end one must get it for oneself from within one’s own self—God. It is the firmest base of life. Although it is quite true that each quester must travel the path for oneself, must move on one’s own two feet, this does not mean that one is travelling completely along, or on one’s own. If one has no personal guide to accompany one, God is still there, within one, pulling, drawing, leading, or pointing, if only one can learn how to recognize it. One wants to be faithful to the Glowing Light within, not subjected to or obstructed by an outside authoritarianism. If the Infinite Power is everywhere present, it can surely make itself known to is ardent seeker in any place, even though that place be bereft of masters. “It is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that Angels appear and minister unto mortals; wherefore, if these things have ceased wo be unto the children of mortals, for it is because of unbelief, and all is vain,” reports Moroni 7.37. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
No. He found a way to imitate immortal life. To be one with mortals. He slew only the evildoer, and he painted as mortals paint. When you were telling me, Angels and blue skies, clouds, those are the things you made me see. He created good things. And I see wisdom in him and a lack of vanity. He did not need to reveal himself. He had lived a thousand years and he believed more in the vistas of Heaven that he painted than in himself. You have to suffer through emptiness and find what impels you to continue. There is perfection in life you cannot deny. We are illusions of what is more, and the stage is an illusion of what is real. Do you not see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual. The look in a face, the music of a violin. A Paris theater can be infused with the spiritual for all its solidity. There is nothing in it that has not been shaped by the power of those who possessed spiritual visions of what it could be. Seduce the public with voluptuousness. For God’s sake, and the devil’s, use the power of this life and the theater as you will. Can anyone look on the great works of the past and the present and not call them spiritual? Mystics, such as Anne Rice, Sarah Winchester, Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, use the language of the spirit with a greater insight than the rest of us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The human spirit can never be satisfied with what light it has but storms the firmament and scales the Heavens to discover the spirit by which the heavens are driven in revolutions and by which everything on the Earth grows and flourishes. The spirit, in knowing, has no use for number, for numbers are of use only within time, in this finite World. No one can strike one’s roots into eternity without being rid [of concept] of number. The human spirit must go beyond all number-ideas, must break past and away from ideas of quantity and then one will be broken into by God—God leads the human spirit into the desert, into one’s own unity—here the spirit achieves unity and freedom. Freedom turns out to be central in the concept of the mystics, probably because they exercise their own freedom so intensively in achieving their inspirations. God does not constrain the will, rather, he sets in free, so that it may chose him, that is to say, freedom. The spirit of the mortal may not will otherwise than what God wills, but that is no lack of freedom. It is true freedom itself. When we considered the curious union of destiny and freedom that characterizes the great religions we see in them that freedom and necessity, or freedom and bondage, are ultimately identical. Your intensions are right and your will is free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When we consider art in the great churches, one ponders, is it spiritual or is it voluptuous? Is the Angel in the stained glass caught in the material, or was the material transformed? No matter what on things, one never doubts the beauty of value of the work. I know I do not. And it is the material transformed. It ceases to be a window and becomes magic, just as the blood ceases to be liquid and becomes life. God is fire. Existence is a stream of fire. All life is fire. The fire is the will. Will—freedom—is the principle of all things. Freedom is deeper than and prior to all nature. Freedom is the foundation of being, freedom is to most deeper and more primary than all being, deeper and more primary than God himself. If the love of God it to have any meaning, the wrath of God is necessary. By our own powers we are visually impaired, but through the spirit of God, our own inborn spirit pierces all things. However one judges them, authentic mystics have a source of wisdom that cannot come from learning, but must come from insights that spring out of an immediate participation in the Universe in ways we cannot understand, but surely can admire. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The mystics’ wisdom seems to be a combination of empathy, telepathy, intuition. This shows how far off the mark are those who criticize such things as acupuncture, and placebos of many sorts from a purely left-brain, rationalistic point of view. Such things as placebos may simply represent tangible patterns that act as foci on which a person may project the insights and intuitions that come from different sources. Whatever peculiarity one may have shown in the past one need not look like that today, and does not need to assume theatrical postures. One can be ordinary and inconspicuous, one’s behavior normal, one’s demenour simple. However, one thing one may do and that is cultivate some individuality in one’s attitude toward life. Most mortals live as prisoners of ideas which are not even their own, but which have been suggested to them by other people. Independent thinking is rare. Consciously or unwittingly, most of us are suggestible. We accept the thoughts which other persons want to put in our heads. And we do so to such an extent that we live vicariously: we do not really live our own lives. This is quite fitting and proper to the childhood and adolescent years, but how can it be worth of the adult ones? #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Where is the mortal who has one’s own self, and not one made for one by others? Heredity and environment, society and suggestion, convention and education heavily contribute to forming an “I” that is not one’s own “I,” to making a pseudo-individual that is not oneself but passes for it. As one goes deeper and deeper into oneself, one’s private acts become more and more independent of other people’s suggestions and resistant to their influence. The longer I live the more I am impressed, to the point even of awe, by the tremendous power of suggestion on the human mind. Where is the person who is able to cultivate one’s own intelligence without being conditioned by ideas and examples put into it by one’s environment or by one’s reading, by one’s religion or one’s family, by one’s social tradition, or by the personal fears and desires connected wit others? It is others, whether of the long-dead past or of the living present who partly or wholly imprison one in their thoughts and imaginations, their conflicts. An inner life not entirely directed by or dependent on another person is an adult one. No one is such who has to seek another’s approval of one’s actions or shrink from disapproval of them. We do not have to accept all the burdens which others try to put upon our shoulders. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
We are free to choose and to be sure that we are not merely surrendering our own ego to the other person’s. Of what use is it to ask or accept the opinions of those who are inexpert in this subject because they have yet to study it thoroughly? A truth which is born out of personal knowledge, or hammered out of personal experience, has more value for a mortal than other people’s hearsay. Whatever form our outer life may have to take under the pressure of destiny, one will keep one’s inner life inviolate. It is not necessarily an unstable mind which pushes one from guru to guru, or from belief to belief, or from group to group. It may be that one is really seeking the one Truth and has not by one’s own standards found it in others yet. It is the individual who refuses to be cast in a mold who brings inspiration, inner contact with the divine, not the institution. There are few who rise above the crowd to this level by their own self-ennoblement and self-interiorization. The philosopher is not discouraged because the number of those who adopt philosophical ideas is so small. One is not seeking the success of a movement, group, program, or sect. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even if one were the only person who held these ideas one is learning and expressing, one would still not be discouraged. For one knows that one has not been put in the World to reform it but to reform oneself. One makes ones own World-view rather than inherits it with one’s body, that is, one thinks for oneself, without inherited bias and prejudice. It is sometimes beneficial to throw away the manuals of spirituality, the textbooks of holiness! There is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubtantial—we may say: God and human, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to mortal, is called mission and commandment; from mortal to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in one, bows before one that is grater and prays to one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to mortal’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization. However, mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony? I know not only of one but two kinds of event in which one is no longer away of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too did at one time. First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between mortals and God but in a mortal. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being standalone in itself and jubilates in its exaltation. This is mortal’s decisive moment. Without this one is not fir for the work of the spirit. With this—it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to one’s encounter—wholly successful only now—with mystery and perfection. However, one can also savor the bliss of one’s unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way id decision—intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret—but this one, deep down, is the primarily secret decision. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. However, when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflect on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this World into that unity, when this World itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity—what does all enjoyment of God profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich Heavenly Moment has noting to do wit my poor Earthly moment—what is it to me as long as I still have to live on Earth—must in all seriousness still live on Earth? That is way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of unification. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Which was no unification. Those human being may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamic of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in World time, fusing I an You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured. What we find here is a marginal exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten. This is one of the phenomena that we find on the margins where actuality becomes blurred. However, what is greater for us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of being is the central actuality of everyday hour on Earth, with a streak of Sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal You. Against this stand the claim of the other doctrine of immersion that at heart the Universe and the self are identical and hence no You-saying can ever grant any ultimate actuality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When one rests in deep sleep, without dreams, that is the self, the immortal, the assured, the All-being. In that state, O sublime one, we do not know of our self, we are in unity with God. We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given to us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth. In lived actuality there is no unity of being. Actuality is to be found only in effective activity; strength and depth of the former only in that the latter. Inner actuality, too, is only where there is reciprocal activity. The strongest and deepest actuality is to be found where everything enters into activity—the whole human being, without reserve, and the all-embracing God; the unified I an the boundless you. It is not true that religious faith is belief in things without evidence. The word evidence means seeing thoroughly. And we are asked to see. We have present with us what we see; therefore, we want to see what we love, what is significant for us. The great people of God wanted to see God; Moses asked this as the highest of all favors of Jahveh. Isaiah was made the most powerful of the prophets after he had seen God in the temple. Jesus blesses the pure in heart as those who will see God. In the Fourth Gospel he says about himself that he has seen the Father, and that whoever has seen him has also seen the Father. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
In pious imagery the Angels and the saints are described as those who see God face to face. And the ultimate fulfillment, the end of all moving and striving, is pictured as the eternal vision of God. However, when we look at our present human predicament, doubts and questions arise. Is faith not the opposite of vision? Must we not believe without seeing? Does Jesus not bless those who have not seen and yet believe? Is not faith defined as the evidence of things not seen? And does not Paul write, “We walk by faith, not by sights”? “We look not at the things which are seen, but at things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the thing which are not seen are eternal”? All this seems to indicate that faith must be based on hearing and not on seeing. You hear about something you do not see. You believe one who tells you. You accept the word of authorities in humility and obedience. You believe what the Bible says because the Bible says it. You accept what the Church teaches because it is taught by the Church. You call the word of the Bible and of the Church “Word of God.” You hear, you believe, you obey, but you do not see. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Maybe as the years pass, desire will come again to many. We will know appetite again, even passion. Maybe when we meet in another age, these things will not be abstract and fleeting. I will speak with a vigor that matches yours, instead of merely reflecting it. And we will ponder matters of immortality and wisdom. We will take about vengeance or acceptance then. For now it is enough for me to say that I want to see you again. I want our paths to cross in the future. And for that reason alone, I will do as you ask and not what you want. The seeker must be distinctive and not accept conventional views or orthodox religious notions. One must judge all problems from the philosophic standpoint for one should not believe any other will yield true conclusions. This standpoint has the eminent perspective which alone can afford a true estimate of what is involved in these problems. We turn away from a teaching which does not satisfy our inmost spirit, which leaves our deepest thirst unslaked. In this matter our wisest course is to follow the scientist’s example and test the truth of these theories, either by ourselves carrying out experiments or by observing the experiences of other people. “And it came to pass that there was no contention among all the people, in all the land; but there were mighty miracles wrought among the disciples of Jesus,” reports 4 Nephi 1.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. When you are powerful enough that no one can ever take the knowledge from you against you will, you will help me with what I have to do, but only when you are ready for the knowledge, when you have shown that you truly wish to know. However, a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has even see it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things. I am as one whom the Earth has given back. The spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was the spiritual, I am convinced that survived. Holy Communion it seems to be the case, The Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to being the essence of life itself into my understanding for the spit second in which death occurred. Only the great saints of God are our equals in this spirituality, this confrontation with mystery, this existence of prayer and denial. Yet, we have seen the greatest of our companions vanish, bring destruction upon themselves, go mad. We have witnessed the inevitable dissolution of covens, seen immortality defeat the most perfectly made Children of Darkness, and it seems at times some awesome punishment that it never defeated us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The time has come to proclaim to a nobler humanity, the freedom of the spirit, and no longer to have patience with mortal’s tearful regrets for their lost chains. We are miracles or horrors, depending upon how you wish to see us. And when you first know about us, whether it is through the dark blood or promises or visitations, you think anything is possible. However, that is not so. The World closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you do not hope for other miracles. That is, you become accustomed to the new limits and the limits define everything once again. So they say Aaliyah continues. They all continue somewhere, that is what you want to believe. Not a single one remains in the coven in Rome from those nights when I was taught the ritual; and maybe the coven itself is no longer even there. Years and years have passed since there was any communication from the coven. However, they all exists somewhere, do they not? After all, we cannot die. God knows the future because God is the possessor of all the facts. Freedom is an absolute force…flowing up from a spring of boundless depth. Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What is there to know? What is there to give? We are the abandoned of God. And there is no Devil’s Road spinning out before me and there are no bells of hell ringing in my ears. Freedom bandied about with salutes and holiday flags, and the crowds are inspired by a pretty word which the eye deadens and thought enfeebles. What is freedom then? Obviously not merely to send mortals to parliament every three years to sit there dully, wings of thought clipped like inert prisoners behind a sea of prejudices. Freedom, rather, is life’s finest treasure. Only one is free who boldly aspires forward, whose deepest craving is the deed, whose goal is an heroic act of the spirit. And is it anything more than words and sound, if we hail the rosy dawn of freedom, and not understand that its finest fruit can ripen only in the light of the spirit? This was for three centuries, this darkness, this nothingness. The radiant auburn-haired child by the fire could open his mouth again and out would come blackness like ink to cover the World. However, it is just as truth that the human spirit is made possible only by freedom. Without freedom, there is no spirit; and without spirit, no freedom; and without freedom, no self. Mortals are spirit. However, what is spirit? Spirit is the self. However, what is the self? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Mortals are a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temperal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In our day the word spirit has become less respectable because of its association with ghosts, apparitions, specters, fairies, and other forms of spiritualism. “I have the spirit” is the prelude to speaking in tongues and other practices in fundamentalist churches. It is significant that all of these are endeavors to leave behind our humdrum existence and get free by leaping immediately into a spiritual existence. Crossing the boundaries from material to spiritual existence so easily is a sign of magic rather than spirit. Whatever one my think of these apparitions, I am not talking of this usage of spirit. I use the word spirit in it etymological sense of the nonmaterial, animating principle of human life. Its root is spirare, which also means “breath” and is the root of aspire, aspiration, inspire, and inspiration. Thus, spirit is the breath of life. God breathes the spirit into Adam, as the creation myth puts it, and from then on Adam shares this capacity to pass on the life-giving principle to his own descendants in ways that are still a mystery to us. Spirit is that which gives vivacity, energy, liveliness, courage, and ardor to life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We speak of the Spartans fighting at Thermopylae with great spirit. When one is high-spirited, one is lively, active in the sense that is meant when we describe the free person as active and not passive. Or one has lost all spirit meaning that the person is in deep despondency and at the point of giving up life entirely. We borrow from the French the phrase “esprit de corps,” implying the confidence that comes from participating in the spirit of everyone else in one’s group. Spirit increases as it is shared, and decreases as one’s freedom is blocked off. Spirit has its psychological roots in each individual’s inner freedom. We see this identity between freedom and spirit as nature commanding every being, and the beings obey. Mortals feel the same impetus, but one realizes one is free to acquiesce or resist; it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of the soul is shown. Spirit can be powerful—indeed, so powerful that it can transcend natural law. For fate has put a spirit in his heart that drives one madly on without a pause, and whose precipitate and rash behest O’erleaps the joy of Earth and natural laws. The spirit here is described as part of fate, of destiny—or as we would say in contemporary language, it is both born in us and developed as our culture influences us from birth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The description of the spirit can be seen in our day in the patients who come for psychotherapy who are workaholics, driven by ambition, who not only push themselves into a heart attack, but also miss what joys of Earth en route. Spirit is also an epistemological capacity: one can see into things, get insights, perceive things that were covered before. This capacity is partially intuition. Spirit is a special perspicacity, a keenness, a lucidity. One seems to exist on a higher level; one transcends the mundane and the boundaries of the mundane. I hope you prosper. I wonder if any of you, with all your Dark Ways and Dark Rituals, have ever really wanted this nightmare that we all share. Many have been drawn into it as I have, really. And we are all Children of Darkness now, for better or worse. However, be wise in what you do here. Be clever and keep your hiding place safe. You put terror into their hearts. The language of spirit is image, symbol, metaphor, myth; and these also comprise the language of freedom. This is a language that points toward wholeness; a half image, for example, is still a whole image. Each one of these terms, whether it be image, symbol, metaphor, or myth, deals wit the whole circuit. This points toward the totality of the event. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Hence, these terms in the language of spirit deal with quality, which by its very nature is a wholeness, rather than quantity, which by its very nature is a wholeness, rather than quantity, which by its very nature is partial. We speak, for example, of a painting as being sensitive, powerful, communicating a richness of color to us—all terms that deal with qualities. The quantity of a painting or piece of music—say, the size of the canvas of Picasso or the number of notes in a concerto—is silly when we are talking of works of art. This whole circuit indicates that our logical left-brain thinking deals in arcs—for instance, parts of the circuit rather than the whole. One is thus confined, limited, unfree as one sees only part of the reality one is looking at. This confinement is, of course, necessary in empirical thinking. However, when freedom and the spirit enter our discourse, we find ourselves bursting out of these limits and dealing with a symbol of the whole, the universality of a myth, or a metaphor which stands for the totality. This is why we insists on the inclusion of right-brain thinking as part of our description and why we put so much emphasis on the contests in which one does one’s thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Mere purposive rationality unassisted by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and its virulence springs specifically from the circumstances that life depends upon interlocking circuit of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. That is the sort of World we live in—a World of circuits structures—and love can survive only if wisdom [for instance, a sense of recognition of the fact of circuity] has an effective voice. I curse you. Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me. I showed you my power to understand. You made pictures. And rather childish pictures. You have done this all along. And here, when there is a respite in the struggle, what do you do but try to sow dissension between me and my people. The things I have spoken here are true. The individual need to escape from rigid formalism into intellectual freedom comes only to a minority. However, it is from this minority that the real truth-seekers emerge. Taking no theoretical position, not committed to any beliefs, not wearing any labels, not putting oneself in any categories, the philosophical student starts one’s search for truth in intellectual freedom and ends it in personal inner freedom. One is then what one is. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The independent self-reliant attitude of Saint Paul set an example which, had it been followed by succeeding generations, might have changed the history of one’s religion. One refused money gifts and followed one’s craft of tent-making throughout one’s wide travels. To become a follower of this quest there is no master or organization whose permission one must ask: one is free to do so just so far as one’s aspiration and capacity permit one to. Has one refused to submit to one’s own ego only to submit to society’s? Shall one conform to the World and its ways out of fear of the World’s opinion of one? Is one to have courage enough to reject one’s neighbour’s religious ideas but not to resist one’s neighbour’s foolish habits? If one cannot find in society or surroundings the standards which suit one’s character, then one must find one’s own. It is this that makes one a quester. A mortal must stay in one’s own orbit and take one’s directives from within. If through fear of loneliness, intimidation, or suggestion, one joins the marching groups of one’s time, one will not reach one’s best. Those who said it—the Church and its servants in all periods—made it a matter of law and tradition, of habit and convention. They made it into something we believe we know and have tried to follow. It does not cut any more into our ordinary World. It has become part of our ordinary World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Christianity, as it has become in its organized and institutionalized state, presents the good citizen as its model. However, as long as society is itself ignorant of where it is going wrong in its appraisal of the nature of mortals and mesmerized by institution prestige while neglectful of inner light, so long ought its demand for conformity to be treated with cold reserve will be asserted. So long as so many mortals live in error or compromise with wrong, merely because both have been established by tradition or custom, so long must a few among them do the greater and nobler thing by following a bold nonconformity. Without making any fuss and avoiding unnecessary friction, one my purse one’s independent path and choose one’s own goals. The average, the normal, is not to be taken as the true standard. One must walk at one’s own pace, not society’s hasty trot. One must choose one’s own road, not the most trodden one. The way of life which one’s neighbours follow does not suit one, so one must alter it. One hold the desire to fashion oneself creatively into something better than one is at present, something nobler, wiser, and more perceptive. However, they hold no such desire, are content with static existence. One must be willing and even determined to think and feel differently from those around one. How can it be otherwise when one’s goal is different from theirs, too? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
So far as a convention is reasonable and helpful, one will respect it, but when it becomes a hollow formality or stuffy pomposity, one will not. Like the prophets with whom Jeremiah fights in our text, the ministers of the word have ceased to ask, to cry for, a word from the Lord. They claim to have it as their possession, and since the Word of God can never be a possession, the words they say are not a word from the Lord. We have received it. However, as it has been distorted in the mouths of the preachers, so it has been resisted in the ears of the listeners, that is, in all of us. We hear it, but we cannot perceive it. As Christians we do not reject it, but it has lost its voice, that voice with which Jahweh poke into the hearts of the prophets, that voice with which the Spirit spoke into the hearts of the disciples. We hear the words which have been said before. However, we do not feel that they speak to our situation, and out of the depth of our situation. They may even produce torturing doubts and drive us to task passionately for a word from the Lord against what we have received as the Word of God, in the Bible, and Church. For there is no word from the Lord except the word which is spoke now and is spoken by us? There is only one answer: By keeping ourselves open when it comes to us! This is not easy. We try to resist it, and if it is too strong for us we try to falsify it. We may be in a situation out of which we cannot extricate ourselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
A great cycle has ended, and even years ago one has felt it closing without understanding it was a cycle at all. So the word from the Lord comes as a word of judgment and we cannot take it. Or the word which comes to us requests a radical change in our ways of life and thought. However, this we cannot achieve, and we back into our habits of good and evil, of right and wrong. Or we are in doubt and guilt and despair, and the word comes to us and tells us that we can say yes to ourselves because an eternal yes has been said to us and of us. However, we resist the word which demands of us the courage to say yes to ourselves because we are in love with out doubt and out guilt and our despair. We go into the fire or we go into the legend. Some choose to memorize the laws, perfect their performance of the ceremonial incantations, the rituals, and the prayers. Some see the greatest Sabbats one has ever been witness to. And they learn the most powerful and skillful and beautiful beings one is ever to know. Many learn so well that one has become a missionary sent out to gather the vagrant Children of Darkness into covens, and guide others in the performance of the Sabbat, and the workings of the Dark Trick when the World and the flesh of the Devil call for it to be done. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
In Spain and in Germany and in France, I had taught the Dark blessings and Dark Rituals, and I had known savage and tenacious Children of Darkness, and dim flames had flared in me in their company and in those moments when the coven surrounded me, comforted by me, deriving its unity from my strength. I had learned to summon those who truly wished to die. Dazzling visions I have, if they should want to receive, but I did not move towards them nor even close my arms around them. Drawn inexorably towards me, it was they who embraced me. It seemed to me in the best of these moments my way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by the appetites and confusion that made up the World, despite the carnal rapture. It is not easy to keep oneself open for a word from the Lord. And nobody can make it easier for us by giving us the direction in which to listen. No fixed place can be named, either in our religious tradition or in our cultural creations, or in the depth of our souls. However, for this very reason, no place is excluded from communicating to us a word from the Lord. It is always present and tries always to be perceived by us. It is like the air, surrounding us, omnipresent, trying to enter every space. It is the empty space in our souls into which it tries to enter here and now. So the last question is: Is there any empty space in your soul? #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Without a soul opened for it, no word from the Lord can be received. Listening with an open soul, keeping an empty space in our inner life, sharpening our spiritual hearing: this is the only thing we can do. However, this is much. And blessed are those whose minds and hearts are open. Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” tings like that to each other? It was a rather detached intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. However, it was a matter of a concept of evil, was it not? All the creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation. I had known that all my life. It had terrified me as a child, the idea that I might go to Heaven and my neighbour might go to hell and that I should hate her. I could not hate her. And what if we were in hell together? I now know, whether I believe in hell or not, that we can love people who dedicate themselves to evil, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love. Or so it seemed for that brief instant. However, do not start crying again. I cannot abide all this crying. So far conformity connotes pretense and insincerity and timid blind imitation, one is not one to favour it; but so far as it connotes decency in behaviour, consideration for others, and experience-tested proven standards, one is for it. One must accept the fact that one is not, and does not want to be, like the majority of people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
I speak the truth and you know. And what you will never know is the full depth of each other’s hatreds and resentments. Or suffering. Or love. The superior person always has a choice facing one: is one to live in that way others live in order to please them or is one to live in the way one’s own standards call for? If one lets them pull one down one loses what has taken one many, many years to develop. Somewhere at some point one must take one’s stand, must plant one’s feet and refuse to budge any farther. The ideal World will be one in which the seeker can live without becoming Worldly, where one can fulfill one’s social obligations without becoming a slave to social conventions. The philosopher’s brake defiance of stuffy herd thought has a beneficial spirit behind it and not a negative one. When mortals falls away from the false standards set by materialism, one falls into conflict with the crippling conventions of one’s time. Therefore, let us keep open our ears and let us keep open our hearts, and ask with great seriousness and great passion: Is there a word from the Lord, a word for me, here and now, a word for our World in this moment? It is there, it tries to come to you. Keep open for it! Who can love us, you and I, as we can love each other? #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Amazing how the mind works kind of like a puzzle and as it grows, as your neurons produce more synapses which have dendrites. My guidance is what you need. You have only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as tuberculosis did to me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. Having a disease in one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of thinking one’s World so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities. I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. However, beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our World and our World adequate to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the Earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil. Leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell one how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain. Has this been the danger all along, the trigger of our fear? Even as we recognize it, we are yielding, and it seems the great lessons of our life have all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear is one again breaking the shell around us so that something else can spring to life. The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other–never, never in all our existence, not mortal or immortal, have we been threatened with an intimacy quite like this. Many of us, for example, want to know why beauty exists, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, the why do they retain for us such a symbolic power. What is the lantern by which we see the Devil’s Road, by what lantern have many traveled it? What have people learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do we know about other humans and how they came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing. How strange would appear to be this thing that mortals call pleasure! And how curiously is it related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a mortal, and yet if you seek one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
There is a common illusion that medical technology is wiping out one disease after another—such original lethal scourges as tuberculosis, which supposedly claimed the life 2nd President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, William Wirt Winchester, in 1880. That is why in memory of her husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester donated over $1,00,000.00 ($25,053,725.49 adjusted for inflation) to the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still proudly exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. Infantile paralysis along with tuberculosis being among the recent examples—that we need only to wait, hoping we live long enough until medicine vanquishes all diseases. However, this illusion rests on a serious misunderstanding of the functions of illness and health in any human society. However, physicians must resist the idea that technology will some day abolish disease because as long as humans feel threatened and helpless, they will seek the sanctuary that illness provides. And as the population grows and we cure more diseases, other symptoms will pop up to cure the disease that overpopulation is causing the planet to suffer from. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only do physicians need to resist this illusion, but even more do play people, to whom the idea that medical technology will ultimately save them is the most powerful rationalization for evading their own responsibility for their health. For human beings live—it is their destiny to do so—delicately balanced between health and illness, and this balance is what is important. There is no doubt that we, as a race, are getting healthier. However, will I be misunderstood when I affirm that the possibilities of illness get proportionately greater at the same time? Certainly, there is just as much consulting with doctors as there was one hundred years ago. What seems to be occurring is the shift in the kinds of illness from infectious diseases—which attack the person from the outside—to internal diseases like heart attacks, hypertension, and strokes—which are intimately related to anxiety and stress. The latter are the greatest killers of our day. Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with diseases all their lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that they way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into oneself for a times. The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all suffered severe illness and met in constructively. George Pickering, who suffered from his own osteoarthritic hips as an ally, which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. However, these the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life. #RandolpHarris 6 of 13
Sometimes when in pain or under the weather, one way to treat it I by becoming aware that you are involved in a fight and to pray for a cure. For ten minutes each day, focusing on your body being healed. That is a way to be conscious of and handle the consciousness of your illness or pain without letting it overcome you. One will be better, but in order to contrive with one’s body, to impose one’s wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will. It is important to devote as much as one can into regulating one’s World, in building the being who you are, and in embellishing one’s life. What am I? Is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for oneself. If one finds the true answer, one will find also that one cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same. Surely the human race has by this time, by this late century in history found the truth? Why, then, does the mortal who wants it have to make one’s own personal search all over again? It is because one must know it for oneself within oneself. You yourself are your own guru. Be that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
One who seeks the truth about these matters will discover that it is contrary to current opinion, and therefore one will have to discover it by oneself and for oneself. One should verify the truth not by reference to book or bible but by reference to one’s own private experience. There is no room in this school for those who are ready to dispose of life’s problems with secondhand judgment. The need of individual thinking is vital here. Humanity will not be saved in groups or by organizations. It will be saved individual by individual. Being true to oneself brings happiness. Being indifferent to the criticisms of those who misunderstand brings freedom from anxiety on their account. Walking the streets in a spirit of independences, enables us to walk as a billionaire! If they will, let others sacrifice themselves to snobbery; let us be free. Only when the feet rest can we bring the mind to rest—unless we are Attained Ones! We can be devout and dignified but we need not therefore be dull. I do not deny that the drift of several movements which are in the World’s eye today, is toward this idea of greater spirituality. However, whereas they are confined in their search by attachment to a set creed, or a particular philosophy, or even some one person, we propose to pursue an absolutely independent quest—one limited in its width by no qualifications or conditions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are not concrete threats against life and well-being, there is not a depressing guilt feeling or a despair about ourselves. There is not a disintegrating doubt or an intolerable emptiness. There is not an extreme situation. Does this mean that there is no desire to ask for a word from the Lord? Are the situations which are not extreme situations, deprived of a word out of the dimension of the eternal? Is God silent if the foundations of our existence are not shaken? A hard question, and answered in many different ways! How would we answer? I shall never forget the word of a wise old man who said to my grandfather when I was still a child, “I need somebody who I can than when a great joy is given to me.” Can we share this experience? Do we remember such moments in which the eternal made itself felt to us through the abundance or greatness or beauty of the temporal? I believe that none of us is completely without such experiences. However, did we not say that a word from the Lord is the eternal cutting into the temporal does not mean negating it. This can mean, and this is does mean whenever we are driven into an ultimate situation. There are in everybody’s life such situations, and they are frequent in mortal’s tragic history. However, the eternal can also cut into the temporal by affirming it, by elevating a piece of it out of the ordinary context of temporal things and events, making it translucent for the Divine glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Without such moments, life would be poor and sad; there would be on creations in which the greatness of life is expressed. However, they exist, and the eternal shines through them; they can become a word from the Lord to us. However, still some of you are thinking: All this may be as you say, but it remains strange to us. Neither in ultimate situations nor in moments of a great elevation has the eternal cut into our temporal existence. We never got a word from the Lord. Maybe you did not hear it. However, certainly it was spoken to you. For there is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The problem of mortals is not that God does not speak to one: God does speak to everyone who has a human countenance. For this is what makes one a human. One who is not able to perceive something ultimate, something infinitely significant, is not a mortal. Mortals are human because one is able to receive a word from the dimension of the eternal. The question is not that humankind has not received any word from the Lord; the question is that it has been received and resisted and distorted. This is the predicament of all of us. Human existence is never without that which breaks vertically into it. Mortals are never without a manifestation of that which is ultimately serious and infinitely meaningful. One is never without a word from the Lord and one never ceases resisting and distorting it, both when one has to hear it and when one has to say it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, should be aware of this: We resist and distort the word from the Lord not only when we hear it, but also when we say it. When we ask why our message of the Word of God is rejected, we often find that one does not reject that for which we stand, but the way in which we stand for it. Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal, but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know they have. There is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The Christian Church believes that this word has a central content, and that is has the name Jesus the Christ. Therefore, the Church call not his words but his Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in his Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a word, nay, the word from the Lord. It believes that whatever word from the Lord has been said in all history and in every individual life, is implied in this Word, which is not words but reality, a new reality, the reality of the eternal in the temporal, conquering the resistance and the distortions of the temporal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
So we have not a, but the word from the Lord? As Christians we can boast that we have it? Can we really? Did we not receive the message through mortals, and are not we who heard it mortals? And does that not mean that the message, while it went through the mouths of those who said it and through the ears of us who heard it, lost is power to cut into our World and our soul? It is supposed that God will enter the being that ha been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all selfishness ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in selfishness at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the soul, which then becomes a united being; the second, as it were statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of the World-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that one’s ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be overcome. The doctrines of immersion invoke the greater epigrams of identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are one,” and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.” The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former (after a long subterranean course) had its source in the myth-sized life of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrines and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and you are” takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and actuality.” Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
