Randolph Harris II International Institute

Of course all that these young bourgeois really wanted was to be aristocrats. They bought titles, married into aristocratic families whenever they could. And it is one of the little jokes of history that they got mixed up in the Revolution, and helped to abolish the class which in fact they really wanted to join. If we are to understand contemporary narcissism and its relation to freedom, we must look at the cultural crisis out of which the narcissism was reborn. The 1960s were marked by pronounced rejections, especially on the part of young people: the rebellions against education as a factory, the strident protests of draft-age person against the automatic assumption that they could be sent off to be maimed in the swamps of Vietnam; the fairy-tale love of the flower children; the hippies, who camped together believing they needed nothing more than themselves; the vast number of young people who served all ties to their parents and took to the road. All of these movement in the 1960s can be seen as endeavors to gain freedom. Free from the assembly line of education, free from wars regarded as psychotic, free to enjoy pleasures of the flesh with no hindrance by the mores of the past or vague dreads of the future, free from the limits of space for those who donned knapsacks and set out hitchhiking to live on the road. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The faith was that everyone could be born anew in a secular sense. They were all Jay Gatsbys, not representing but rebelling against the Horatio Alger myth. I do not wish to burlesque the decade of the 1960s. Among the good things it did produce were highly valuable gains in race relations, the erasing of some of the barriers between adolescence and adulthood, and the new sharing of responsibility on college boards by students as well as faculty. However, the general feeling with which the decade of the 1960s left us was one of disappointment and disillusionment. Something important had been missing. Was it not that this freedom from past structure brought with it the assumption that all structure could be thrown to the winds? One’s own purity of heart would suffice for everything. One’s faith would move the mountains even of legislative passivity. The belief was the individual will is all powerful and totally determines one’s fate. There was no sense of responsibility to society, no acceptance of the inevitable, no sense f responsibility to society, no acceptance of the inevitable, no sense of a human destiny that could not be denied. The American tradition was that people believed that their whole destiny is in their own hands, and was acted out to the extreme in these movements of the 1960s. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

 Americans believe they are in control of their destiny because they were born, often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, themselves driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about them, the American has no time to bond themselves to anything, they grow accustomed only to change, and end by regarding it as the natural state of mortals. One feels the need of it, more, one loved it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to one, seems to give birth only to miracles all about one. No one can exist long on disillusionment. There was visible a different kind of concern among the equivalent groups; The young people of the 1970s turned inward. They asked, logically enough: “Is it because of something lacking in ourselves that these movement failed? Since we cannot change the outside World as we wished, can we change the inner World?” Since the extrovert efforts proved more or less bankrupt, they now were replaced by introvert concerns. One felt the question in the 1970s—and we therapists heard it time and again: Can we find ourselves by means of some therapy for the inner person or with some new religion? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Many of those who has been leaders in the activist movement went directly into the introvert movements. It needs to be said, in defense of the new narcissism, that the threat of losing oneself was real—losing oneself to behaviorism, which was indefatigably preached in those years with strict doctrines that the self did not exist, that all behavior was simply a conglomeration of conditioning, and tat freedom was an illusion. The extent of the general culture’s acceptance of these ideas, partly to escape the pervasive fears of atomic warfare and internal chaos shown in society by the demonstrations and voices of the people. Or losing oneself to a technologized culture that was becoming a mechanical robot of our society. A significant minority retreated—some would say advanced—to another fort, the fort of oneself, in the hope that behind that stockade they could form the final line in defense not only of freedom but of their existence as human beings. The new narcissism was seen in the concerning statement: “I have a right to do what I wish with my own body.” This was the greatest tidal wave of self-awareness since the Freudian sexual revolution. People believed that they could find ways of living their lives freely and happily without feeling a responsibility to be involved in a society that was unfree. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Also, if you must give up your happiness for it, of what importance is society? If not in society, where did these people learn to speak? If not the society of their mothers, who protected them as an infant. Did they never attend society’s schools or the million and one things for which people join in society? That this me age is still alive is shown by all of these spiritual guide and gurus, who claim to be so balanced and entuned with nature, and promise others absolute happiness and to make them a winner 100 percent of the time, for only $120 an hour. However, who knows what spirit they are channeling into? Along with these came the mushrooming of self-help gurus and the endeavor to raise consciousness to the point where it would suffice not only to direct ourselves, but to insure that our sense of freedom will not be threatened by the vast mechanical pressures all about us. It is not surprising, then, that many believe “If I am me, I will be free.” His is the new narcissism, in the me decade. Everything is not becoming a possession: my neighborhood, my walk, my lunch, my DMV. It is significant that in psychotherapy, too, narcissism has become the dominant problem. It is recognized, from Dr. Freud on, that the completely narcissistic person is the most difficult to help in psychotherapy because the therapist can achieve no relationship. The client seems unable to break through one’s own self-enclosing fog. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Our whole society partakes in the culture of narcissism. The narcissistic person is liberated from the superstitions of the past, they doubt even the reality of their own existence and consider reality an illusion, although for most of us, the consequences are very real. Superficially relaxed and tolerant, one finds little use for strict doctrines of racial and ethnic purity but at the same time forfeits the security of group loyalties. Their attitudes toward pleasures of the flesh are permissive rather than puritanical, even though their emancipation from ancient taboos brings one no peace in pleasures of the flesh. Fiercely competitive in one’s demand for approval and acclaim, one distrusts competition because one associates it unconsciously with an unbridled urge to destroy. One extols cooperation and teamwork while harboring deeply antisocial impulses. One praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to oneself. Acquisitive in the sense that one’s cravings have no limits, one does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Nevertheless, psychoanalysis is a symptom of the whole development of modern culture, not simply an endeavor to correct its problems. One cannot understand society, unless they understand why people formed their deviations from society. Many people do not have symptoms, but are generally purposeless, aimless, empty, and complaining of boredom and a lack of commitment. That is why the reasons people come to the quest seeking God are widely different. If suffering brings man, joy brings others. If a kind of ambition brings not a few, satiety with ambition brings a few. Mortals come to this quest simply because they seek the truth, because they want to learn what their life means and what the Universe means and the relation of both, which is the best of all reason. However, others come because of shaken self-respect or after a bereavement which leaves them without a dearly loved one. Still others come in reaction to disillusionment, frustration, or calamity. And lastly there are those who come out of utter fatigue with the senseless World and disgust with its evil ways, which is the second of best of all reasons. Human lack, human sufferings, and human failures drive most of the people who come to it, to the quest as compensation. However, there are a few whose human circumstances are satisfactory, yet who come to the quest also. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Many are the seekers after truth, the explorers trying to find a higher consciousness. All classes are welcome, of course. We many come to this change of view by strict philosophical reflection alone, which is the easiest and pleasantest path, but which demands certain intellectual and moral capacities, or we may come to it by the path of bitter pain and external compulsion. Some people seem hungry for the truth. This is because society has staved them and given them no satisfaction other than a surface one. Some people are slowly brought to the quest by the inescapable conclusions of reason, others are brought into it more quickly by the natural guidance of instinct. For many people the Quest of truth begins with a feeling that something is missing from their life, a need that none of their possessions or relations can satisfy. Sometimes—do you lie awake at night? Thinking about what you might have been? Watching the procession of your past life move like a cinema film before your eyes? Reading anew the whole tale of time born and dead, a few joys, many tears perhaps, and long barren years of drought? Waiting for something bigger, better, brighter to turn up? But it has no come yet. The road is hard and the field you are trilling is sterile. Many people are also looking to find people on the path who are not willing to comprise their values for cookies, chips, or money. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Among those who come to the quest for reasons other than the search for truth, which usually means for emotional reason, there are those who come to it at the end of a period of mental depression and those who come at the beginning of a period of mental elation. The first kind may be unhappy because of past personal experiences and seek comfort, consolation. The second kind is prone to exaggerated hopes because of somewhat neurotic enthusiastic temperament. The one may find its peace and the other its joy but both may overlook the need for determined work and self-discipline as the cost. Few people come to this quest by choice; most come by necessity. Its invitation, addressed to a reluctant World, is heard and considered only when under great pressure and suffering, or after great moral or mental or aesthetic growth. Some propulsive force from within or some compulsive condition from without must come into existence to make one undergo the self-discipline needed to open one to the divine influx. With this event a new era opens in one’s personal life. One feels that, for the first time in one’s life, one has touched real being when hitherto one has known only its shadow. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Consequently it is in reality the most important one. Whoever once gives one’s allegiance to God as affirmed and symbolized by one’s entry on the quest, undertakes a commitment of whose ultimate and tremendous consequences one has but a vague and partial notion. When God sounds the spiritual note, its echo is heard within the mortal and one awakens from spiritual stupor. However the history of the individual and that of the human race may diverge in other respect, they agree in this at least: both signify a progressive increase the quest for truth. Regarding the history of the race this is often doubted. People point out that successive cultures begin with a primitive stage that is colored differently but always has essentially the same structure, involving a small World of objects; and this it is the life of each individual culture and not that of the race that is held to correspond to the life of the individual. However, if we disregard those cultures that seem to be isolated, we find that those that are under the historical influence of others take over their rational World at a certain stage that is not so early but precedes the great age—sometimes by immediately accepting it from a culture that is still contemporary, as did the Greeks from the Egyptians; at other times indirectly from a past culture, as Occidental Christendom accepted the Greek rational World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

They enlarge their rational World not only through their own experience but also be accepting alien influences, and it is only then that the rational World which has grown in this way experiences its crucial expansion which involves discovery. (Let us ignore for the moment the overwhelming share in this development of the vision and deeds of the personal World). Generally, it rational World of every culture is therefore more comprehensive than that of its predecessors, and in spite of some stoppages and apparent regressions the progressive increase of the rational World is clearly discernible in history. It is not essential in this connection whether the World of a culture should be characterized more as finite or whether we should attribute to it so-called infinity or, more correctly speaking, non-finitude: a finite World may very well contain more components, things, and processes than an infinite one. It should also be noted that we must compare not only the extent of their knowledge of nature but also that of their social differentiation and their technical achievement because both expand the World of objects. The basic relation of mortals to the rational World includes experience, which constitutes this World ever again, and use, which leads it toward its multifarious purpose—the preservation, alleviation, and equipment of human life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

With the extent of the rational World the capacity for experiencing and using it must also increase. To be sure, the individual can replace direct experience more and more with indirect experience, the acquisition of information; and one can abbreviate use more and more until it becomes specialized utilization: a continual improvement of capacity from generation to generation is nevertheless indispensable. When people speak of a progressive development of the life of the spirit of God, this is what is usually meant. This certainly involves the real linguistic sin against the spirit; for this life of the spirit is usually the obstacle that keeps mortals from living in their spirit of God, and at best it is only the matter than has to be mastered and formed before it can be incorporated. The obstacle: for the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves a decrease in mortal’s power to relate—that power which alone can enable mortal to live in the spirit of God. What is more miserable than uncertainty! Take away assertations and you take away Christianity. It is not the character of the Christian mind to avoid assertions. Jesus makes assertions with a certainty and an unshaken confidence about the truth of their message, which is often hard to stand and harder to understand for the modern mind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Even if we, or an Angel from Heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let one be accursed. Do we approach Christianity as just another possibility among so many others? As, perhaps, a probability, but by no means a certainty? There is sometimes a defeat in our hearts, in our lives, in the depths of our souls. Sometimes people can preach a distorted gospel because they are not sure of themselves and one is not even sure of angelic visions. However, one is sure of the gospel, so sure that one places oneself and the highest spiritual powers under the threat of a divine curse if one or someone else should distort the gospel. The gospel is a description of our situation before God which runs through the whole Bible and the confessions of all the great Christian witnesses. It is our certainty, but it is lost the moment we begin to regard it as our certainty, but it is lost the moment we begin to regard it as our certainty. We are certain only as long as we look at then content of our certainty and not the rational or irrational experiences in which we have received it. Looking at ourselves and our certainty as ours, we discover its weakness, its vulnerability to ever critical thought; we discover the small amount of probability which our reasoning can give to the idea of God and to the reality of the Christ. We discover the contradictions in the emotional side of our religious life, its oscillation between ecstatic confidence and despairing doubt. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

However, looking at God, we realize that all the shortcomings of our experience are of no importance. Looking at God, we see that we do not have God as an object of our knowledge, but that God has us as the subject of our existence. Looking at God we feel that we cannot escape him even by making him an object of sceptical arguments or of irresistible emotions. We realize that in our uncertainty there is one fixed point of certainty, however we may name it and describe it and explain it. We may not comprehend, but we are comprehended. We may not grasp anything in the depth of our uncertainty, but that we are grasped by something ultimate, which keeps us in its grasp and form which we may strive in vain to escape, remains absolutely certain. By assertion, I mean a constant adhering, affirming, defending and invincibly persevering. This certainty is not something everyone possesses as one’s own. Nobody has experienced the profundity of doubt more than some religious scholars. The possible arguments for religious truth and all confidence in the vocation as a reformer, in one’s religious strength and one’s accumulated experience comes when we see at last that the mind has gathered from its schooling the information it needs and hungers for and even more deeply is revelation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Sometimes in the worst of all Hells, First Commandment, “I am the Lord, thy God,” comes to our minds, we know that one certainly has not left us, and this is the only one which is ultimately needed. Can we maintain this certainty in spite of the fundamental uncertainties which are the character of our period in religion as well as in all other realms of life? Can we maintain it in spite of our personal doubts and despairs and of our sceptical heritage? The answers to these questions does not depend on us. We can attain the certainty of the Reformers and Apostles whenever it is given to us to touch the Ground of our existence and to look beyond ourselves. When we have left behind all objective probabilities about God and the Christ, when all preliminary certainties have disappeared, the ultimate certainty may appear to us. And in the power of this certainty, though never secure and never without temptation, we may walk from certainty to certainty. The faintest clue or hint from God is enough; how much more the fullness of a glimpse it is to see the radiance of God, and it draws everyone to you. It is there even when you are angry, or discouraged. If you could see God in yourself, hear it in your own voice, you would not see darkness. You would see an illumination that is all your own. Somber, at times, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

May 18, 2019 3:59 am

You make life when you play. You create something from nothing. You make something good happen. And that is blessed to me. I have lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing. Actors and musicians—they are saints to me. You do not understand. I am speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I am speaking of those who will not accept a useless life, just because there were born into it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things. There is blessedness in that. There is sanctity. There is goodness in that. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine. Events will take their course, it is no good our being angry at them; one is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account. How can we wisely turn them to the best account? What powers do we have to guide and influence the direction of our destiny? How does one both shape one’s destiny and live as an expression of it? This day we fashion destiny, which is our web of fate we spin. It has been years and years since I had walked in the witches’ place. The moon was bright enough to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after burning. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness. A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I had felt as a child when I had heard those awful words “roasted alive,” when I had imagined the suffering. What one individual has done another can aspire to; the destiny that one mortal has challenged and finally mastered another has it in one’s power to confront courageously also. In its externals each person’s destiny is their own; seen from within it is the destiny of mortals made manifest in one individual. One does not fulfill our destiny for us, but one shows us how we in our turn may fulfill it. Destiny sets limits for us physically, psychologically, culturally, and equips us with certain talents. However, we do not simply ask: How do we act within those limits or how do we develop those talents? We ask the more crucial question: Does the confronting of these limits itself yield us constructive values? Can one, in other words, turn misfortune into fortune and keep fortune fortunate, turn handicaps into assets and keep assets from becoming handicaps? Is something taught us by the very process of confronting hardship that yields greater benefits than we gave up in our hardships and greater gifts than we lost? There come to mind hosts of examples of persons who have been burdened with a cruel destiny and have turned it to a constructive use. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I could not bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything. Yes, that is what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur-lined cape and threw back my head to look at the Moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches’ place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains. We were closer for all this in the days that followed. What possibilities does our capacity to be active give us in molding our destiny? Which trends in our destiny do we choose to identify with, and which others do we avoid? Do we cringe before our destiny, feeling sorry for ourselves, crying out: If only we could have been such and such? #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

If we feel sorry for ourselves, so we shall go down like cowards or, more likely, robots—mechanical human beings who the Universe erases. Or do we confront destiny directly, using it as a stimulus to call forth our best efforts, our greatest sensitivity, our sharpest creative vision? If so, we then are men and women for whom the future cries. We can see the vicissitudes of finding and losing, searching for but fleeing from, our personal destiny in noting how other historical figures have dealt with their destiny. From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security…Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among mortals, but alone with God. I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people—aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. However much a mortal searches Heaven and Earth, the present and the future, for one’s higher destiny, one remains the victim of a perennial vacillation, of an external influence which perpetually troubles one. For the first time I have found myself and am happily in harmony with myself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Many look so hard for their destiny, their destiny is so little apparent to some, because in looking for it one has already made up one’s mind to flee from it. To be continually preoccupied with one’s destiny is also a way of escaping living it out. A sense of abandon is necessary, a sense of throwing oneself into one’s calling. Some people spend most of their days depressed, a psychological state that can be a symptom of a lack of harmony between oneself and one’s way of life, a state opposite to the way God wants us to live. In depression one feels on the rack, one struggles against meaninglessness, against the burden of it not being worthwhile to get up in the morning. There are people who greet every morning with bitter weeping, as if this is where they belong. Are these people in the service of their vocation, or rather, a perpetual deserter from their inner destiny? It is the geniuses, the persons of abundant talents, who have the greatest difficulty in seeking and living out their destiny because their gifts continually present them with so many different possibilities. Hence geniuses are more often depressed and anxious than the rest of us, and more often joyful and ecstatic. Life, especially for creative people, is generally anything but simple and harmonious. It is especially hard for those with a multiplicity of gifts, which troubles and disorients the vocation, or at least the mortal who is its axis. It may well be, the destiny of some people may not rest in an unambiguous vocation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The conflict many of us face when we want to do something for a career, but cannot due to limitations that are out of our control, this is conflict of destinies and shows us that the point where one’s individual inclinations collide head-on with the necessities of life is where we see revealed the deeper density of ourselves. William James, for example, struggled with bad health, poor eyesight amounting at times to blindness, disabilities of his back, and his profound and recurrent psychological depress. However, William James managed to surmount his depression by his belief in freedom. The focus of his depression had been a conflict around the question of whether his actions were caused by prior influences such as childhood conditioning, or did he have some margin of personal freedom of action? He could not prove the latter, and none of his friends could send him proof. No one can prove in positivistic terms the qualities of life such as courage, love, beauty, or freedom. Thus began the important work of William James on will and belief, illustrated by the title of one of his collections of essays, The Will to Believe. “The first act of freedom is to choose it,” he wrote. Anyone who has done psychotherapy knows that this would give the person a point outside the depression from which to view it and would provide some rising above the malady. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

This  is the demonstration of the relation of belief to destiny. Does belief—or faith, as some may put it—change the track of destiny? There are many wise persons in this history of the Western World who would answer “yes” to that. They would hold that the state of mind of the beholder influences what one perceives in life, that our minds not only conform to reality but reality also conforms to our mind. Thus, our state of mind influences the reality we experienced around us. Karl Pribram’s recent experiments on the neurology of the brain and its relation to the World would support this, as would Gregory Bateson’s concept that values are constituted in part our beliefs. Out of his problems and his perpetually difficult destiny William James developed a remarkable sense of personal freedom. He was amazingly flexible and board-minded: he was the living example of freedom from cant and constriction. He not only wrote the classical volume on academic psychology, but books on religion, will, mysticism, and education as well. He insisted everlastingly that in human life there are options, however much destiny may limit these options. However, without God, people feel life is meaningless and will just go on and on and on. And that they will not any longer be witnesses to it. They believe that they will not have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in their minds. They feel they will just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

One should guard against being unconsciously insincere, against protesting one’s love of the divine when it is really a mask for love of oneself. Beware lest you call desire of the World search for God. However, more often one’s quest is inspired by mixed motives. On one hand, one is interested in the personal benefits one hopes to get from it. On the other hand, one is also interested in learning the impersonal truth about life. To the young neophyte the quest, with its mysterious traditions and magical promises, is an enchanting and glamorous enterprise. People of rank, fortune, influence, or power may become complacent, satisfied with what they are or have or where they are. However, this is a condition which cannot last. Why? Because the higher purpose of life, embodied in the World-Idea, is also present and will make appropriate change or exert appropriate pressure at the destined time. There is always a number of enquirers who interest themselves in the teaching to a certain extent and then drop it altogether. Why? Because they are not primarily seeking God for his love, but only the hidden powers or personal success of something else, or sometimes, these things only and God as a means of obtaining them. Many comes to this quest in the beginning because of some personal desire. This personal satisfaction is their primary goal. It may be that later, with growth, harmony with God becomes less important to them. A few in the end will come to see that nothing short of pure devotion to God for their own sake is their proper goal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Some churches very early forgot the word of our Gospel that Christ is the truth; and claimed that their doctrines about Christ are the truth. However, these doctrines, no matter how necessary and good they were, proved to be not the truth that liberates. Soon they became tools of suppression, of servitude under authorities; they become means to prevent the honest search for truth—weapons to split the souls of people between loyalty to the Church and sincerity to truth. And in this way they gave deadly weapons to those who attacked the Church and its doctrines in the name of truth. Not everybody feels this conflict. There are masses of people who feel safe under doctrinal laws. They are safe, but it is the safety of one who has not yet found one’s spiritual freedom, who has not yet found one’s true self. It is the dignity and the danger of Protestantism that it exposes its adherents to the insecurity of asking the question of truth for themselves and that it throws them into the freedom and responsibility of personal decisions, of the right to choose between the ways of the sceptics, and those who are orthodox, of the indifferent masses, and Christ who is the truth that liberates. For this is the greatness of Protestantism: that it points beyond the teachings of Jesus and beyond the doctrines of the Church to the being of Christ whose being is the truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

This quest for truth has different attraction for different people. Some find that it replaces the very ordinariness of their lives by exotic, unusual, even dramatic ideas or experiences. Some draw near because of its promise of help sorely needed to cover up their weaknesses. Others need its intellectual concepts to support their withdrawal from orthodoxy. Still others are delighted to get its help in the reinterpretation of orthodoxy, and in its reasonable replies to reasonable questions. If the philosophical code attracts some by its moral nobility, it attracts others through their personal necessity. It should not be thought that all those who read some literature, or attend such lectures, or even join such movements, are seeking more than a simple glimpse. Perhaps most are ordinary people who are satisfied with having a credo to support their lives which enlarges their traditional religion or belief. How do they reach the truth? By doing it, is the answer of the Fourth Gospel. This does not mean being obedient to the commandments, accepting them and fulfilling them. Doing the truth means living out the reality which is Christ who is the truth, making Christ’s being the being of ourselves and of our World. And again, we ask, “How can this happen?” “By remaining in Him” is the answer of the Fourth Gospel, by participating in his being. “Aide in me and I in you,” he says. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

The truth which liberates is the truth in which we participate, which is a part of us and we a part of it. True discipleship is participation. If the real, the ultimate, the divine reality which is Christ’s being becomes our being we are in the truth that matters. And a third time we ask, “How can this happen?” There is an answer to this question in our Gospel which may deeply shock us: “Every one who is the truth hears my voice.” Being “of the truth” means, coming from the true, the ultimate reality, being determined in one’s being by the divine ground of all being, by that reality which is present in the Christ. If we have part in it, we recognize it wherever is appears; we recognize it as it appears in its fullness in the Christ. However, some may ask in despair: “If we have no part in it, if we are not of the truth, are we then forever excluded from it? Must we accept a life without truth, a life in error and meaninglessness? Who tells me that I am of the truth, that I have a chance to reach it?” Nobody can tell you; but there is one criterion: If you seriously ask the question, “Am I of the truth?’ you are of the truth. If you do not ask it seriously, you do not really want, and you do not deserve, and you cannot get, an answer! One who asks seriously the question of the truth that liberates, is already on one’s way to liberation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

One may still be in the bondage of strict doctrines of self-assurance but one has begun to be free from it. One may still be in the bondage of cynical despair, but one has already started to emerge from it. One may still be in the bondage of unconcern about the truth that matters, but one’s unconcern is already shaken. These all are of the truth and on their road to the truth. One this road one will meet the liberating truth in many forms except in one form: you never will meet it in the form of propositions which you can learn or write down and take home. However, you may encounter it in one sentence of a boo or of a conversation or of a lecture, or even of a sermon. This sentence is not the truth, but it may open you up for the truth and it may liberate you from the bondage to opinions and prejudices and conventions. Suddenly, true reality appears like the brightness of lightening in a formerly dark place. Or, slowly, true reality appears like a landscape when the fog becomes thinner and thinner and finally disappears. New darknesses, new fog will fall upon you; but you have experienced, at least once, the truth and the freedom given by the truth. Or you may be grasped by the truth in an encounter with a piece of nature—its beauty and its transitoriness; or in an encounter with a human being in friendship and estrangement, in love, in difference and hate; or in an encounter with yourself in a sudden insight into the hidden strivings of your soul, in disgust and even hatred of yourself, in reconciliation with and acceptance of yourself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

In these encounters you may meet the true reality—the truth which liberates from illusion and false authorities, from enslaving anxieties, desires, and hostilities, from a wrong self-rejection and a wrong self-affirmation. And it may even happen that you are grasped by the picture and power of Christ who is truth. There is no law that this must happen. Many at all times and in all places have encountered the true reality which is in Christ without know his name—as Christ himself said. They were of the truth and they recognized the truth, although they had never seen Christ who is the truth. And those who has seen Christ, the Christians in all generations, have no guarantee that they participate in the truth which he is. Maybe they were not of the truth. Those, however, who are of the truth and who have encountered Christ who is the truth have one precious thing beyond the others: They have the point from which to judge all truth they encounter anywhere. They look at a life which never lost the communion with the divine ground of all life, and they look at a life which never lost union of love with all beings. The truth which liberates is the power of love, for God is love. The father of the lie binds us to himself by binding us to ourselves—or to that in us which is not our true self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

All sorts of people come to this quest for truth—the truth-seekers, the hallucinated, the ambitious and the meek, the highly intuitive and the utter imbecilic, the joyous and the embittered failures, the really intelligent and the merely curious-but few stay on it. Most are caught soon or late on the detours, the sidetracks, and the return-tracks. If many come to this Quest because they are discontented with living or even despairing of it, some come because they feel the joy of living or even exalt in it. There are a few, however, who come because they seek truth or reality. There are those today as never before whose deep but unconscious spiritual loneliness remains unsatisfied by workaday life. Some people seek truth because of the hunger for the truth for its own sake, or because of the sense of incompleteness of a merely materialistic existence. Love liberates from the father of the lie because it liberates us from our false self to our true self—to that self which is grounded in true reality. Therefore, distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth untied with love; and be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

May 16, 2019 10:49 pm

I know what these creatures are. I have always known. There has never been the slightest doubt with me. This is such a raw and painful moment. I am striving to reach you, and you are only telling me farewell. I have said other things, that I would tell you the whole story, that I would open the files to you, that you are needed on this very matter by us all. When persons cannot or will not acknowledge and confront aspects of their destiny—such as a sudden infirmary, an inexplicable death, the birth of a child with special needs—the destiny become repressed. It is then often projected on figures outside themselves, such as gods, sorcerers, demons, and witches. I do not use the word project pejoratively. Projection is a common and normal function of the human mind, and we all do it continuously in less pretentious ways then those cited here. Many talented people experience their visions in art or music as coming at least partially from outside themselves. As an artist paints a landscape, it is impossible to tell how much comes from the landscape that one presumably sees and how much is projected from one’s own sense of form. Indeed, one’s genuine art depends on what one projects rather than on what exists objectively out there. The line between inner and outer reality is impossible to draw sharply, as the physics as the brain studies of Karl Pribram make clear. However, here we will be talking mainly about the destructive aspects of the projection of destiny as it shows itself in witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Witchcraft has been a sad and serious problem in European and the West since the twelfth century, particularly in the Catholic and Protestant churches. In the thirteenth century the Inquisition petitioned Pope Alexander IV (1254-61) for permission to add witchcraft to the ecclesiastical functions to be judged by the Inquisition. The pope refused, but he left the door open by stating his belief that all witches were the servants of Satan. By the end of the fifteenth century, witchcraft was assimilated with heresy, and those found guilty by the Inquisition of practicing witchcraft were burned at the stake. If a person did not believe in witchcraft, one’s very disbelief put one in danger of being accused of heresy. If you believed that no compact does or can exist between the Devil and a human being or that there is no sexual intercourse between the Devil and human beings, or that neither devils nor witches can raise tempests, rain-storms, hail-storms and the like, you were already suspect of being in league with Satan. Even the leaders of the Protestant Reformation believed in witches. Luther wrote, “Paul reckoneth witchcraft among the works of the flesh, which is not lust or lechery, but a kind of idolatry. For witchcraft convenath with the devil. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

John Calin also was a believer in such sorcery and frequently quoted a passage from the New Testament: “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the World.” Witchcraft not only denied the ethical standards of the day, but also the aesthetic ones. The customary repulsive aspects of the witch’s sabbath are present in extant documents: “The corpses of newly-born children were eaten by them; they had been stolen from their nurses during the night; all manner of revolting liquids were drunk and there was no savour in any of the food.” It is easy to understand that the aspects of destiny that we have called cosmic, like the eruption of volcanoes or Earthquakes, associated as these phenomena are wit emotions of awe and terror, should be seen as the workings of some supernatural power. However, the commonplace things of life were also susceptible, in any imaginative or hysterical persons, to being called the work of witches. Thus, continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil. Male importance, to cite and example among the many things projected, was widely cited as being caused by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

A couple, let us say, had been preparing for weeks to be married, and in the evening, after the strain and stress of the marriage ceremony, the groom finds himself important. Out of his bewilderment, anger, and feelings of inferiority, he could well have fantasies that some enchantment caused this embarrassing phenomenon. Pierre Bayle wrote in the early eighteenth century: “Several men are unable to consummate their marriage, and believe that this importance is the effect of a spell. From then on, the newlyweds regard each other with an evil eye, and their discord at times descends into the most horrible enmity; the sight of one makes the other shiver.” It I said, he adds, that witches say certain words during the nuptial benediction, which is called “knotting the braid.” “That is why there are some good mothers who consent to anticipating the wedding night in order to foil the witch.” Thomas Aquinas takes up this question under the rubric “Whether the effect of sorcery are in impediment to matrimony.” While he concludes that witches cannot impede the consummation of a marriage, the stronger spirits of evil, like demons and the devil, can do so. The catholic faith insists that demons do indeed exist and that they may impede pleasures of the flesh by their works. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Anne Marie de Georgel declares when she was washing her clothes one morning near Pech-David above the town, that she saw a man of huge stature coming towards her across the water. He was dark-skinned and his eyes burned like living coals; he was dressed in the hides of beasts. This monster asked her if she would give herself to hum and she said yes. Then he blew into her mouth and from the Saturday following she was borne to the [witch’s] Sabbath, simply because it was his will. There she found a huge he-goat and after greeting him she submitted to his pleasure. The he-goat in return taught her all kinds of secret spells; he explained poisonous plants to her and she learned from him words for incantations and how to cast spells during the night of the vigil of St. John’s day, Christmas Eve, and the first Friday in every month. He advised her if she could, to make sacrilegious communion, offering God and honouring the Devil. And she carried out these impious suggestions. Anne Marie de Georgel then admitted that she has not ceased to do evil, practicing all manner of filthiness during the years which passed from the time of her initiation to that of her imprisonment. Sometimes these victims make theological statements of considerable sagacity. This Anne Marie went on to say that the struggle between God and the Devil had gone on since eternity and would have no end. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Sometimes one is victorious, sometimes the other, and at this time the situation was such that Satan was sure to triumph. How ironical that her being burned at the stake was itself a demonstration of the triumph of Satan. Why are witches predominately female? Whereas some of the pronouncements from Inquisition use the phrase witches of both sexes, there is no doubt that witches are chiefly woman. (The term for a male witch, warlock, is unfamiliar and rarely used.)  The Malleus Maleficarum (1486) writer by two leaders of the Inquisition in Germany, H. Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, often called an “encyclopedia” of witchcraft, has one section entitled “Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions?” The authors write (with seemingly perverse delight) “concerning witches who copulate with devils,” and they seek the methods by which such abominations are consummated. On the part of the devil: first, of what element the body is made that he assumes; secondly, whether the act is always accompanied by the injection of semen received from another….whether one commits this act more frequently at one time and place…and whether the act is invisible to any who may be standing by. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

These authors speak often of the fragility of females and state, concerning women, that when they are governed by a good spirit, they are most excellent in virtue; but when they are governed by an evil spirit, they indulge in the worst possible vices. Indeed, the word woman is used to mean the lust of the flesh. However, women also have brought beatitude to men, and have saved nations, lands and cities, as did Esther, Judith, and Deborah. Referring to the fact that original sin is blamed on Eve, Institoris and Sprenger remark that “we find a change of name from Eva to Ave [as in ‘Ave Maris’] and the whole sin of Eve is taken away by the benediction of Mary.” This condescending diatribe against women makes one winces, but it also casts light on the dynamics of the repression and projection of destiny. It seems obvious that this lust of the flesh is largely a projection of the men’s own unacknowledged sexuality. The femme fatale phenomenon throws light on the helplessness a man may feel under the attraction of a beautiful woman, especially if she is unavailable to him. Many men resent such attractions, as though these waves of passion take control of their own lives away from them. Throughout history, paintings of the courtesan, the prostitute, the beautiful but possibly insensitive woman bear witness to the power of the femme fatale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Sex is a vivid part of our destiny in that we had no say about whether were born male or female. Sex seems to take over our bodies willy-nilly. Our biological development brings with it new and, to the pubescent, strange and powerful desires and fantasies. Growing boys and men often experience sex as intrusion and the powerful yearnings as something beyond their control. The conflicts males have about their sexuality can be accentuated by monastic life, as illustrated by Saint Anthony’s sexual temptations in the desert and by Origen’s self-castration. All of this generates hostility toward the women on the man’s part. However, good men repress this hostility—perhaps under a Victorianlike code of putting women on a pedestal—even though this hostility is shown in semirecognizable form in men’s groups, men’s humor, and so on. Male anger arises from the situation in which the woman seems to hold power over his glands, some secret influence over his internal organs that may be shown in his involuntary erections. This at first surprises him, then bewitches (the word is apt) him, and finally enrages him. It is easy to imagine these uncontrollable and tantalizing surgings of emotion as evidence that one has been bewitched. So strong can the repression be that one never pauses to consider that the source maybe one’s own destiny in reference to sexuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

What better way to handle this bewildering attraction, this succumbing to the charms of the femme fatale, than by ascribing the secret influence to a witch? Sometimes the witches are young women whose only crime is their beauty, and sometimes the witches are antiquated and wizened and senile. However, the man can easily remind himself that the antiquated witches had this magic power in their youth, and they still remember the secret of it even though they do not tell. The bewitched man, attracted in ways he can do nothing about, passes on to another his suspicion that so and so has witchly powers. Others become suspicious, and soon so and so becomes a witch. Her denial only adds to the conviction. The erstwhile attracted man can tell himself he acted righteously and helped rid the World of the harmful one. Thus, his hostility and his erotic passion are relieved a thousandfold as the woman is burned at the stake. All along there were protest against the cruel and inhuman treatment in the attack on so-called witchcraft, but the protesters objected at the risk of being accused themselves. One Jesuit and poet, Frederick Spee, assigned to the task of confessor to witches condemned to death in Wurzburg, was appalled by the method of the trials and in 1631 published an anonymous attack on the persecutions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

In 1583 Reginald Scot subtitled his book in witchcraft proving that the Compacts and contracts of Witches with Devils and all Infernal Spirits…are but Erroneous Novelties and Imaginary Conceptions, and laying bare The Unchristian Practices and Inhumane Dealing of Witch-tryers upon Aged, Melancholy and Superstitious people in extorting Confessions by Terrors and Tortures. Toward the period a number of people argued that the fears of witchcraft were themselves the result of superstition and the human imagination. Pierre Bayle, in 1703, in a public letter, asserts that one hears among the common people that “an illness has been given to such and such persons by a witch.” However, he argues that these “are an effect of the dominion that the imagination exercises over the other faculties of the body and soul.” The diseases mentioned are maintained by the anxieties of the mind and by the panic-stricken terrors of the soul. He tells of a nun who sincerely felt herself possessed and adds, “see what the imagination is capable of, once unhinged by too contemplative a life.” Bayle reminds the person to whom one is writing that “you did not put too much stock in what I wrote to you about the bitterness that accompanies the devout life. You have persisted in telling me that mystics seem to you to be the happiest mortals in the World. It was thus necessary to convince you by means of a great example that they do not always enjoy those ineffable sweetnesses that you have read in their writings.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

We note here Bayle’s insight that the evil projected on witches was the result of mental difficulties on the part of the mystics and others who repressed their own evil tendencies and pretended to experience perpetual sweetness and peace. Bayle points out that witchcraft is the effect of an intense but twisted imagination. “Remove this cause,” he states like a modern psychotherapist, albeit in overly simplistic terms, “give a full confidence to the ill person, and he will have a tranquil mind, and that will be his cure.” In the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne tells us of talking at length to “a prisoner…a real witch in ugliness and deformity, long very famous in that profession,” and gives his conclusion: “It seemed to me a matter rather of madness than of crime.” In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes also became convinced that the belief in witchcraft was a delusion based on self-persuasion. Even the Grand Inquisitor of Spain came to see that self-delusion in the persecution of witches, and the fact that the presentation of witches itself led, by its suggestive self-fulfilling effects, to the appearance of the symptoms of witchcraft. There was, finally, the touching recantation of the twelve jurors of Salem (where a score of convicted witches had been put to death), who solemnly stated: “We justly fear we were sadly deluded and mistaken, … [and] do therefore humbly beg forgiveness.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Witchcraft and the persecution of witches were ultimately overcome by Cartesian rationalism, the philosophical belief that the body and the mind were separate and dud not influence each other. In our day this rationalism takes the form of the factual, scientific explanation of the adversities that befall us. I propose, however, that this solution is not enough. What are we to do with the destructive projections (which have been and can be shifted to underrepresented populations as well as witches) that are not cured by the clear and simple ideas of the rationalists? Parents may want to know the facts concerning the crippling of their child in an auto accident, but this does not assuage their grief. Sadness and grief, joy and exultation are emotional responses, while scientific explanations are rational phenomena. Thus the acknowledging and confronting of death, serious illness, the fact that one was born into a certain race and culture at a certain historical period (to cite some random aspects of destiny) are essentially feeling, emotional phenomena. Logical data are on a different plane. A healthy society must make room in poetry, art, and music for the expression of those emotional and mythic activities. This is why our forbears, like Bayle and Hobbes, spoke so often of the role of imagination in the projections on witches. It also may throw light on why women were regarded as being more disposed to superstition, since women in Western culture by and large react more emotionally than do men. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Light is thrown on the more emotional aspect of female behavior by contemporary research into the differing functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, begun by Dr. R.W. Sperry at the California Institute of Technology, and is not accepted in scientific quarters. These studied demonstrate that the left hemisphere, broadly speaking, channels logical, rational aspects of our experience, and the right hemisphere channels mainly the emotional, poetic, artistic ones. In our culture, women are reputed to develop the right-brain functions, and men depend more on the left brain. Thus, it can be asked whether women, in our culture, are more addicted to what Institoris and Sprenger called evil superstitions. We here state that this was simply a question of women being emotional, poetic, and imaginative. This can be said only in a general sense, and should not be made into a rule. There are many exceptions, however. In witchcraft women were being punished for being more poetic, more emotionally sensitive, more intuitive than men (all things that could be regarded as fragile). This is also why our argument here does not fall under Calvin’s stricture when he attacks the trifling philosophy about the holy Angels which teaches that they are noting but good inspirations or those impulses which God arouses in mortal’s minds, [and] those mortals…who babble of devils as nothing else than evil emotions of perturbations which come upon us from our flesh. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

However, the acknowledgement of fate and other aspects of one’s destiny is by no means a trifling matter. On it depends our freedom as human beings and our very existence. We note that it is the conventionally good people—the faithful Catholics and Protestants, the ethical bourgeois citizens, the monks and nuns—who seem to have been most ready to ascribe witchcraft to other persons living on the fringes of their communities. These good people are most apt to repress the evil tendencies within themselves and to pretend that fate does not exist, and therefore, they are most likely to project their unacceptable urges on to other persons. Thus, goodness without the humility that John Bunyan expressed on seeing a condemned mortal being taken to the gallows, “There but for the grace of God go I,” can itself lead to evil. Whenever I hear the customary platitudes “I love everyone” or “I have no enemies” or “Illness does not exist since God is spirit,” I sigh and find myself wondering: Which aspect of destiny is the person repressing? Where will the projected energy rear its destructive head?” “Very little is more worth our time than understanding the talent of Substance. A bee, a living bee, at the windowglass, trying to get out, doomed, it cannot understand,” Stan Rice Untitled Poem from Pig’s Progress (1976). #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

May 13, 2019 9:48 pm

If you were never to see me again, that would only make things worse. If you go on as you are, you will not live another five days. Do you remember anything I said to you earlier? There is nothing I can do to make you want to live, is not that so? Will you listen to me, then? Really listen? You are going to weep over me? Anxiety over about death is generally castration anxiety, because no one has ever actually experienced literal death, and, therefore, death cannot be in the unconscious. However, who has ever experienced literal castration? Many people do not address death because they like the illusion of the invincibility of psychoanalysis. For to confront and acknowledge death—our own death and the death of others is the emergence of destiny, now in the sense of necessity, in its extreme and ultimate form. To admit this aspect of destiny, this confession of finitude, would be to admit that psychoanalysis—and Dr. Freud and Dr. Fromm and all the rest of us mortals as well—would have to give up the craving for invincibility. This is to accept our finiteness and our mortality. It is to join the club of the human, the club of the finite, the vincibly, the vulnerable, the vulnerable; the club of the poignant mortals. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5

The awareness of death is required by the yes-no characteristic of human consciousness. Consciousness is never static: it knows one thing because that is opposite to something else. It experiences things dialectically, like an electric current with positive and negative poles. We become aware of something by virtue of its contrast with its background. If they fly were perfectly still, the frog would never see it. However, the fly moves once, and the frog takes aim; the fly moves again and the frog gobbles it up. Again, we hear the echo of the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus: “People do not realize that what is opposed to something is also identical with it.” Life is the opposite of death, and thoughts of death are necessary if we are to think significantly of life. Who has not thought at some moment of great joy, “I hope I never die!” Or on seeing some breathtakingly beautiful view of the Alps “This makes me feel like eternity-I am beyond life and death.” Or not toiling at some challenging task “May Heaven help me to live long enough to finish my work.” Or at some moment of discouragement “Death would be better than this!” Or at a time of great fatigue, “He giveth his beloved rest.” We need not talk about thoughts of suicide at all. For all the above illustrations are of the poignancy of life, and they all contain references to death. The most intense experiences of life bring with them the most intense experiences of death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5

Mortals pass their whole lives in error when they might pass them in truth. They do wrong when they might do good. The result is suffering when it might be peace. When all the chief decisions of a mortal’s life are made in a condition of spiritual ignorance, what other results may be expected than unfortunate ones? It is a bitter moment—and the consciousness of one’s error falls painfully upon one—when one discovers that the aims one pursued have led one up a blind alley and that the ambitions one nurtured have yielded only ashes for one’s hands. The parable of the Prodigal Son now assumes an intimate meaning for one. One may derive an astringent wisdom from all these unpleasant consequences of the lower ego’s activities. It has indeed been like a blind mortal tremblingly feeling one’s way and moving from one mishap to another, making one false step after another. When one see how the littler personal self has brought one so much pain, sorrow, disappointment, and waste of years, that even when it brought one success the latter turned out to be false and deceptive, one will become yearn to get away from it altogether. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5

In all of us, open or hidden, admitted or repressed, the despair of truth is a permanent threat. We are children of our period as Pilate was. Both are periods of disintegration, of a World-wide loss of values and meanings. Nobody can separate oneself completely from this reality, and nobody should even try. Let me do something unusual from a Christian standpoint, namely, to express praise of Pilate—not the unjust judge, but the cynic and sceptic; and of all those amongst us in whom Pilate’s question is alive. For in the depth of every serious doubt and every despair of truth, the passion for truth is still at work. Do not give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Do not be deduced into a truth which is really your truth, even if the seducer is your church, or your party, or your parental tradition. Go with Pilate, if you cannot go with Jesus; but go in seriousness with him! Twofold are the temptations to evade the burden of asking for the truth that matters. The one is the way of those who claim to have the truth and the other is the way of those who do not care for the truth. They point to their traditions which goes back to Abraham. Abraham is their father; so they have all the truth, and do not need to be worried by the question which they encounter in Jesus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5

The World is twofold for mortals in according to their twofold attitude. One perceives the being that surrounds one, plain things and beings as things; one perceives what happened around one, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processed and capable of being measured against and compared with those others—an ordered World, a detached World. This World is somewhat reliable; it as density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands—right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure—and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take if for your truth; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for your; but you cannot encounter others with it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you wee to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5

May 12, 2019 9:15 pm

The necklaces she wore were all modern jewelry, but the profusion made them look archaic, pearls and gold chains and opals and even rubies. Against the luster of her skin, all this ornament appeared somehow unreal! It was caught up in the overall gloss of her person; it was like the light in her eyes, or the luster of her lips. She was something fit for the most lavish palace of the imagination; something both sensuous and divine. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” reports John 1.14, 17. Truth and freedom will make you free. The question of truth is universally human; but like everything human it was first manifest on a special place in a special group. It was the Greek mind in which the passionate search for truth was most conspicuous; and it was the Greek World in which, and to which, the Gospel of John was written. The words, here said by Jesus, are, according to ancient custom, put into his mouth by the evangelist who wanted to show the answer of Christianity to the central question of the Hellenic mind: the question of truth. The answer is given also to us, for we, too, ask the question of truth. And some of us ask it as passionately, and sometimes as desperately, as the Greeks did. “One who does what is true, comes to the light,” reports John 3.21. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Mortals become an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relationship to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in cull consciousness. “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you the Spirit of truth, whom the World cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you,” reports John 14.16, 17. Only now can the other basic word be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I—and object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become henceforth—but as it was waiting for the new relational event. Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Now, however, the detached I is transformed—reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects—and this approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it and joins wit it to form the other basic word. The mortal who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity. One bends down to examine particulars under the objectifying telescope of distant vision to arrange them as mere scenery. In one’s contemplation one isolates them without any feeling for the exclusive or joins them without any World feeling. The former could be attained only through relation, and the latter only by starting from that. Only now one experiences things as aggregates of qualities. Qualities, to be sure, had remained in one’s memory after every encounter, as belonging to the remembered You; but only now things seem t one to be constructed of their qualities. Only by drawing on one’s memory of the relation—dreamlike, visual, or conceptual, depending on the kind of mortal one is—one supplements the core that revealed itself powerfully in the You, embracing all qualities: the substance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Only now does one place things in a spatio-temporal-casual context; only now does each receive its place, its course, its measurability, its conditionality. The You also appears in space, but only in an exclusive confrontation in which everything else can only be background from which it emerges, not its boundary and measure. The You appears in time, but in that of a process that is fulfilled in itself—a process lived through not as a piece that is a part of a constant and organized sequence but in a duration whose purely intensive dimension can be determined only by starting from the You. It appears simultaneously as acting on and as acted upon, but not as if it had been fitted into a causal chain; rather as, in its reciprocity with the I, the beginning and end of the event. This is part of the basic truth of the human World: only It can be put in order. Only as things cease to be our You and become out It do they become subject to coordination. The You knows no system of coordinates. “Let us love one another; for love is of God, and one who loves is born of God and knows God. One who does not love does not know God; for God is love,” report 1 John 4.7, 8. Having got this far, we must also make another pronouncement without which this piece of the basic truth would remain an unfit fragment: an ordered World is not the World order. There are moments of the secret ground in which World order is behold as present. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Then the tone is heard all of the sudden whose uninterpretable score the ordered World is. These moments are immortal; none are more evanescent. They leave no content that could be preserved, but their force enters into the creation and into mortal’s knowledge, and the radiation of its force penetrated the ordered World and thaws it again and again. Thus the history of the individual, this the history of the race. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” reports John 8.31, 32. The decision to embark on this Quest may ripen for a long time in one’s unconscious mind before it is openly and slowly made, or it may explode impulsively in a wholly unpremeditated way. One has entered upon the quest for no other reason than that one has been inwardly and strongly commanded to enter it. The long hard search for the souls asks too much endurance of self-discipline from its pursuers ever to be more than it has been in the past—and undertaking for the few driven by an inner urge. Hence it is not so much a voluntary undertaking as an involuntary one. The questers cannot help themselves. It is not that they necessarily have the strength to endure as that they have no choice except to endure. It is often at an early age that we are moved by the desire for truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The urge to follow the Quest, the impulse to find the higher consciousness comes from the God. Whatever be the pull of their interests in their lives, a time comes in the reincarnation when the divine self asserts itself in their consciousness. There is something within us which will not let us rest in what we are, which urges us to think of still higher possibilities. This is the paradox that when you take the first step on this Quest, it is grace which impels you to do so. Yet, you think and act as if you have never been granted the divine gift. There comes a time when the unfulfilled possibilities of a mortal begin to haunt one, when one’s innermost conscience protests against the wastage of this reincarnation. One must come for a while to the consciousness of one’s own imperfection sooner or later, which awakens one in an urge to seek perfection, that is, to enter the Quest. When one awakens to truer values, they will desire a truer kind of live. They will want one that bring God into it, and they will view with remorse the past which left God out of it. Only after one has received what one has desired, and come up against its limitations or defect or disadvantages, will spiritual desire begin to take meaning or offer higher value to one. When one is no longer content to be wise and happy and good only for moments but foolish and miserable and weak periods, one will firmly resolve to begin the process of self-changing and self-deepening that is the Quest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

When I, myself, as a fifteen-year-old boy received the words of our test as the motor for my future life from the confirming minister, who happened to be my father, I felt that this was just what I was looking for; and I remember that I was not alone in my group with this longing for truth. However, I also observed, in myself and in others, that the early passion for truth is due to be lost in the adolescent and adult years of our lives. How does this happen? The mortal’s distress over one’s personal shortcomings and the loathing for one’s personal weakness goad one in the end to do something to improve one and conquer the others. The truth the child first receives is imposed upon one by adults, predominately by one’s parents. This cannot be otherwise; and one cannot help accepting it. The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority, be it that of the mother or the father, or an older friend, or a gang, or the representatives of a social pattern. However, sober or later the child revolts against the truth given to one. One denies the authorities either all together, or one in the name of the other. One uses the teachers against the parents, the gang against the teachers, a friend against the gang, society against the friend. This revolt is as unavoidable as was one’ early dependence on authority. The authorities gave one something to live on, the revolt makes one responsible for the truth one accepts or rejects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

However, whether in obedience or in revolt, the time comes when a new way to truth is opened to us, especially to those in the academic surroundings: The way of scholarly work. Eagerly we take it. It seems so safe, so successful, so independent of both authority and willfulness. It liberates from prejudices and superstitions; it makes us humble and honest. Where else, besides in scholarly work, should we look for the truth? There are many in our period, young and old, primitive and sophisticated, practical and scientific, who accept this answer without hesitation. For them scholarly truth is truth altogether. Poetry may give beauty, but it certainly does not give truth. Ethics may help us to a good life, but it cannot help us to truth. Religion may produce deep emotions, but it should not claim to have truth. Only science gives truth. It gives us new insights into the way nature works, into the texture of human history, into the hidden things of the human mind. It gives a feeling of joy, inferior to no other joy. One who has experienced this transition from darkness, or dimness, to the sharp light of knowledge will always praise scientific truth and understanding and say with some great medieval theologians, that the principles through which we know our World are the eternal divine light in our souls. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

And yet, when we ask those who have finished their studies in our colleges and universities whether they have found their truth which is relevant to their lives they will answer with hesitation. Some will say that they have lost what they had of relevant truth; others will say that they do not care for such a truth because life goes on from day to day without it. Others will tell you of a person, a book, an event outside their studies which gave them the feeling of a truth that matters. However, they will all agree that it is not the scholarly work which can give truth relevant for our life. To admit genuinely one’s mortality is to be released, to achieve a sense of freedom. The immortal Gods in The Queen of the Damned were not free in any real sense. They were bored, empty, and uninteresting creatures—except when they got involved with mortals. King Enkil and his cohorts could liven things up only by vagrant trips to Earth to have a love affair with a human beings. In other words, mortality must be brought in to liven up immortality. The drama between Queen Akasha and Lestat illustrates this point. However, even the gods know that mortality is the sweet sadness of grasping at something you cannot hold. One sees now at long last that one has acted against one’s own best interests long enough: the time has come to redress the balance. One feels the call to dedicate oneself to higher ideals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

 Ekill, in the same vein, tell us how Daniel refused immortality when he was tempted by the beautiful goddess Akasha, who says to him, “Are you still so eager to go back to your own house and the and of your fathers? I wish you well, however you do it, but if you only knew in your own heart how many hardships you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, you would stay here with me and be the lord of this household and be an immortal, for all your longing once more to look on that wife for whom you are pining all your days here. And yet, I think that I can claim I am not her inferior either in build or stature, since it is not likely that mortal women can challenge the goddesses for build and beauty.” Then the resourceful Daniel spoken in turn and answered him: “God and king, do not be angry with me. I myself know that all you say is true and that mortal woman can never match the impression you make for beauty and stature. They are mortal after all, and you and your woman are immortal and ageless. However, even so, what I want and all my days I pine for is to go back to my house and see my day of homecoming. And If some god batters me far our on the wine-blue water, I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside of me, for already I have suffered much and done much hard work on the waves and in the fighting. So let this adventure follow.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

So he spoke, and the Sun went down and the darkness came over. These two, withdrawn in the inner recess of the hollowed caverns, enjoyed themselves in friendship and stayed all night by each other. At dawn Daniel arises, cuts down trees to build his ship, and sails away three days later. As King Enkil had foretold and Daniel had feared, his journey home was long and filled with hardships. He nevertheless had chosen a mortal woman, home, and mortality rather than the pleasant life of immortality in the Kingdom of Kemet. This is what is meant by death and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love more possible. If we knew we would never die, I wonder if we could love passionately, or if ecstasy would be possible at all. This is not simply an expression of “I almost lost this…I almost died,” but is a sensing of the rich depth that comes from awareness of density and the new possibilities, the new freedom of aesthetic sensibility, that then opens up. No one knows what lies beyond this pale. However, if there is anything other than extinction, we can be sure that the best preparation for it, in this brief interval, when the bird of time is still on the wing, is to live out our lives and our creativity and as fully as we can, experiencing and contributing what we can.  If, however, we defend ourselves against the dread of dying by the belief that death is simple and easy, life becomes insipid and empty and the concept of freedom has no meaning. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Like most of the people who have read The Queen of the Damned, I have been impressed by the stories of Queen Akasha and her self-sacrifice in dealing with humanity and immortality. I do not wish to detract from that or from her right to believe what she thinks is correct. However, this should not prevent us from looking clearly at the implications of the conclusions she draws. Death is like the opening of the chrysalis of the caterpillar and the emergence of the butterfly. This, I propose, is a form of denial; it takes away the person’s impetus to make the most of this life. It is like saying I cannot wait to die and see my friends. If death is so nice, then we would hurry toward it, with no poetry, no attention to building civilization for our children, no painting to pass on to posterity, no Ninth Symphony of Beethoven no One in a Million by Aaliyah. And freedom would not even be a relevant concept. This leads to the real hopelessness, for it robs human beings of the poignancy of living. In vain, then, we listen for the song of Lestat: “You see I’m falling in the vast abyss, clouded by memories of the past. At last I see, I hear it fading, I can’ speak it or else you will dig my grave. You feel them finding, always whining. Take my hand now be alive. You see I cannot be forsaken because I am not thee only one. We walk amongst, must we hide from everyone?” (Forsaken by David Draiman on Queen of the Damned Soundtrack.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

However, immediately, we run up against the omnipresent denial of death in our culture, the fact that our society is sick in its pretenses in song and ritual that we never really die. When Hubert Humphrey, wizened and thin from cancer, made his last appearance before Congress, the senators, in their speeches, spoke optimistically, “Get well soon, Hubert. We need you back here.” Who were they kidding? Not Humphrey, who courageously knew his death was only several months away. Not the millions watching on television, who could see clearly he was dying. Themselves? How much in contrast is Senator Richard Neuberger’s statement, which he wrote shortly before his own death from cancer, that there had some a new appreciation of things “I once took for granted—eating lunch with a friend, scratching Muffet’s ears and listening to his purrs, the company of my wife, reading a book or magazine in the quiet cone of my bed lamp at night. For the first time I am savoring life. I realize, finally, that I am not immortal.” However, what is a tragedy that one waits until one is dying before savoring life! The denial of death is the more amazing because it is clearly exhibited by many of the famous psychoanalysts themselves. The good mortal never thinks of death. Good is all that serves life; evil is all the serves death. The problem is that one then represses all thoughts of death, and this leads directly to the denial of death and of evil. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

May 12, 2019 12:51 am