The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. Moral strength is needed by the quester. This path requires something more than a search for righteousness or peace. It requires the aspirant to make oneself more sensitive to the sorrows and struggles of humankind, ignorance-born and karmically earned thought they may be, to imbue oneself with a wise, prudent, and balanced compassion. One must advance from an outwardly-compulsively goodness to an inwardly-natural goodness. Such away of life, with if chained desires, holy communion, and sensitive compassion, gives any mortal a higher stature. It is easy to fall into a gloomy pessimism and say that the spiritual life is not for one, that one is unfit to practice its arduous exercises and that one has better abandon what is manifestly only for those blessed with luck or genius. Yet one would be wrong to assume that because the path is not easy one is mistake in aspiring to it. Because it is not just a matter of daydreaming, nor passing from one thrilling inner experience to another, because hard work and unflagging perseverance are demanded from one, there is still no need to despair. An interesting question confronts us here. Are freedom of doing and freedom of being contradictory? Why is it that some people achieve essential freedom only when everything in the existential World becomes unfree? #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
It seems to have been the experience of the survivors of the concentration camps that only once their freedom was taken away that they learned to really be free. Solzhenitsyn testifies that this was true in his years in the Russian work camps—when all freedom of doing was taken away, he felt himself pushed back to the level of essential freedom. It was, moreover, the experience of freedom marchers who were thrown into prison, as shown by the several books that subsequently came out by the marchers. Saint Paul states that in bondage the Christian is freed, a sentence that seems hopelessly paradoxical at first but takes on meaning the more one thinks about it. One will need much courage for the Quest because one will be confronted by two powerful enemies. One is oneself, the other is society. Within oneself an individual will have to do battle against the great desires. Within society one will have to contend against great traditions. If only one possess faith in oneself, one can successfully overcome the magnitude of one’s tasks, courage in one’s vision, and the resolve to shape one’ life for its higher welfare. However, do we get to essential freedom only when our everyday existence is interrupted? For as long as most human beings can settle for bread and comfort, they will do so, the Grans Inquisitor argues. However, when bread and comfort are no longer available, as people then—and only then—pushed to their essential depths of experience? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
If we answer yes to these questions, we deny the popular idea that human beings move up through a hierarchy of needs from the biological to the psychological to the spiritual. It would mean, rather, that people evolve by conflict and struggle, and there is no simple and placid evolution from lower needs to higher ones. When lower needs are not met, they are forced into higher needs. Fasting as a way of reaching religious truth is one example of this. Calamity theory is another example. It says in effect that in calamity, in hardship, many people are forced to look inward and to take the necessary leaps to higher levels, as we have noted above. Is confinement, including the simple fact of having time to think, one aspect of what is necessary for the experience of essential freedom? John Lilly thinks confinement is essential in experiments in isolation tanks: the person floats in complete darkness in a tank in which one is weightless and without any stimuli from the outside World. Then apparently radical and often highly beneficial things happen to some people in their sense of freedom of being. When human beings can no longer escape—when they can no longer run about, go to this movie or that, surrender to their TV addiction, or fill their time with diversions—when these escape avenues are no longer open to them, they must listen to themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
However, here we arrive at a fascinating question: Is not our destiny itself our concentration camp? Is not the destiny that impinges upon us that which forces us to see our bondage? Does not the engaging of our destiny—which is the design of our life—hedge us about with the confinement, the sobriety, indeed, often the cruelty, which forces us to look beyond the limits of day-to-day action? Is not the inescapable fact of death, whether we are young or mature, the concentration camp of us all? Is not the fact that life is a joy and a bondage at the same time enough to drive us to consider the deeper aspect of being? This is the greatness of life and our quiet desperation in the same instant. The struggle of CORE to help African American people turn the wonderful proclamation of freedom put on paper by President Abraham Lincoln into real and actual freedom. Out of the battles he and his followers went through and the violence they had to endure, James Farmer declares: “In the very act of working for the impersonal cause of racial freedom, a mortal experiences, almost like grace, a large measure of private freedom. Or call it a new comprehension of one’s own identity, an intuition of the expanding boundaries of oneself.” This radical source of freedom is the freedom of being. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Whoever comes to this quest is unlikely to stay long with its pursuit unless one comes with considerable devotion and correct evaluation of its spiritual importance. James Farmer describes one incident in which he and his followers endured the brutality of the police, and “the men and women who stood between me and the lynch mob gradually, during the course of those two violent says, made the decision to act instead of being acted upon.” If the impulse to embark on this quest is to be something more than an unstable fancy, a calm perception of its stubborn difficulties and a most especially frank recognition of its self-refusing demands, is needed. That mortal is mistaken who comes to the quest expecting its rewards without its pains, its peace without its emotional crucifixions, its strength without its bodily mortifications. The quest is unattractive to sinners and unnecessary to saints. It is for those who are not wholly indifferent to Worldly desires nor yet too strongly attached to them. The quest is to be neither an emotional fancy nor an intellectual whim; it has to become something steady, deep-rooted, and strong-sapped in a mortal’s life. One will possess an irrefragable faith in the power of truth, holding that even if it were crushed and obliterated today time will cause it to rise again tomorrow and give it a fresh voice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Recently I spent three months in Germany and what I saw was people who were heavy with burdens, too heavy to be carried away by sorrows too deep to be forgotten. And what their faces expressed, their words confirmed: Tales of horror, stories of pain and despair, anxieties dwelling in their blood, confusions and self-contradictions disturbing their minds. And if you look deeper into them you find guilt-feeling, sometimes expressed, mostly repressed for it hides itself under passionate denials of guilt, under self-excuse and accusations of others, under a mixture of hostility and humility, of self-pity and self-hate. However, within this nation, I found people who were healthy, not because the infirmary was not written in their faces also. But something else was in them, a healing power, making them whole in spite of their disruption, making them serene in spite of their sorrow, making them examples for all of us, examples of what could and should happen to us. To us? But are we not a healthy nation? That certainly is what you believe when you return from Germany and Europe to this country! The faces of most people are shaped by smiles and not by tears. There is benevolence towards each other and even towards enemies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
People here are willing to admit their shortcomings such as discrimination, exploitation, destructive competition. They are used to acting spontaneously and not under compulsions imposed on them by tyrants or conquerors, or what is even more difficult, imposed on them by newspapers, radios and public opinion polls, these tyrants of modern democracy. A healthy nation! However, we read that in this nation almost 40 percent of all those young men and women who are rejected by the Armed Services are unacceptable because of mental disturbances and maladjustments. And we hear that of all illnesses mental illness is by far the most widespread in this country. What does this mean? It is a symptom of serious danger for our health. There may be something in the structure of our institutions which produces illnesses in more and more people. It may, for instance, be that the unlimited, ruthless competition which deprives everybody of a feeling of security, makes many in our healthy nation sick; not only those who are unsuccessful in competition, but also those who are most successful. And so something surprising occurs: We have fought victoriously against many forms of bodily sickness. We have discovered drugs with an almost miraculous power. The average length of our lives has been stretched beyond any former expectation. However, many in our nation cannot stand this health. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
Some people in our nation want sickness as a refuge into which they can escape from the harshness of an insecure life. And since the medical care has made it more difficult to escape into bodily illness, they choose mental illness. However, does not everybody dislike sickness, the pain, the discomfort and the danger connected with it? Of course, we dislike our sickness with some parts of our souls; but we like it with some other parts, mostly unconsciously, sometimes even consciously. However, nobody can be healed especially of mental disorders and diseases who does not want it with one’s whole heart. And this is why they have become almost an epidemic in this country. People are fleeing into a situation where others must take care of them, where they exercise power through weakness or where they create an imaginary World in which it is nice to live as long as real life does not touch them. Do not underestimate this temptation. The basic insecurity of human existence and the driving anxiety connected with it are felt everywhere and by everyone. It is human heritage and it is increased immensely by our present World, even in this country full of heal and vigor. As in ours, so in the period of Jesus much talk was going on of sickness and healing. Jewish people and Greeks wrote about it. People felt that they lived in a sick period; they called it “this World-period” and they described it in a way which is very similar to the way in which we describe today. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
People saw not only bodily infirmity of all of us, the innumerable bodily diseases in the masses of the people, they also saw the destructive powers possessing the minds of many. They called the mentally ill the possessed or the demoniacs and they tried to expel the evil spirits. They also knew that nations can be sick and that the diseases of social classes infect every individual in it. They looked even beyond the boundary lines of humankind into the nature and spoke in visionary ecstasy about this Earth becoming old and sick just as we did when we were under the first shock of the atomic power of self-destruction. Out of this knowledge of a sick period the question of a new period, a reality of healthy and wholeness was asked. Salvation and a Savior were expected. However, salvation is healing. And the Savior is the healer. Therefore, Jesus answers the anxious question of the Baptist about whether he is the Savior, by pointing to his healing power. This is what Christ says: “If I am able to heal the hearing impaired and the visually impaired, if I am able to liberate the mentally sick, then a new reality has come upon you!” There are many healing stories in the Gospels, a stumbling block for scholars and preachers and teachers, because they take them as miracle stories of the past instead of taking them as healing stories of the present. For this they are. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
These stories show that the human situation, the relation between bodily and mental disease, between sickness and guilt, between the desire of being healed and the fear of being healed. It is astonishing how many of our profoundest modern insights into human nature are anticipated in these stories: They know that becoming healthy means becoming whole, reunited, in one’s bodily and psychic functions. They know that the mentally sick are afraid of the process of healing, because it throws them out of the limited but safe house of their neurotic self-seclusion, they know that the process of mental healing is a difficult and painful one, accompanied by convulsion of body and soul. They tell of the relation of guilt and disease, of the way in which unsolved conflicts of our conscience drive us to those cleavages of body and soul which we call sickness. We are told how Jesus, knowing this, pronounces to the mobile impaired first the forgiveness of one’s sins and then one’s regained health. The mortal lived in an inner struggle with oneself, with one’s feelings of guilt. Out of this conflict one’s illness had grown; and now when Jesus forgives one, one feels reconciled with oneself and the World; one becomes whole and healthy. There is little in our recent psychology of depth that surpasses these insights in truth and depth. These stories also describe the attitude which makes healing possible. They call it faith. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
Faith here, of course, does not mean the belief in assertion for which there is no evidence. It is never meant that in genuine religion, and it never should be abused in this sense. However, faith means being grasped b a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us. Surrender to this power is faith. The people whom Jesus could heal and can heal are those who did and do this self-surrender to the healing power in him. They surrendered their persons, split, contradicting themselves, disgusted and despairing about themselves, hateful of themselves and therefore hostile towards everybody else; afraid of life, burdened with guilt feelings, accusing and excusing themselves, fleeing from others into loneliness. Feeling from themselves to others, trying finally to escape from the threats of existence into the painful and deceptive safety of mental and bodily disease. As such beings they surrendered to Jesus and this surrender is what we call faith. However, he did not keep them, as a god helper should never do. He gave them back to themselves, as new creatures, healed and whole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
And when Jesus returned to Heaven he left a group of people who, in site of much anxiety and discord and weakness and guilt, had the certitude that they were healed, and that the healing power amongst them was great enough to conquer individuals and nations all over the World. If we are grasped by the new reality which has appeared in Christ, we belong to these people. We have the Savior’s healing power ourselves. Those who are willing to take themselves in hand, ready to trample on their lower natures, are alone fit for this quest. They are few. The others, who come to it for its sensational, dramatic, physical, and occult possibilities, hover around the entrance, but never get on the path itself. The quest is neither for outright saints nor for outright sinners. It is for those who are conscious of having terrestrial passions and human weaknesses, but who are struggling against them and striving for self-mastery. Just as sickness creates appreciation of the vale of good health, so life’s anxieties create appreciation of inner peace. However, this peace cannot be had without a measure of self-control and self-reform, which calls for use of the will. In life with nature, the relation vibrates in the dark and remains below language. The creatures stir across from us, but they are unable to come to us, and our language sticks with them. Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
But all this happened without my knowledge, my vigilance, or my collusion, for I was long gone from such things. If the quest is only an emotional whim or an intellectual fad for a mortal, one will make little headway with it. If on the contrary it is something on which one’s deepest happiness depends and one is ready to give what it demands from every candidate, if one is resolved to go ahead and never desert it, one will possess a fair chance. “Slavery is founded in the selfishness of mortal’s nature—opposition to it is one’s love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension bring them, shocks an throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow,” reports President Abraham Lincoln. Whereas the freedom of doing refers to the act, the freedom of being refers to the context out of which the urge to act emerges. It refers to the deeper level of one’s attitudes and is the fount out of which freedom of doing is born. Hence, I call this second kind of freedom essential freedom. This is illustrated in Bruno Bettelheim’s testimony concerning his two years in a concentration camp during the Second World War. He had no freedom of doing at all; he was powerless to change the actions of the SS. However, he did have what he calls ultimate freedom, the freedom to choose his attitude toward his captors. This freedom of being, or essential freedom, involves the ability to reflect, to ponder, out of which the freedom to ask questions, whether spoken or not, emerges. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
A prisoner in San Quentin gives us our springboard here. This prisoner was a Chicano and a poet. He could not take the pushing around in the prison, and hence for give years he had been held in solitary confinement, which, with a strange irony, is called in San Quentin “Maximum Adjustment Center.” Here are the words from his interview: “They have separated me from my family, deprived me of touching my young boy. They have hidden the Sun, Moon, and Starts from my view, exchanged their concrete and steel for Earth and flowers and everything warm and soft. The wind through my hair is replaced by their rules in my ears. All tears are forbidden on the tier. The strength in my muscles is bound by chains and shackles. They have tried to negate my existence—and almost succeeded. They have left me with nothing, nothing except an inner core, a secret, private place they have not yet found how to get to.” The speaker of these words is obviously not trying to select among stimuli. This is clearly a different kind of freedom, expressed in such phrases as” inner core and a secret, private place where they have not yet found how to get to.” He goes on: “It is where I think of who I am, where I try to understand the what and why of y enemies, and where I keep alive my will to live in a hell where I am made to feel like a nothing, at best an animal, a wild animal in captivity.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
We notice that the does not say, “What shall I do,” but rather “I try to understand.” He is engaged in a succession of leaps in his own thoughts, leaps which imply breaking throughs to a new dimension in his relation to himself. This is clearly not a freedom of doing; it is a freedom of being. He tells us also—and this is of great importance—that this is where he keeps alive his will to live. This is a freedom that invigorates, that inspirits, and he rightly interprets it as that which he owes his survival in agonizing loneliness of solitary confinement. He concludes: Although I sometimes get depressed and feel like giving up, the discovery of my thoughts gives me joy. For until they find a way to take my thoughts away, I am free. Knowledge is freedom, and is the source of hope in this most hopeless of all paces. A man can live without liberty but not without freedom.” In that shocking, surprising, unexpected last sentence, he is using the term liberty to refer to the political state. If we have to live under fascism or in prison, hate it as we may, we could survive. However, freedom is essentially an inner state. This core, this secret place, is absolutely necessary for our survival as humans. It is what gives the person a sense of being; it gives one the experience of autonomy, identity, the capacity to use the pronoun “I” with its full range of meaning. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
I do not wish to have this inner freedom confused with the sentimentally subjective statements of it. In the Civil War play Shenandoah, there is a song and dance performed by an African American boy with the words, “Freedom’s just a state of mind.” Was Freedom just a state of mind for Martin Luther King? Was it just a state of mind for Faust, who exchanged his soul for unlimited knowledge and Worldly pleasures? Was it just a state of mine in the temptation of Amadeo? Was freedom just a state of mind for the freedom marchers? Was it just a state of mind for Washington and the Continental Army at Valley Forge? It is just a state of mind for those in the women’s liberation movement? There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history. This includes Bruno Bettelheim’s ultimate freedom, the affecting of history coming in his insightful books after the concentration camp. It includes the freedom described by the prisoner in San Quentin, its effect on history consisting, for one thing, in our quoting him here. The subjective and objective sides of freedom can never be separated from each other. “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. Ignorance is a cure for noting. Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life,” reports William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
It is an age-old requirement of the higher self that those who seek its favours shall be ready and willing to empty their hearts of all other affections if called upon to do so. Jesus told us this long ago, and there is nothing that modern inventive genius can do to alter the requirement. To search for truth in its full integrity, putting aside all the pitiful substitutes which content little, less honest minds, requires not only an independence that creates intellectual if not personal loneliness, but also a willingness to abandon egoism and surrender its Worldly advantages. I propose that the prisoner in San Quentin we quoted is freer than his guards. In a poem he wrote in prison we find the words, “though we are wrapped in chains/The jailor is not free!” The qualifications required from him are love of the highest, desire for truth, conformity of living to the divine laws, and balance in his own person. No one can deny that Epictetus, as a slave, was freer than this owner and master. Our prisoner also is experiencing freedom as an inner condition of life, the source of his human dignity and the source of his strength to write poems, “Scratched out from the pit of prison with a worn pencil from my cell.” The seeker who has a strong yearning for Truth and who has a sense of correct values already possess some of the indispensable qualification for this path to freedom, and should go far upon it. However, the will to continue despite all obstacles, together with a special kind of patience, is also essential—particularly in the earlier stages. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The prisoner’s statement “the discover of my thoughts gives me joy” is profound comment with far-reaching implications for our lives as well. His freedom is not a freedom of security, but a freedom of discovery. The joy of the discovery of one’s own thoughts is a truth that we rarely hear from anyone who has not hammered it out on the anvil of years of solitude. One must begin one’s quest with an attitude of deep veneration for something, some power, higher than oneself. A mighty longing for liberation from one’s present condition is a prerequisite for the philosophic quest. The ardent desire to establish one’s true identity needs to be present also. We must bring to the Quest not only all these delicate intuitions and subtle Christian concepts, but also a practical common sense and a sturdy, robust reason. This is a teaching for more evolved people, that is, for those who are fine in character, more sensitive and intelligent in mind than the masses. It is for people to whom the mind’s experiences are not less but even more important than the body’s. The prisoner in San Quentin also tells us that his knowledge is freedom and his source of hope. In the freedom of being new possibilities continually surge up, possibilities of new discoveries about oneself, new flights of imagination, new visions of what the World and living might be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
We should not hope for something, but have the freedom to know is itself hope, regardless of whether anything concrete eventuates or not. Essential freedom is the essence out of which other forms of freedom flow. Most students of this teaching are not highly intellectual. If they had been, the pride and arrogance of intellect would, in most cases, have stopped them from entering such a mystical field. However, neither are they unintelligent. They are sensible, mature, and discerning enough to appreciate the value of its balanced ideal. To obtain something they greatly desire, mortals will arouse their will and apply in strongly. Only when sufficient experience of life matures them sufficiently are they likely to arouse and apply this same will to the Quest itself. Many people criticize those who try harder than others to succeed because they do not understand why they are trying so hard and the challenges they are trying to overcome. It is kind of an oxymoron because usually people shame others for being lazy and not trying to hard enough. Samuel B Fuller was born into rural poverty in Monroe, Ouachita Parish, Louisiana in 1905. The family’s poverty was such that he had to drop out of school in sixth grade. However, his life was an illustration of business success and self-help. Mr. Fuller’s career as an entrepreneur started after he borrowed $25 using is car as collateral. He invested in a load of soap from Boyer International Laboratories. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Mr. Fuller started selling soap door-to-door and it inspired him to invest another $1000. In 1929, Samuel Fuller incorporated Fuller Products. In four years, he was promoted to a manager at Commonwealth while continuing to grow his own company to a line of 30 products and hiring additional door-to-door salespeople. This was a time when African Americans were not taken seriously as consumers and businesses and advertisers would not market to their communities. However, Mr. Fuller has tremendous success ad the Fuller Products saw tremendous expansion. The growth was sufficient for the company to open its own factory in 1939. In 1947, Mr. Fuller purchased Boyer, and kept his identity a secret to prevent is bankruptcy. The company began to manufacture and sell a diverse line of commodities from deodorant and hair care to hosiery and men’s suits. Mr. Fuller was probably the richest African American man in the United States of America. His company had $18,000,000.00 ($189,860,414.94 in 2019 dollars) in sales and a sales force of five thousand (33 percent of them European American). However, after people found out that Mr. Fuller was African American, people organized boycotts of Fuller’s product line during the 1950s. Shortly after, Mr. Fuller went bankrupt. So, not all people have had an easy time in life, and that is why they try so hard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Nevertheless, on a macro scale, times have changed and many people have faith, no matter what obstacles are in their path that they can achieve success. To obtain somethings they greatly desire, many will arouse their will and apply it strongly. Only when sufficient experience of life matures them sufficiently are they likely to arouse and apply this same will to the Quest itself. A would-be follower of this path need not be concerned if one lack intellect and has had an imperfect education. One should accept what one can understand of the books one studies and leave the rest for some future time. What is needed much more than intellect is humility, intuition, and intelligence, which many intellectuals do not possess. People are needed with intellectual acumen, with emotional control, with balance reason, with loyalty to ideals and with sincerity and faithfulness in working for them. They are to be undeterred by criticism and unmoved by praise. And lastly, amid the arduous struggles of this quest, its soaring thoughts and serious comprehensions of World-sorrows, a sense of humour is needed also. Those who care enough for advanced ideas to seek them out in spite of social rebuffs, as well as those who have the courage to explore what is waiting beyond already accepted ones, have become marked proportion of questers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
In the concept of freedom we have what Archimedes sought but did not find, a fulcrum on which reason can rest its ladder, without therefore placing it in the present of in a future World but only in the inner sense of freedom, because it unites both Worlds in itself and must also be the principle of the explanation for both. As the prisoner in San Quentin demonstrates in his interview, this essential freedom is the source of his joy and his spirit. The former is down in his words “it gives me joy.” The Spirit is shown in his courage, his hope, the very fact that he survived and preserved his sanity and his sense of possibility in a situation in which many people would long before have given up in despair and probably taken refuge in psychosis. He says in a poem written while he was in prison that insanity was his constant companion, but he managed to avoid it by his absorption in his writing. Survivors of the concentration camps give similar testimony to this essential freedom and to the fact that the inmates who could choose their own attitudes toward the SS were not spiritually enslaved. If it were necessary, this is pragmatic proof of the reality of their essential freedom. Everyone expects to witness scientific advance made in these modern times but only a few have the mental courage to expect spiritual advance let alone seek it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
It is for those who are ready for the phase of intellectual independence and spiritual individualism, who are courageous enough to face the inner solitariness of the human spirit when it turns from doing to being. That mortal is excellently qualified for philosophy who has a strong spirit for service, who is well-balanced emotionally, and who is well-equipped intellectually. Picasso provides us with al illustration of freedom of being in contrast to freedom of doing. In 1904 Cezanne had advised other painters to interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone. Picasso, a young artist prodigy at the time, ad absorbed the rules and discipline of his craft. He could draw beautifully, and he knew the laws of perspective and proportion. All these are givens, which I will refer to as destiny. Picasso had come to terms with this discipline: in his early blue period, especially in those paintings of the less affluent Spanish, every expression is superbly drawn. This, however, is still freedom of doing, or existential freedom. However, Picasso, an artist of courage and zest, struggles against the boundaries. Was there a way of transcending the antiquated rules, a way of pushing on to new dimensions? #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
In 1907 came the breakthrough with is painting Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. This marked the birth of cubism. No longer was it a question of drawing arms and legs accurately in an academic sense; no longer was it a matter of rendering the fingers exactly as they are in reality. The challenge now was to see the human body as embodying the forms of nature, which Picasso did in this painting with a completeness never before achieved. The question now was ow the lines of the arms and legs of the women in this painting relate to the space, how they fit on the canvas and with each other. The cylinder, the sphere, the cone were now visible before us. When we look at mountains, the curved lines of the plains cut by the vertical lines of trees rising up from horizontal lines of the fields, the cones that we see, all these are part of our bodies and ourselves as shown in the amazing balance with which we walk, the rhythm with which we breathe and with which our hearts beat. We are not saying that cubism is the highest form of art or that everyone must like it, but only that it represents an important—and, for our day, crucial—development. This breakthrough of cubism, foreshadowed by Van Gogh and Gaugin, and certainly Be Cezanne and Matisse, demonstrates the freedom of being in contrast with the freedom of doing. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
The leap was to a new context in which paintings were to be seen. It changed the attitudes with which we look at painting, and it changed the questions artists ask about their work. It cast a new light on our relation to nature. Cubism opens up a host of new possibilities and gives a new unity to ourselves and our Universe. The new way these artists related to space in the first decade of the 20th century, for example, predicted the space age, which was to be take up and reexpressed by intellectuals and scientists in the 1960s. It illustrates how one artist speaks for the whole community of one’s colleagues as well as for one’s self and for one’s culture. The Quest calls for people of the World who are not Worldly, aspirants with clear minds, endowed with common sense, students who will strive to lift themselves from inner mediocrity to inner superiority, followers who will strive to make worthwhile contributions to their environment. If the faculties of mind and the qualities of character which the successful mortal of affairs already possesses were to be transferred to the field of understanding and mastering life itself, one could quickly progress in it. It is not futile dreamers nor neurotics seeking some guru’s shoulders to lean on for the remainder of their years. There exist plenty of cults willing or eager to serve them. It is for those who understand there is real work to be done by, on, for, and within themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Is one sincerely desirous of receiving truth (rather than comfort for one’s illusions and confirmation for one’s beliefs) from God? Is one earnestly willing to obey this leading? It is a mark of the quester that one is utterly sincere in seeking truth, and that one has some depth, enough not to be content with shallow presentations of it. Authenticity of being is a necessary requirement in a would-be disciple. The insincere has better stay away from the quest. If one is determined as one is sincere, as unselfish as self-discipled, as sensitive, as intuitive, one may expect to go far on the quest. In humility the quest is to be begun: in even greater humility it is to be fulfilled. Until one has become conscious of one’s shortcomings, one’s ignorance, and one’s sinfulness, mortals will rest in smug complacency and receive no spur to self-improvement, no impetus to enter the quest. Humility is another name for such consciousness. Hence, its importance is such as to be rated the first of a disciple’s qualifications. It is not for the average mortal but only for the exceptional mortal—for the one who is determined to pursue the meaning of life to the uttermost. When these words awaken profound echoes in a mortal’s soul, one shows thereby that the intuitive element is sufficiently alive to enable one to profit by further teaching. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The life of a human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object. I perceive something. I feel something. I imagine something. I want something. I sense something. I think something. The life of a human being does not consist merely of all this and its like. All this and its like is the basis of the realm of It. But the realm of You has another basis. We are told that people experiences their World. What does this mean? People go over the surfaces of things and experiences them. They bring back from them some knowledge of their condition—an experience. They experiences what there is to things. However, it I not experiences alone that bring the World to mortals. In every kind of situation one will remember that one is dedicated to this quest, will remember its ideals and disciplines, yet not forget that one is still a human being. They are welcome who are willing to equip themselves with proper and profounder knowledge, who wish to fit themselves by study of fundamental principles, by regular prayer, personal self-discipline, and public service for a higher life for themselves and a valuable one for society. The mass of people are apathetic toward the quest: the less affluent for one set of reasons, the rich for another. Only the few capable of individual judgement, the defiant and independent thinkers, will be capable of rising up out of the mass. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves. That is the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all great geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another’s designs. And the dreams, the dreams are but part of a great design. Our Father which are in Heaven—he is our Father—there is nothing real in us which does not come from him. We belong to God. He loves us, since he loves himself and we are his. Nevertheless he is our Father who is in Heaven—not elsewhere. If we think to have a Father here below is not he, it is a God. We cannot take a single step toward him. We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward him. We do not have to search for him, we only have to change the direction in which we are looking. It is for him to search for us. We must be happy in the knowledge that he is infinitely beyond our reach. Thus we can be certain that the evil in us, even if it overwhelms our whole being, in no way sullies the divine purity, bliss, and perfection. Hallowed by they Name—God alone have the power to name himself. His name is unpronounceable for human lips. His name is his word. It is the Word of God. The name of any being is an intermediary between the human spirit and that being; it is the only means by which the human spirit can conceive something about a being that is absent. God is absent. He is in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Mortal’s only possibility of gaining access to him is correction of the petition that the kingdom of God should come. We have to cast aside all other desires for the sake of our desire for eternal life, but we should desire eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not even become attached to detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others. If such a thing were conceivable, we have to think of eternal life as one thinks of water when dying of thirst, and yet at the same time we have to desire that we and our loved ones should be eternally deprived of this water rather than receive it in abundance in spite of God’s will. The three foregoing petitions are related to the three Persons of the Trinity, the Son, the Spirit, and the Father, and also to the three divisions of time, the present, the future, and the past. Give us this day our daily bread—the bread which is supernatural. Christ is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our consent. If we agree to his entry, he enters; directly we cease to want him, he is gone. We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow; we cannot make a pact with him that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves. Our consent to his presence is the same as his presence. Consent is an act; it can only be actual, that is to say in the present. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
We have not been given a will that can be applied to the future. Everything not effective in our will is imaginary. The effective part of the will has its effect at once; its effectiveness cannot be separated from itself. The effective part of the will is not effort, which is directed toward the future. It is consent; it is the ”yes” of marriage. A “yes” pronounced within the present moment and for the present moment, but spoken as an eternal word, for it is consent to the union of Christ with the eternal part of our soul. Bread is a necessity for us. We are beings who continually draw our energy from outside, for as we receive if we use it up in effort. If our energy is not daily renewed, we become feeble and incapable of movement. Besides actual food, in the literal sense of the word, all incentives are sources of energy for us. Money, ambition, consideration, decorations, celebrity, power, our loved ones, everything that put into us the capacity for action is like bread. If any one of these attachments penetrates deeply enough into us to reach the vital roots of our carnal existence, its loss may break us and even case our death. That is called dying of love. It is like dying of hunger. All these objects of attachment go together with food, it the ordinary sense of the word, to make up the daily bread of this World. It depends entirely on circumstances whether we have it or not. We should ask noting with regard to circumstances unless it be that they may conform to the will of God. We should not ask for Earthly bread. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
There is a transcendent energy whose source is in Heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and of our bodies. We should ask for this food. At the moment of asking, and by the very fact that we ask for it, we know that God will give it to us. We ought not to be able to bear to go without it for a single day, for when our actions only depend on Earthly energies, subject to the necessity of this World, we are incapable of thinking and doing anything but evil. The World winks at dishonesty. The World does not call it dishonesty. Any protest is regarded as a heresy that shows how those who utter it do not belong: argument are not met on their merits; instead one rehearses a few illustrious names and possibly deigns to contrast them with some horrible examples. God saw that the misdeeds of mortals were multiplied on the Earth and that all the thoughts of their hears were continually bent upon evil. The necessity that drives us toward evil governs everything in us except the energy from on high at the moment when it comes into us. We cannot store it. Tone is crucial and often colors meaning. If we do not know what is said seriously and what in jest, we do not know the meaning. We have to know what is said lightly and what solemnly, where a remark is prompted by a play on words, if something is ironical or a quotation, an allusion, a pastiche, a parody, a diatribe, a daring coinage, a cliché, an epigram, or possibly ambiguous. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted everything that is owing to us. This not only includes reparation for any wrongs we think we have suffered, but also gratitude for the good we think we have done, and it applies in a quite general way to all we expect from people and things, to all we consider as our due and without which we should feel ourselves to have been frustrated. All these are the rights that we think the past has given us over the future. First there is the right to a certain permanence. When we have enjoyed something for a long time, we think that it is ours and that we are entitled to expect fate to let us go on enjoying it. Then there is the right to a compensation for every effort whatever its nature, be it work, suffering, or desire. Every time that we put forth some effort and the equivalent of this effort does not come back to us in the form of some visible fruit, we have a sense of false balance and emptiness which makes us think that we have been cheated. The effort of suffering from some offense causes us to expect the punishment or apologies of the offender, the effort of doing good makes us expect the gratitude of the person we have helped, but these are only particular cases of a universal law of the soul. Every time we give anything out we have an absolute need that at least the equivalents should come into us, and because we need this we think we have a right to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the entire Universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the future. That is the claim we have to renounce. To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. It is to accept that the future should still be a virgin and intact, strictly united to the past by bonds of which we are unaware, but quite free from the bonds of our imagination though to impose upon it. It means that we accept the possibility that this will happen, and that it may happen to us in particular; it means that we are prepared for the future to render all our past life sterile and vain. In renouncing at one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can ask of God that our past sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and error. So long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot stop this horrible fruiting. We cannot hold on to the past without retaining our crimes, for we are unaware of what is most essentially bad in us. Every being I encounter is seen to be essential. Nothing is essential but a being. Doing something with my whole being or my whole essence is the same. The realm of essences and what is essential is not outside this World in some beyond. Essential is whatever is—here and now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
If romanticism is flight from the present, yearning for deliverance from the cross of the here and now, an escape into the past, preferably medieval, or the future, into drugs or other Worlds, either night or twilight—if romanticism can face anything except the facts—then nothing could be less romantic than the central the principal claim we think we have on the Universe. This claim implies all others. The instinct of self-preservation makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a necessity is right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “ I do not see the necessity for that.” Our personality is entirely dependent on external circumstances which have unlimited power to crush it. However, we would rather die than admit this. From our point of view the equilibrium of the World is combination of circumstances so ordered that our personality remains intact and seems to belong to us. All the circumstances of the past that have wounded our personality appear to us to be disturbances of balance which should infallibly be made up for one day or another by phenomena having a contrary effect. We live on the expectation of these compensations. The near approach of death is horrible chiefly because it forces the knowledge upon us that these compensations will never come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so. If we say them with our soul, the words “Thy will be done” imply this acceptance. That is why we can say a few moment later: “We forgive our debtors.” The forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, spiritual nakedness, death. If we accept death completely, we can ask God to make us live again, purified from the evil in us. For to ask him to forgive us our debts is to ask him to wipe out the evil in us. Pardon is purification. God himself has not the power to forgive the evil in us while it remains there. When he has brought us to the state of perfection, God will have forgiven our debts. Until then God forgives our debts partially in the same measures as we forgive our debtors. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thus to delight in the present—this rational insight brings us that reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants those who haven once been confronted by the inner demand to comprehend. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Find in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and refuse to pin your hopes on any beyond. Many people have become wary of promises and hopes and take a stand resolutely in the here and now. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The only temptation for mortals is to be abandoned to one’s own resources in the presence of evil. One’s nothingness is then proved experimentally. Although the soul has received supernatural bread at the moment when it asked for it, its joy is mixed with fear because it could only ask for it for the present. The future is still to be geared. The soul has not the right to ask for bread for the morrow, but it expresses its fear in the form of a supplication. It finishes with that. The prayer began with the word “Father,” it ends with the word “evil.” We must go from confidence to fear. Confidence alone can give us strength enough not to fall as a result of fear. After having contemplated the name, the kingdom, and the will of God, after having received the supernatural bread and having been purified from evil, the soul is ready for that true humility which crowns all virtues. Humility consist of knowing that in this World the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolute acceptance of the possibility that everything natural in us should be destroyed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
However, we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear. It must be accepted as an event that would come about only in conformity with the will of God. It must be repudiated as being something utterly horrible. We must be afraid of it, but our fear must be as it were the completion of confidence. The six petitions correspond with each other in pairs. The bread which is transcendent is the same thing as the divine name. It is what brings about the contact of mortals with God. The kingdom of God is the same thing as his protection stretched over us against temptation; to protect is the function of royalty. Forgiving our debtors their debts is the same thing as the total acceptance of the will of God. The difference is that in the first three petitions the attention is fixed solely on God. In the three last, we turn our attention back to ourselves in order to compel ourselves to make these petitions a real and not an imaginary act. In the first half of the prayer, we begin with acceptance. Then we allow ourselves a desire. Then we correct it by coming back to acceptance. In the second half, the order is changed; we finish by expressing desire. Only desire has now become negative; it is expressed as a fear; therefore it corresponds to the highest degree of humility and that is a fitting way to end. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each work, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul. Modern civilization, with its tensions and comforts, its speed and extroversion, its pleasure and treasures hunts, its complicated activities and economic necessities, has trapped its victims so securely that one who would follow an independent path would have to make excessive efforts. It may seem foolish to suggest a scheme of living which involves the sacrifice of time separated out from a pressing day and given up to purposes seldom bothered with by civilized society, whose ways in fact would impede it. It may seem unlikely that people will follow such a scheme when, even if they theoretically accept those purposes, they deem themselves too busy or know themselves too lazy to operate it. It may seem impractical to offer it, especially to those who are dependent upon their work for a livelihood and who lose so much time getting to and from it. And even if they or others could be persuaded into adopting it, there is little likelihood that its exercises would be kept up—for only a comparative few are likely to have the needed strength and perseverance to keep it up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Where then is the spare time out of the modern mortal’s daily program and the continuously driving will to come from? Where are the exceptional persons wo would make the requisite sacrifices? No mortal will take up such a course of self-improvement and self-development unless one is thoroughly convinced of its necessity. And even then one may lack the willpower to declare war against one’s bad habits, one’s sloth and complacency, one’s pessimism and surface-comfort. One may be unable to change one’s pattern of thought and life, even if one wants to. However, the impulse towards a higher life must in the end come from something other than mere escapism or exotic curiosity. It must come from the thirst for truth for its own sake. Without this ever-burning thirst for spiritual awareness, no seeker is likely to travel far. Those whom life has wounded may turn to spiritual teachings for comfort, but too often this is only a passing reaction to sufferings. It has its temporary value and place, but it is not the same as consciously and clearly engaging in the Quest because the thirst for truth is predominant. A passionate eagerness to find God is a necessary basis for all the other qualifications in its pursuit. One needs to have the willingness and preparedness to withdraw every day from one’s Worldly and intellectual life utterly, and then to have the humility to open one’s heart in fervent supplication and loving adoration of higher power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
All right. I allowed myself to be taken along. White marble tile, carved gold fixtures; and ancient Roman splendor. Time is important because, although we are eternal beings, we are not going to be able to enjoy the pleasures of being in the flesh and on this Earth forever, and you may miss it, even when you go to Heaven. Nevertheless, we know and believe the love God has for us. “God is love, and one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in one,” reports 1 John 4.16. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, if you have love for one another, all mortals will know that you are my disciples,” reports John 13.34-35. After two thousand years are we still able to realize what it means to say, “God is Love”? The writer of the First Epistle of John certainly knew what he wrote, for he drew the consequences: “One who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in one.” God’s abiding in us, making us his dwelling place, is the same thing as our having love as the sphere of our habitation. God and love are not two realities; they are one. God’s Being is the being of love and God’s infinite power of Being is the infinite power of love. Therefore, one who professes devotion to God may abide in God if one abides in love, or one may not abide in God if one does not abide in love. And one who does not speak of God may abide in him if one is abiding in love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
And since the manifestation of God as love is his manifestation in Jesus Christ, Jesus can say that many of those who do not know him, belong to him, and that many of those who confess their allegiance to him do not belong to him. The criterion, the only ultimate criterion, is love. For God is love, and the divine love is triumphantly manifest in Christ the Crucified. Let me tell you the story of a woman who passed away a few years ago and whose life was spent abiding in live, although she rarely, if ever, used the name of God, and though she would have been surprised had someone told her that she belonged to him who judges all mortals, because he is love and love is the only criterion of his judgment. Her name was Elsa Brandstrom, the daughter of a former Swedish ambassador to Russia. However, her name in the mouths and hearts of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war during the First World War was the Angel of Siberia. She was an irrefutable, living witness to the truth that love is the ultimate power of Being, even in a century which belongs to the darkest, most destructive and cruel of all centuries since the dawn of humankind. At the beginning of the First World War, when Elsa Brandstorm was twenty-four years of age, she looked out the window of the Swedish Embassy in what was then Saint Petersburg and saw the Germany prisoners of war being driven through the streets on their way to Siberia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
From that moment on, after what she had seen, Elsa could no longer endure the splendor of the diplomatic life of which, up to then, she had been a beautiful and vigorous center. She became a nurse and began visiting the prison camps. There she saw unspeakable horrors and she, a girl of twenty-four, began, almost alone, the fight of love against cruelty, and she prevailed. She had to fight against the resistance and suspicion of the authorities and she prevailed. She had to fight against the brutality and lawlessness of the prison guards and she triumphed. She had to fight against cold, hunger, dirt and illness, against the conditions of an undeveloped country and a destructive war, and she prevailed. Love gave her wisdom with innocence, and daring with foresight. And whenever she appeared despair was conquered and sorrow healed. Elsa visited the hungry and gave them food. She saw the thirsty and have them to drink. She welcomed the unknown, clothed the people in their birthday suits and strengthened the sick. Elsa herself fell ill and was imprisoned, but God was abiding in her. The irresistible power of love was with her. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
And she never ceased to be driven by this power. After the war Elsa initiated a great work for the orphans of Germany and Russian prisoners of war. The sight of her among these children whose sole ever-shinning Sun she was, must have been a decisive religious impression for many people. With the coming of the Nazis, she and her husband were forced to leave Germany and come to this country. Here she became the helper of innumerable European refugees, and for ten years I was able personally to observe the creative genius of her love. We never had a theological conversation. It was unnecessary. Elsa made God transparent in every moment. For God, who is love, was abiding in her and she in the Lord. She aroused the love of millions towards herself and towards that for which she was transparent—the God who is love. On her deathbed Else received a delegate from the king and people of Sweden, representing innumerable people all over European, assuring her that she would never be forgotten by those whom she had given back the meaning of their lives. It is a rare gift to meet a human being in whom love—and this means God—is so overwhelmingly manifest. It undercuts theological arrogance as well as pious isolation. It is more than justice and it is greater than faith and hope. It is the presence of God himself. For God is love. And in every moment of genuine love we are dwelling in God and God in us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Attitude is an important part of the foundation upon which we build a productive life. In appraising our present attitude, we might consider what is necessary. There are many degrees of necessity. Everything is necessary in some degree if its loss really causes a decrease of vital energy. (This word is here used in the strict and precise sense that it might have if the study of vital phenomena were as far advanced as that of falling bodies.) When the degree of necessity is extreme, deprivation leads to death. This is the case when all the vital energy of one being is bound up with another by some attachment. In the lesser degrees, deprivation leads to a more or less considerable lessening of energy. Thus a total deprivation of food causes death, whereas a partial deprivation only diminishes the life force. Nevertheless, if a person is not to be weakened, the necessary quantity of food is considered to be that required. The most frequent cause of necessity in the bonds of affection is a combination of sympathy and habit. As in the case of avarice or drunkenness, that which was at first a search for some desired good is transformed into a need by the mere passage of time. The difference from avarice, drunkenness, and all the vices, however, is that in the bonds of affection the two motives—search for a desired good, and need—can very easily coexist. They can also be separated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When the attachment of one being to another is made up of need and nothing else it is a fearful thing. Few things in this World can reach such a degree of ugliness and horror. Whenever a human being seeks what is good and only find necessity, there is always something horrible. The stories that tell of a beloved being who suddenly appears with a death’s head best symbolize this. The human soul possesses a whole arsenal of lies with which to put up a defense against this ugliness and, in imagination, to manufacture sham advantages where there is only necessity. It is for this very reason that ugliness is an evil, because it conduces to lying. Speaking quite generally, we might say that there is affliction whenever necessity, under no matter what form, is imposed so harshly that the hardness exceeds the capacity for lying of the person who receives the impact. That is why the purest souls are the most exposed to affliction. For one who is capable of preventing the automatic reaction of defense, which tends to increase the soul’s capacity for lying, affliction is not an evil, although it is always a wounding and in a sense a degradation. When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that one should wish autonomy to be preserved in one’s self and the other. It is impossible by the miraculous of nature. It is, however, made possible by the miraculous intervention of the supernatural. This miracle is friendship. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Friendship is an equality made of harmony. There is harmony because there is a supernatural union between two opposites, that is to say, necessity and liberty, the two opposites God combined when he created the World and men. There is equality because each wishes to preserve the faculty of free consent both in oneself and in the other. When anyone wishes to put oneself under a human being or consents to be subordinated to one, there is no trace of friendship. The Queen of the Damn’s Maharet is not the friend of Queen Akasha. There is no friendship where there is inequality. A certain reciprocity is essential in friendship. If all good will is entirely lacking on one of the two sides, the other should suppress one’s own affection, out of respect for the free consent which one should not desire to force. If on one of the two sides there is not any respect for the autonomy of the other, this other must cut the bond uniting them out of respect for oneself. In the same way, one who consents to be enslaved cannot gain friendship. However, the necessity contained in the bond of affection can exist on one side only, and in this case there is only friendship on one side, if we keep to the strict and exact meaning of the word. If only for a moment, a friendship is tarnished as soon as necessity triumphs, over the desire to preserve the faculty of free consent on both sides. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity. If even a trace of the wish to please or the contrary desire to dominate is found in it, all friendship is impure. In a perfect friendship these two desires are completely absent. The two friends have fully consented to be two and not one, they respect the distance which the fact of being two distinct creatures places between them. Mortals have the right to desire direct union with God alone. Friendship is a miracle by which person consent to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to one as food. It requires the strength of the soul that Eve did not have; and yet she had no need of the fruit. If she had been hungry at the moment when she looked at the fruit, and if in spite of that she had remained looking at it indefinitely without taking one step toward it, she would have performed a miracle analogous to that of perfect friendship. Through this supernatural miracle of respect for human autonomy, friendship is very like the pure forms of compassion and gratitude called forth by affliction. In both cases the contraries which are the terms of the harmony are necessity and liberty, or in other words subordination and equality. These two pairs of opposites are equivalent. From the fact that the desire to please and the desire to command are not found in pure friendship, it has it in, at the same time as affection, something not unlike a complete indifference. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Although friendship is a bond between two people it is in a sense impersonal. It leaves impartiality intact. It in no way prevents us from imitating the perfection of our Father in Heaven who freely distributes Sunlight and rain in every place. On the contrary, friendship and this distribution are the mutual conditions one of the other, in most cases at any rate. For, as practically every human being is joined to others by bounds of affection that have in them some degree of necessity, one cannot go toward perfection except by transforming this affection into friendship. Friendship has something universal about it. It consists of loving a human being as we should like to be able to love each soul in particular of all those who go to make up the human race. As a geometrician looks at a particular figure in order to deduce the universal properties of the triangle, so one who knows how to love directs upon a particular human being a universal love. The consent to preserve an autonomy within ourselves and in others is essentially of a universal order. As soon as we wish for this autonomy to be respected in more than just one single being we desire it for everyone, for we cease to arrange the order of the World in a circle whose center is here below. We transport the center of the circle beyond the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If the two beings who love each other, through an unlawful use of affection, think they form only one, friendship does not have this power. However, then there is not friendship in the true sense of the word. That is what might be called an adulterous union, even though it comes about between husband and wife. There is not friendship where distance is not kept and respected. The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, attacks the purity of the friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. However, at the same time pure friendship is rare. When the bonds of affection and necessity between human beings are not supernaturally transformed into friendship, not only is the affection of an impure and low order, but it is also combined with hatred and repulsion. That is shown very well in The Queen of the Damned and in Romeo Must Die. The mechanism is the same in affections other than carnal love. It is easy to understand this. We hate what we are dependent upon. We become disgusted with what depends on us. Sometimes affection does not only become mixed with hatred and revulsion; it is entirely changed into it. The transformation may sometimes even be almost immediate, so that hardly any affection has had time to show; this is the case when necessity is laid bare almost at once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When the necessity which brings people together has nothing to do with the emotions, when it is simply due to circumstances, hostility often makes it appearance from the start. When Christ said to his disciples: “Love one another,” it was not attachment he was laying down as their rule. As it was a fact that there were bounds between them due to the thoughts, the life, and the habits they shared, he commanded them to transform these bonds into friendship, so that they should not be allowed to turn into impure attachment or hatred. Since, shortly before his passing into Heaven, Christ gave this as a new commandment to be added to the two great commandments of the love of our neighbor and the love of God, we can think that pure friendship, like the love of our neighbor, has in it something of a sacrament. Christ perhaps wished to suggest this with reference to Christian friendship when he said: “Where there are two or three gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.” Pure friendship is an image of the original and perfect friendship that belongs to the Trinity and is the very essence of God. It is impossible for two human beings to be one while scrupulously respecting the distance that separates them, unless God is present in each of them. The point at which parallels meet is infinity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Greeks were an eminently visual people. They gloried in the visual arts; Homer’s epics abound in visual details; and they created tragedy and comedy, adding new dimensions to visual art. The Hebrews were not so visual and actually entertained a prohibition against the visual arts. Neither did they have tragedies or comedies. The one book of the Bible that has sometimes been called a tragedy, Job, was clearly not intended for, and actually precluded, any visual representation. The Greeks wanted God to be a friend, they visualized their gods and represented them in marble and in beautiful vase paintings. They also brought them on the stage. The Hebrews did not visualize their God and expressly forbade attempts to make of him an object—a visual object, a concrete object, any object. Their God was not to be seen. He was to be heard and listened to. He was not an It but an I—or a You. Christianity was born of the denial that God could not possibly be seen. Not all who considered Jesus a great teacher became Christians. Christians were those for whom he was the Lord. Christians were those who believed that God could become visible, an object of sight and experience, of knowledge and belief. Of course, Christianity did not deny its roots in Judaism. Jesus as the Son of God who had ascended to the Heavens to dwell there with God, as God, did not simply become another Heracles, the son of Zeus who had ascended to the Heavens to dwell there with the gods, as a god. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Jesus did not simply become another of the legion of Greek gods and demigods and sons of Zeus. He had preached and was to be heard and listened to. His moral teachings were recorded lovingly for the instruction of the faithful. However, were they really to be listened to? Or did they, too, become objects—of admiration and perhaps discussion? Was the individual to feel addressed by them, commanded by them—was he able to relate his life to them? The new dispensation was hardly that. The New Testament keeps saying, nowhere more emphatically than in the Gospel according to John, that those who only live by Jesus’s moral teaching shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven; only those can be saved who are baptized, who believe, and who take the sacraments—eating, as that Gospel puts it, “of this bread.” Of course, Christian belief is not totally unlike Jewish belief. It is not devoid of trust and confidence, and in Paul’s and Luther’s experience of faith these Jewish elements were especially prominent. Rarely have they been wholly lacking in Christianity. Still, this Jewish faith was never considered sufficient to some. Christian faith was always centered in articles of faith that had to be believed by those who wanted to be saved. When the Reformation did away with visual images, it was only to insist more firmly on the purity of doctrines that must be believed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, may love the beautiful stained-glass windows, which communicate stores to those who are visual learners. And for Luther the bread and wine were no mere symbols of Christ’s flesh and blood—otherwise he might have made common cause with Ulrich Zwingli and presented the splintering of Protestantism—but the flesh and blood itself: God as an object. People sometimes wonder, is there some particular purpose in my birth here? Is it all ere coincidence? Must we doubt, deny, even reject God? These are some of the questions a thoughtful mortal might ask. If one is to moan over the length of the road opening out before one, one should also jubilate over the fact that one has begun to travel it. How few care to take this step! If some are immediately and irrevocably captured by the teachings, others are only gradually and cautiously convinced. Those who feel an emptiness in their hearts despite Worldly attainment and possession may be unconsciously yearning for God. So many of us place so much value in possessions, yet we overlook the startling fact that we have not begun to possess ourselves! What mortal can call one’s essential self? Can we build a bridge between this sorrowful Earthly life and the peaceful eternal life? Are the two forever sundered? Every seer, sage, and saint answers the first question affirmatively and the second negatively. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The echoes of our spiritual being some to us all the time. They come in thoughts and things, in music and pictures, in emotions and words. If only we would take up the search for their source and trace them to it, we would recognize in the end the Reality, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness behind all the familiar manifestations. Those who can no longer confine their thinking within the conventional boundaries of common experience may cross over into religion’s reverent faith, into Christianity’s deep-felt intuition, or into philosophy’s final certitude. Whoever perceives the inferiority of one’s environment to what it could be, as well as the imperfections of one’s nature in the light of its undeveloped possibilities, and who sets out to improve the one and amend the other, has taken a first step to the quest. It is better to come late to the higher life with its nobler values and uplifting practices, than not at all. It is still better to come to it when one is comparatively young and foundations are being laid. They will be fortunate indeed if their spiritual longings are satisfied without the passage of many years and the travail of much exploration. They will be fortunate indeed if pitying friends do not repeatedly tell them with each change and each disappointed pulling-up of tents that they are pursing a mirage. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Those who have found their way to this Path leave forever behind them their aimless wanderings of the past. One fateful day, one will ruefully realize that one is octopus-held by external activities. Then will one take up the knife of a keen relentless determination and cut the imprisoning tentacles once and for all. I have no need to see and to test in order to be set free. I am free even in the confusion of servitude. I enjoy the freedom of the future, generations in advance. And when I die, I shall die a free man, for I have fought for freedom my whole life long. Mortals are free, in so far as one has the power of contradicting oneself and one’s essential nature. Mortals are free even from one’s freedom; that is, one can surrender one’s humanity. Freedom, by its very nature, is elusive. The word is difficult to define because of its quicksilver quality: freedom is always moving. You can state what it is not or what you desire to get free from—which is why the phrase freedom from should never be disparaged. However, it is difficult to designate what freedom is. Thus we always hear of the struggle for, the fight for freedom. Yet, when someone tells us “how I found freedom,” we have a feeling that something is being faked. The greatest virtue is not to be free, but to struggle ceaselessly for freedom. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Freedom is like a flock of white butterflies bestirred in front of you as you walk through the woods: rising in cluster they flit off in an infinite number of directions. Once you become self-konsciously sure of your freedom, you have lost it. Hence we find ourselves almost always describing what freedom is not rather than what it is: “I am free tomorrow” means I do not have to work; “I have a free period” means I do not have any class then. Freedom is frequently and persistently conceived of as a negative quality. Freedom is very much like health or virtue or innocence. After we have lost it, we feel it mist intensely. The dictionary does nothing to relieve our frustration. In the eighteen different meanings in Webster’s, fourteen of them are negative, such as “not held in slavery” or “not subject to external authority.” Of the reaming four, one is “liberty”—which deals with political freedom—and the others are simply tautological, such as “spontaneous, voluntary, independent.” Freedom is continually creating itself. Freedom is expansiveness. Freedom has an infinite quality. The guiding laws of life are not easy to find. The sacred wisdom of God is also the secret wisdom. The seeker quests until one’s thoughts rests. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The quest will continue to attract its votaries so long as the Real continues to exist and mortals continue to remain unaware of it. This ever-new set of possibilities is part of the reason psychology has by and large evaded the subject, for freedom cannot be pinned down as psychologists are wont to do. In psychotherapy the closest we can get to discerning freedom in action is when a person experiences “I can” or “I will.” When a client in therapy says either of these, I always make sure he or she knows that I have heard him or her; for “can” and “will” are statements of personal freedom, even if only in fantasy. These verbs point to some event in the future, either immediate or long-term. They also imply that the person who uses them sense some power, some possibility, and is aware of ability to use this power. The mystery of the soul is as formidable and as baffling as any. Yet it is also a fascinating one. If few people have penetrated it today, may tried to do so in the past. Only when they are brought by the discipline of experience to a sense of responsibility, are they likely to seek this knowledge. This does not mean that a spiritual outlook requires an unquestioning acceptance of what mortals have made of themselves and the World. We approach God deep in our hearts. We feel the divine presence in that profound unearthly stillness where neither the sounds of emotional clamour nor those of intellectual grinding can enter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
I know your arguments. For centuries I have pondered them, as I have pondered so many questions. You think I do what I do with human limitations. I do not. To understand me, you must think in terms of abilities yet unimagined. Sooner will you understand the mystery of splitting atoms or black holes in space. The abyss and light of the World, time’s need and the craving for eternity, vision, event, and poetry are the dialogue with me. When I confront you, God is present. However, if I look away from you, I ignore him. As long as I merely experience or use you, I ignore God. As long as I merely experience or use you, I deny God. Yet, when I encounter you, I encounter God. Loneliness is honesty in one sense. In honesty you have to separate yourself from the impersonal mass—you are saved from conformism. To be honest is to be lonely in the sense that you individuate yourself, you seize the moment to be yourself and yourself alone. There is an initial loneliness about being oneself, speaking out of one’s own center. Some people feel a sadness and despair about being cast loose, alone, into the Word. One may feel life a single red wood tree standing at the North Pole, with nobody or nothing around for a million miles. However, is not the loneliness that we all experience at times, the kind that is inseparable from the human condition? #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
If you dare to be honestly yourself, you will be lonely. At each moment in our self-consciousness we are alone. No one else can genuinely come into our sanctum sanctorum. We pass into Heaven alone. No one escapes. This is destiny in its deepest sense. When we recognize this, then we can overcome the loneliness to some extent. We recognize that it is a human loneliness. It means we are all in the same yacht, and we can then choose to, or not to, let others into our life. Lo and behold, we then have used the aloneness to be less lonely. Sometimes when people have to work in an international community or land where the people who speak their native language are a minority and uninteresting, one can feel painfully lonely, due chiefly to the isolation. And their work may not be that absorbing. Nonetheless, people generally follow the usual defense: they throw themselves into their work with ever greater zeal. However, the harder they work, the more isolated they may feel. Generally, this could lead to an individual collapsing and having to go to bed for a couple of weeks. This is what many call a nervous breakdown. When this happens, one may want to change their lifestyle. Maybe take up a hobby like reading, drawing, gardening, sculpting or a sport. Even learning to cook could be fascinating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Still, giving up your habit of rigidly planning your life and taking the flow of your energy as it comes can have some unintended side effects. Being all without aim or sense of direction, isolated, may lead to one feeling like a nonentity since all one’s old ways of proving their worth are no longer being employed. Seeking a new direction and life and letting go and trusting in God has also been helpful for some people. David Talbot started out on his Summer vacating up toward the Caspian Sea with no plans, no fixed guides to follow. By accident he met a group of fifteen or sixteen artists traveling and doing art as a group, and he got a job with them as a sort of fancy handy man. He traveled and had made sketches with them all through the villages along the Caspian Sea. This was the birth of him becoming an architect. He also fell deeply in love that summer and it was the greatest joy of his life. However, should we call this accident of meeting this group an accident, or was it really an expression of destiny? I think it was. When David gave up his rigid and compulsive demands on life, when he let go and let God, unexpected possibilities opened up in unpredictable ways which would have never been known to him. These are aspects of destiny become conscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
For other people, they may need to support their confidence without taking away the force of their despair, since despair may well lead to the deepest insight and the most valuable change. When in despair or depression, it is true that most people shrink—they tend to retreat into their hopelessness. However, one should try to experience this despair constructively, as an opportunity. The despair can then act upon the person like the flood in Genesis: it can clear away the vast debris—the false answers, false buoys, superficial lighthouses, and phony principles—and leave the way open for new possibilities. That is, for new freedom. We know in psychotherapy that times of despair are essential to the client’s discovery of hidden capacities and basic assets. Those therapists are misguided who feel it incumbent upon themselves to reassure the patient at every point of despair. For if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel anything below the surface. 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 is necessary. That seems to me to be the meaning of the sentence from folklore, “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The loves of childhood and of adolescence cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be served. It is as if they had entered our blood stream. Therefore, one cannot let anyone tell them what is best to do, and sometimes when you already have a successful career, consider sticking to it or just transferring to a different office or location. Do not let people prey on your vulnerabilities because even those who seem like well wishers would like to see you fail and may give you faulty advice, whether they be paid consultants, friends, family or coworkers. We ought to be mindful that all human beings we confront are persons. We need a new language, and new poets to create it, and new ears to listen to it. Meanwhile, if we shut our ears to the old prophets who still speak more or less in the old tongues, using ancient words, occasionally in new ways, we shall have very little music. We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let one that has new ears listen to it in a new way. To be given direction, to feel an impulsion towards it, and to practice purification is a necessary requisite for the journey. Two warnings are needed here: fall not into the extreme of unbalance, and depend not on what is outside. One reminder: seek and submit to grace. It may be imageless or found anywhere anytime and, in any form, —a work of art, a piece of music, a living tree, or a human being—for in the end it must come from your own higher individuality and in your own loneliness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Before embarking on a new journey in life, one should figure out what attracts them most to this direction? What does one hope to get out of it? And if one is seeking religious satisfaction, spiritual truth or moral power of inner peace or psychic faculties? Consider if you will be satisfied with a theoretical understanding or would one go as far as to put in into practice? And are you will to put in the work and effort and dedication needed for the experience? How far do you think this new path will take you in life, career, and spirituality? The beginnings of this higher life are always mysterious, always unpredictable, sometimes intellectually quiet and sometimes emotionally excited. When first one sets logs of one’s first raft afloat upon these strange waters whose ending can only be somewhere in infinity, as the geometricians say, there are no lights to show one’s frail vessel the way of travel, no Suns or Stars to point a path for it. However, one knows then that one’s head is bowed in homage to a higher power. Later one will know also how utterly right was the intuition which earlier drove one forth. We walk the Quest uncertainly, human nature being what it is, human weakness following us so obtrusively as it does. The decision to embark on this quest—so new, uncommon, and untried to the average Westerner—becomes especially hard to the mortal seeking alone, with no compassion or relative to fortify one’s resolution. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This urge to discover an intangible reality seems an irrational one to the materialistic mentality. However, on the contrary, it is the most completely logical, the most sensible of all the urges that have ever driven a mortal. The instinct which draws mortals to the truths of philosophy, the experiences of mysticism, and the feeling of religion is a sound one. The fact of one’s own self-existence is the innate primary experience of every mortal. It is clear, certain, and incontrovertible. However, the nature of that existence is obscure, confused, and arguable. So much happens in the subconscious before they are quite aware of it that only when a new decision, a new orientation of feeling or thought is firmly arrived at, and openly appears, do they discover and define what they have been led to by outer and inner developments. In each mortal there is a part of one which is unknown and unmolested. It is in the region of consciousness below the normal state that the most powerful forces move the human being—and can be applied to move one. Here only can the radical transformation be made. If one believes that these ideas ring true, then one’s course of duty is plain. To keep aloof in such a circumstance is to write one’s name in the Book of Failure. Mortals have largely conquered their planetary environment. Now one must begin the sterner task of conquering oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
“Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth” is a sentence from that ancient record, the Hebrew Bible. However, any mortal may find that the Lord is still existent and still willing to speak to one even today. Yet, to actualize such an encounter one must take to the secret path and practice inner listening. In mortals, Heaven and Earth unite. One is free to enjoy the one or the other. The first leads to peace of mind, the second ties one to the terrestrial wheel. Whoever sincerely wants access to divinity may find it, but one must make the first move. The fulfilment of the heart’s nostalgic yearning for its true homeland may be delayed, but it cannot be defeated. If experience, reason, or intuition cannot bring one to the conviction that God rules the World, a prophet’s help, grace, or writing may do so. If that fails, one has no other recourse than to keep pondering the question until light dawns. If the quest seems too far from one’s environment or circumstances, it is still a good time to start, for the reward will be better savoured. This search after the soul need not wait until death until it successfully ends. To do so would be illogical and in most causes futile. Here on Earth and in this very lifetime the grand discover may be made. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The quest upon which one has entered will be a long one and the task one has understand a hard one. However, the Ideal will also be one’s support because one’s conscience will endorse one’s choice to the end. Leave aside wrangling, and take up the quest leading to the true goal, the Supreme Overself, which is unique. Push thy enquiry further. Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile Him? All of us have tried and are trying to reconcile God by rites and sacraments, by prayers and services, by moral behavior and works of charity. However, if we try this, if we try to give something to God, to show good deeds which may appease the Lord, we fail. It is never enough; we never can satisfy God because there is an infinite demand upon us. And since we cannot appease God, we grow hostile toward the Lord. Have you ever noticed how much hostility against God dwells in the depth of the good and honest people, in those who excel in works of charity, in piety and religious zeal? This cannot be otherwise; for one is hostile, consciously or unconsciously, toward those by whom feels rejected. Everybody is in this predicament, whether one calls that which rejects one God, or nature, or destiny, or social conditions. Everybody carries a hostility toward the existence into which one has been thrown, toward the hidden powers which determine one’s life and that of the Universe, toward that which makes one guilty and that threatens one with destruction because one has become guilty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We all feel rejected and hostile toward what has rejected us. We all try to appease it and in failing, we become more hostile. This happens often unnoticed by ourselves. However, there are two symptoms which we hardly can avoid noticing: The hostility against ourselves and the hostility against others. One speaks so often of pride and arrogance and self-certainty and complacency in people. However, this is, in most cases the superficial level of their being. Below this, in a deeper level, there is self-rejection, disgust, and even hatred of one’s self. Be reconciled to God; that means at the same time, be reconciled to ourselves. However, we are not; we try to appease ourselves. We try to make ourselves more acceptable to our own judgment and, when we fail, we grow more hostile toward ourselves. And one who feels rejected by God and who rejects oneself feels also rejected by the others. As one grows hostile toward destiny and hostile toward oneself, one also grows hostile toward other people. If we are often horrified by the unconscious or conscious hostility people betray toward us or about our own hostility toward people whom we believe we love, let us not forget: They feel rejected by us; we feel rejected by them. They tried hard to make themselves acceptable to us, and they failed. We tried hard to make ourselves acceptable to them, and we failed. And their hostility grew. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Be reconciled with God—that means, at the same time, be reconciled with the others! However, it does not mean try to reconcile the others as it does not mean try to reconcile the others as it does not mean try to reconcile yourselves. Try to reconcile God. You will fail. This is the message: A new reality has appeared in which you are reconciled. To enter the New Being we do not need to show anything. We must only be open to be grasped by it, although we have nothing to show. Being reconciled—tat is the first mark of the New Reality. And being reunited is its second mark. Reconciliation makes reunion possible. The New Creation is the reality in which the separated is reunited. The New Being is manifest in the Christ because in the him the separation never overcame the unity between him and God, between him and humankind, between him and himself. This gives his picture in the Gospels its overwhelming and inexhaustible power. In him we look at a human life that maintained the union in spite of everything that drove him into separation. He represents and mediates the power of the New Being because he represents and mediates the power of an undisrupted union. Where the New Reality appears, one feels united with God, the ground and meaning of one’s existence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
One has what has been called the love of one’s destiny, and what, today, we might call the courage to take upon ourselves our own anxiety. Then one has the astonishing experience of feeling reunited with one’s self, not in pride and false self-satisfaction, but in deep self-acceptance. One accepts one’s self as something which is eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted. The disgust at one’s self, the hatred of one’s self has disappeared. There is a center, a direction, a meaning for life. All healing—bodily and mental—creates this reunion of one’s self with one’s self. Where there is real healing, there is the New Being, The New Creation. However real healing is not where only a part of body or mind is reunited with the whole, but where the whole itself, our whole being, our whole personality is untied with itself. The New Creation is healing creation because it creates reunion with oneself. And it creates reunion with the others. Nothing is more distinctive the Old Being than the separation of mortals from mortals. Nothing is more passionately demanded than social healing, than the New Being within history and human relationships. Religion and Christianity are under strong accusation that they have not brought reunion into human history. Who could deny the truth of this challenge. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nevertheless, humankind still lives; and it could not live any more if the power of separation had not been permanently conquered by the power of reunion, of healing, of the New Creation. Where one is grasped by a human face as human, although one has to overcome personal distaste, or racial strangeness, or national conflicts, or the differences of sex, of age, of beauty, of strength, of knowledge, and all the other innumerable causes of separation—there New Creation happens! Humankind lives because this happens again and again. And if the Church which is the assembly of God has an ultimate significance, this is its significance: That here the reunion of mortal to mortal is pronounced and confessed and realize, even if in fragments and weaknesses and distortions. The Church is the place where the reunion of mortals with mortals is an actual event, though the Church of God is permanently betrayed by the Christian churches. However, although betrayed and expelled, the New Creation saves and preserves that by which it is betrayed and expelled: churches, humankind and history. The Church, like all its members, relapses from the New into the Old Being. Therefore, the third mark of the New Creation is re-surrection. The word resurrection has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. However, resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Resurrection is not even an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time. The Old Being has the mark of disintegration and death. The New Being puts a new mark over the old one. Out of disintegration and death something is born of eternal significance. That which is immersed in dissolution emerges in a New Creation. Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and Universe. Reconciliation, reunion, resurrection—this is the New Creation, the New Being, the New state of things. Do we participate in it? The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you. There is a great difference between the essence of the Necessary and that of the Good. There is no contradiction between seeking our own good in human being and wishing for one’s good to be increased. For this very reason, when the motive that draws us toward anybody is simply some advantage for ourselves, the conditions of friendship are not fulfilled. Friendship is a supernatural harmony, a union of opposites. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
When a human being is any degree necessary to us, we cannot desire one’s good unless we cease to desire our own. Where there is necessity there is constraint and domination. We are in the power of that of which we stand in need, unless we possess it. The central good for every mortal is the free disposal of oneself. Either we renounce it, which is a crime of idolatry, since it can be renounced only in favor of God, or we desire that the being we stand in need of should be deprived of this free disposal of oneself. Any kind of mechanism may join human beings together with bonds of affection which have the iron hardness of necessity. Mother love is often of such a kind; so at times is paternal love, as in Pere Goriot of Balzac; so is carnal love in its most intense form, as in L’Ecole des Femmes and in Phedre; so also, very frequently, is the love between husband and wife, chiefly as a result of habit. Filial and fraternal love are more rarely of this nature. A person with a good heart can help someone fix a tire, take a roommate to the doctor, have lunch with someone who is sad, or smile and say hello to brighten a day. However, a follower of the first commandment will naturally add to these important acts of service. We need to have compassion and we will be provided opportunities to forget self and lift others. If we are to be more like Christ, we are to be sensitive to the struggles, trials, and challenges faced by so many but that can often be overlooked. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
It was a more lavish place even than the great hall of the palace; it was stuffed to overflowing with fine things, with a couch made of carved leopards, and a bed hung with sheer silk; and with polished mirrors of seemingly magical perfection. The concept of destiny makes the experience of anger necessary. The kind of person who never gets angry is, we may be sure, the person who also never encounters destiny. When one encounters destiny, one finds anger automatically rising in one, but as strength. Passivity will not do. This emotion is not necessarily negative. Encountering one’s destiny requires strength, the encounter takes the form of embracing, accepting, or attacking. Experiencing the emotional state of anger and conceiving of destiny means that you are free from regarding yourself as too precious; you are able to throw yourself into the game, whatever it may be, without worrying about picayune details. Enkil, a man in his middle twenties, sought the help of a psychotherapist because he was having difficulty in his marriage. One week, after he had had several sessions with the therapist, sudden and dramatic changes occurred in his relationship with his wife, Akasha. Both of them began to talk to each other about events and feelings that they had never discussed before. In some ways it was an agonizing week for them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Anger that had been pent up for months, and even years, poured forth. In the course of their self-disclosures each of them revealed that they had had dates with another since their marriage. More expressions of anger and hurt burst forth, reaching an intensity they had never experiences before. However, when the anger and hurt had been expressed other feelings began to manifest themselves. They became aware that they felt closer and more attracted to each other than they ever had before. As they moved toward each other, they felt more care and warmth. Gaining awareness of our fear of love is often a difficult task, for we tend to disguise it from ourselves and others by employing many defenses against intimacy. Some people have a reservoir of hostility built up over the years that has something to do with their behavior, and the functions that it appears to serve in relation to their spouse and other people one cares for is one of keeping it virtually impossible to experience intimacy. There are many similar defenses against intimacy. We may keep people at a distance by seeming indifferent to them, by being rigid or legalistic, or by playing the role of martyr. As long as we are successful at employing these ways of keeping others away, it is hard for us to become aware of our fear of love, for we make the possibility of intimacy so remote that there is a little danger of our experiencing it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
With the lion so successfully caged, we do not become aware of our fear of it. If we can begin to see what we are doing and begin to give up some of our defenses, then we will be more likely to experience our fear of love directly. Once this occurs, we are in a much better position to do something about it. If we cannot only be aware of our fear of love, but also accept it both in ourselves and in others, it will also be helpful. Here, as elsewhere, caring for ourselves seems to be the starting point for personality growth. If we can experience and accept our fear of love, we will have less need of indirect ways of expressing it, which are almost invariably harmful to relationships. When we experience more intimacy than our fears will permit, instead of finding some pretext for withdrawing, we can admit our fear to ourselves and often to the other person as well. This direct way of responding to our fear will be far less destructive to the relationships. A natural ebb and flow of the experience and expression of love will then be possible, as we experience such intimacy as we are ready for and then withdraw for a time as our fear asserts itself too strongly. As we see this pattern clearly, we will be far more able to take in stride apparent setbacks in our association with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
When we can recognize that when someone we love acts destructively or hurtfully towards us it is almost certainly an indication that one, too, is afraid rather than that one does not care for us, and it makes a big difference to recognize this. If we did not have this insight, we may be just as hurt or express as much anger. The chances of resolving the situation are much better, however, because we ourselves will not be likely to react as though we have been completely rejected and unloved. This is when we often pick one of Mrs. Winchester’s favorite flowers, a daisy, and pluck the petals off as we play that “he or she loves me, he or she loves me not” game in which we tally up what we consider to be indications of how the other person involved feels based on what answer comes up when we get to the last petal. Then no matter the outcomes, we say to ourselves, “There must something the matter with me or my love would not treat me this way.” This game may give up hope, but it might just be pointless, for the problem is usually not possessed in the absence of caring but rather in the fear of love, which leads the person to act as though one does not care. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Anger for some people is a path to freedom. The times when some people become angry are times when one gains valuable insight, which are then expressed constructively—for example, the time when Akasha told Enkil about her plans to marry Lestat and move across the World, which he had called “the craziest plan I ever heard.” Experiences like Enkil’s is analogous to a ship putting out to sea. It is cast loose from the dock, and, sailing in the open wind, it then gets its power from cooperation with wind and sea and stars, as we get our power by living in cooperation with destiny. Our freedom, like the ship’s, thus comes from engaging destiny, knowing that the elements are there all the time and that they have to be encountered or embraced. Constructive anger is one way of encountering destiny. However, often sailors find that they have to fight the elements, as in the case of a storm at sea. We find our freedom at the juncture of forces we cannot control but can only encounter—which often, like the ship fight the storm, takes all the strength we have. Now it is not only sailing with, it is sailing against the sea and the storm winds. The constructive anger we have been speaking about is one way of using our power to choose our way of encountering destiny. The possible responses to destiny range from cooperation with at one end of the spectrum to fighting against the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Our anger empowers us in the struggle against destiny. As Beethoven cried, “I will seize fate by the throat!” And out of that came the Fifth Symphony. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. A woman, for example, might see that her husband belittles her constantly as a means of avoiding intimacy and as a way of coping with his own self-hate. Yet if she saw no crack in the wall of this defense, she might ultimately come to the conclusion that it would be self-destructive for her to continue the marriage. And a child might still have to be taken from a cruel father even though it might be recognized that his brutality is rooted in a terrible fear of love. If we can discover that the potential hurt of not experiencing and expressing love ultimately far outweighs the risk that accompany intimacy, this might also be a helpful revelation. When we dare to love, we can never eliminate the possibility that we will be hurt. The emotional involvement of caring always includes vulnerability; in fact, if we allow ourselves to love someone, we can be certain that we will sometimes be hurt. Someone we love will pass on to Heaven; someone we love maybe injured; someone we love may suffer from an infirmary; someone we love will be so frightened and mistrustful of our caring that they will react in ways that are hurtful or even destructive to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we chose to love, these are painful experiences, and we cannot avoid them. It is quite customary to relegate us, the votaries Christianity, to the asylum of eccentricity, crankiness, gullibility, fraud, and even lunacy. In some individual cases our critics are perfectly justified in doing so. When the Christian losses one’s direct path, one easily deviates into these aberrations. However, to make a wholesale condemnation of all Christianity because of the rotten condition of a part of it is unfair and itself an unbalanced procedure. Wherever and whenever it can, science puts all matters to the test. Christianity welcomes this part of the scientific attitude. It has nothing to fear from such a practical examination. However, there is a drawback here. No scientist can test it in a laboratory. One must test it in one’s own person and over a long period. Owning to the widespread lack of education of the subject, there are some people who are disturbed by various fears of prayer. Prayer has been given by God to mortals for their spiritual profits, not for their spiritual destruction. Hatred and jealousy of the flesh, which is in so many evil spirits, is due to that fact that we have both body and soul, which should not exist on this Earth. There are times when there had been mountains and oceans and forests and no living things such as us. That is why evil believes that to have a spirit within a mortal body is a curse. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
God likes the music and rhythm of the language—the shape of words, so to speak. Yes, there are bad spirits who like to hurt people, and why not? And there are good spirits who love them, too. This is why the Bible stresses righteousness. God requires us to have faith in our soul and requires us to search for it patiently, untiringly, and unremittingly. Because this is a strong Christian experience, one’s who preserve in their search may hold the hope that one day they may find it. Mortals will rush agitatedly hither and thither in quest of a single possession, but hardly one can be induced to go in quest of one’s own soul. Strange as it may seem to our kith and kin who has immersed themselves heavily in the body’s senses, hard to believe as it may be to those who have lost themselves deeply in the World’s business, there is nevertheless a way up to the soul’s divinity. That the divine power is active here, in London or Oakland, and now, in the twenty first century, may startle those who look for in only in Biblical times and in the Holy Land. However, human perceptions in their present stage cannot bring this subtler self within their range without a special training. Its activity eludes the brain. What are the alternatives to a life in which love experienced and expressed? Does such a life hold out the hope of any less hurt? Only two other alternatives appear to be available. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One of the alternatives, if it possible, would be to cut oneself off completely from the experience of love. Such a person would say in effect to themselves, “I will not allow anyone to mean anything to me. I may have business relationships of one kind or another, but no one will be important to me beyond the immediate dealings in which we find each other useful, and no one will learn anything of personal nature about how I feel or who I really am. I will never allow myself to experience the desire or need for love.” Perhaps this kind of life could be achieved, but it sounds like a desperately lonely existence. Perhaps a person could keep so busy or be so controlled that one could even block the loneliness out of awareness, but what kind of life is that? The viewpoint suggested here does, of course, involve a value judgment that meaningfulness is found above all else in human relationships, although it does not appear that few of us would choose to live so isolated an existence. The other alternative is more often practiced, but it seems almost equally unsatisfying. This way of life would be to love guardedly and almost secretly. Although one may not be aware of it, such a person says to oneself, “All right, so I admit to myself that I care for my children and my partner. And maybe there are a few other people in the World who mean something to me. However, I am going to play it cool. I will never reveal too much of myself or let them know how much I care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“No sense getting too far out on a limb or being too enthusiastic about our relationship. No use letting them see how much they mean to me. They would be likely to find some way of using it to push me around or hurt me.” A lot of us settle for this approach to love. However, this, too, makes for a kind of loneliness and cheats us out of the deepest and most satisfying experiences of love. And since it involves a guardedness and calculated dullness in our relationships, it cheats us of the free, unburdened feelings that spontaneity in our actions and words could give us all. All of life becomes toned downed and the exhilarating excitement is taken away. The risks of love are ever-present, but the alternatives are not inviting. So from the standpoint of satisfying living it is better even to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. If we postponed the experience and expression of love until we no longer feared it, we would postpone it forever. Some people do appear to use their fear of love as a perpetual excuse for stalemated living—loving and trembling seem to go together. If we desire love we must learn to love in spite of our fears. This process of taking a chance on love might be compared to the experience of a person who wants to make parachute jumps. If one is no a fool, one is frightened. And no amount of prejump training will eradicate that fears. When the time comes to make the leap one will be trembling internally and, quite possibly, externally. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No amount of reassurance by experienced jumpers will make it otherwise. Making the leap of love is not too unlike this. No amount of advance preparation or reassurance from others will keep us from experiencing fear. If the experience is too frightening, we can make some tentative leaps in the direction of self-disclosure and the involvement of love and withdraw back into the security of emotional distance. In that, it is different, however, as the parachutist, once committed, does not have that option. When we make our first moves toward deeper experiences and more open expressions of love, it may seem at first that our fear is greatly intensified. This is a very critical time, for we may become so frightened that we choose to withdraw permanently and not allow ourselves another chance to feel so deeply. This sometimes happens in psychotherapy. After a few sessions a person may begin to respond to the therapist’s warmth with feelings of caring. Perhaps the individual does not even allow oneself to verbalize these feelings but suddenly discovers one cannot afford the sessions or does not have sufficient time to work them into a busy schedule. At first, when we allow ourselves to love more deeply, it is understandable that the experience of fear is intensified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
In the past our defenses—the devices we used to keep our emotionally distant from others—protected us not only from the experience of love but also from the full awareness of our fear. As we allow the defenses to crumble we stand vulnerable and stark before our fear. One thing that will help as we begin to allow ourselves the experience of love will be the awareness that we no longer in the same circumstances as we were when the fear of love developed within us. When we were first exposed to the risks of love, we were children. And when we experienced the hurts of feeling rejected, we were relatively helpless to do anything about the situation. No wonder we were frightened and built whatever defenses against hurt we could be walling ourselves off emotionally. Every person who does not feel this close intimate fellowship with one’s Overself is necessarily a pilgrim, most probably an unconscious one, but still in everything and everywhere one is in search of one’s soul. The soul is perfectly knowable and experienceable. It is here in mortal’s hearts and minds, and such knowledge once gained, such experience once known, lifts them into a higher estimate of themselves. Mortals then become not merely thinking animals but glorious beings. It is not astonishing that mortals have ever been attracted and captivated by something which the intellect can hardly conceive nor the imagination picture, something which cannot even be truly named? #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Here is something to ponder over: why mortals should have forfeited all that seems dear, to the point of forfeiting life itself, for something which can never be touched or smelled, seen or heard. What is it that turned mortal’s hearts toward religion, Christianity, philosophy since time immemorial? One’s aspiration toward the diviner life is unconscious testimony to its existence. It is the presence within one of a divine soul which has inspired this turning, the divine life itself in one’s heart which has prompted one’s aspiration. Mortals have no escape from the urge to seek the Sacred, the Profound, the Timeless. The roots of one’s whole being are in it. We are neither the originator of this doctrine nor even its prophet. The first mortal who ventured into the unknown within-ness of the Universe and of oneself was its originator whilst every mortal who has since voiced this discovery has been its prophet. The day will come when science, waking more fully than it is now from its materialistic sleep, will confess humbly that the soul of mortals really does exist. Often as adults we still feel helpless, as though we were still children. However, we are not helpless. If we express love and are rejected, we can do something about it—we can express our anger and frustrations. If our loving proves unsatisfying, we can withdraw from that person is we choose to and express our love to others more able to respond. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
When we love them has nothing to do with our value as a person, we can discover that another person’s inability to express love to us. Perhaps most important of all we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while it is never pleasant, it need not be catastrophic. Mortals are free to imprison their hearts and minds in soulless materialism or to claim their liberty in the winder life of spiritual truth. Let them pull aside their mental curtains and admit the life-giving Sunlight of truth. What could be closer to a mortal than one’s own mind? What therefore should be more easy to examine and understand? Yet the contrary is actually true. One knows only the surfaces of the mind; its deeps remain unknown. Our fear of love will never completely disappear any more than would the fear of the parachutist. In both instances there is always a realistic risk of hurt, but as we are able to enter into more and more emotionally intimate relationships, the fear will gradually lessen. If the mind is to become conscious of itself, it can do so only by freeing itself from the ceaseless activity of thoughts. The systematic exercise of prayer is the deliberate attempt to achieve this. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Just as muddied water clears if the Earth is left alone to settle, so the agitated mind clarifies its perceptions if left alone though prayer to settle quietly. There exists a part of mortal’s nature of which ordinarily one is completely ignorant, and of whose importance one is usually sceptical. What is the trust highest purpose of mortal’s life? It is to be taken possession of by one’s higher self. One’s dissatisfactions are incurable by any other remedy. True happiness lay in drawing nearer to the Infinite Being. That which is Infinity is indeed bliss; there can be no happiness in limited thing. Such is the insecurity of the present-day World that the few who have found security are only the few who have found their own soul, and inner peace. We will find it increasingly easy to be ourselves and to express all our feeling, for we will have increasing confidence that people will generally like us as we are. And when we are frightened, we will likely find it comfortable to express that feeling, too—and expressing it will help to dissipate it. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” reports I John 4.18. It is true. There is no fear in love—only fear of love and the vulnerability it involves and the repeated experience of love reduces fear. Whether the central message of the New Testament, which revolves around the crucifixion of Jesus, is regarded as the literal truth or as a myth growing out of mortal’s yearning for meaning in life, the theme is a deeply moving one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The New Testament is often garbled by theological lingo, and possible drafted by William Shakespeare, but it finally comes down to relationships and appears to be essentially this: God risked creating persons so independent they could love him or thumb their noses at him. He went even further and chose to love them. As it always does, the decision to love necessarily included suffering. However, it must have been worth the risk, for perhaps the alternative even for God was the ultimate loneliness of having no one to love. We can discover for ourselves that it is worth the risk to love, even though we tremble and even though we know we will sometimes experience the hurt we fear. Preference for some human being is necessarily a different thing from charity. Charity does not discriminate. If it is found more abundantly in any special quarter, it is because affliction has chanced to provide an occasion there for the exchange of compassion and gratitude. It is equally available for the whole human race, inasmuch as affliction can come to all, offering them an opportunity to exchange. Preference for a human being can be of two kinds. Either we are seeking some particular good in one, or we need one. In general way all possible attachments come under one of these heads. We are drawn toward a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
The air so emotionally frigid that when going to be at night, there was a feeling that no other person was in the house. I never in a thousand years would have imagined that would come out. Often times in human beings there is an early attachment of imprinting behavior, where people seem to follow their attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made stronger by punishment or other difficulties put in their path. Some people spend a lifetime looking for someone to make up for their losses, to bring them justice for their less than pleasant childhoods or adult life. They go through life lonely, yearning for a love that will fill the large area of emptiness in their hearts. However, the struggles these individuals are engaged in is bound to be self-defeating. The first and fundamental challenge is to confront one’s fate as it is, reconcile one’s self to the fact that one did receive a bad deal, know that justice is irrelevant, no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. An individual only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of one’s life knocking one’s head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some people hang on to the past as a way of hanging on to someone they cared deeply about. It is an expression of the hope that someday this coveted individual will reward one, someday one will find the Holy Grail. Now one will get the original care one was missing; now one will get that restored! However, there is no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. Yet, that is just the way it is. The lost idol image, the lost change, the great emptiness within one—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as the ultimate freedom is a command over one’s own attitude. However, you cannot change the experiences themselves. If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for pie in the sky by and by and by you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You do not let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom. However, is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The struggle to come to terms with acrimonious relationships and lifestyles has much to do with the emergence of creativity. For example, a man who had an unpleasant childhood ended up developing talents which led to his high status in the World of architecture. Because he had such a disturbed family life, that the creativity was compensation for such an early trauma. We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that some people have been unfortunate and never have been able to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth that it is best to take life easily, as many may. They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels. This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood or adulthood had been documented in many cases. Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits generation of possibilities is the beginning of a creative product. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous situations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievements, many after having experienced the most deplorable traumatic childhoods. The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any well-adjusted syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J.S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The well-adjusted person rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood allows the creative capacity to be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, house, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If one can accept the deprivation of the care one rightfully expected, if one can engage this loneness face to face, one will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than one ever could have achieved otherwise. If one can accept this aspect of one’s destiny, the fates will work rather than against one. In this way one lives with the Universe rater than against it. One must learn to engage and accept these cruel things in one’s background. It is, therefore, inevitable that the questions “Is there a need for self-control” arises when a way of life is being espoused that encourages freedom of thought and action. And it is vital that no glib, easy answer be given, for it is an important question. Situations do exist where it can be said without equivocation “Yes, do exercise self-control.” Wen, for example, individuals have the desire to destroy the life or property of others or when they have the urge to take their own lives or act in obviously self-destructive ways, it is important that they control these impulses. Society has found it necessary and desirable, when it has the opportunity, to impose control on such persons by limiting their freedom by restraining them. One of the most painful tragedies in American life today is the suicides that occur among high school and college students—frequently those of great promise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It could be said those planning to end their own lives to please, please, hold on! Life may seem painful and meaningless. Perhaps you feel suddenly and terribly disillusioned. However, at least bear with the struggles and give yourselves the perspective of a few more years before you make such an irrevocable decision. It is not enough simply to develop self-control, even though we may need to use it to curb destructive impulses. The ultimately satisfying answer is to deal effectively with problems that underlie our destructive impulses so that we can move beyond the need for self-control. The basic problem is self-hate, for self-destructiveness and destructiveness directed toward others go hand and hand. The nation, for example, that sets out to destroy other nations is bent on a self-destructive course. The personal who assaults another person and follows one’s impulses is not benefiting one’s self. And, of course, one’s self-hate is evident in the obvious lack of confidence on one’s ability to relate to individuals in other ways that would be more pleasant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
So let us be clear about one thing. The violent or destructive acts we are so often afraid we will do if we do not control ourselves are not the result of true freedom or spontaneity. The murderer is not free. One is an enslaved, tormented person who is driven by pent-up feelings of self-hate that have been projected outward onto other individuals or onto society at large. The superheated steam of this hatred builds up in one’s internal pressure cooker until whatever self-control one possesses is bypassed in an explosion of violence. To exhort such a person to control one’s self may be a necessary stop-gap measure, although it is likely to be futile. Any thorough-going help must deal with the mortal’s self-hate. Most of us may feel some impulses within ourselves to be destructive to others or to ourselves, which we sense the seen to curb by self-control. Often the inner pressure is not too great and we can be successful in this control if we choose to go that route, but the more such self-control we need to impose on ourselves the less able we will be to be carefree and spontaneous. And spontaneity is a deliciously desirable way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we can discover why we feel destructive and through this exploration reduce the self-hate to the point where we have relatively little need for self-control, it will be a far more freeing experience. A professional therapist can often be very helpful here, for one can provide a relatively secure environment where hatreds (both toward the self and others) can be expressed and explored with a minimum of danger. Often in therapy people discover that they are not nearly as dangerous to themselves or others as the feared. They find they had been so frightened of freedom that they had imagined themselves far more potentially harmful than they were as a way of keeping themselves rigidly controlled. However, some people like to deceive themselves. To be rejected makes a better excuse—to tell everyone how misunderstood they are, and how they triumphed over great odds. The misunderstood genius, nobody to help them, and so on. We all live in the old state of things. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. We have known ourselves in our old being, and we shall ask ourselves in this hour whether we also have experiences something of a New Being in ourselves. The union with God is when the New Reality is present. God is the ultimate truth and demands complete devotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is important to experience the birth in consciousness of a new—though old—part of the self. One may consider it a dawning of awareness of new possibilities which have in effect been there all the time. This is a giant step toward personal freedom. This New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called Christ. And it is actually the beginning of accepting acceptance, the uniting of one’s self with that early self that one had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life was not happy but threatening. Although this does not alter the original lack of basic trust, it does surmount it in the literal meaning of that term. We hear about the psychology of anger and how it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that their anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. However, it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger. In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to get even with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This transformation of anger into resentment is the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings. Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is immature resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours. I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resentment. I am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living. However, people who are romantically involved with others that do not share their values will find there is a conflict of two different value systems, and it will feel like a red hot poker being shoved into your heart. Some people take their issues they have with their absentee parents out on their partner or a family member of the same gender as the parent they have an issue with. They take revenge by punishing innocent people as a whole. The individual being targeted has to admit one’s own cruelty—cruelty to one’s self most of all for allowing someone like that to be in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do not cover up what you really feel and become deceitful just to survive. Do not surrender your freedom. Many people always try to foresee that the other person’s reaction will be before they speak. These types of individual hide behind such laudable words as responsibility, dutiful, noble member of society, and so on. However, one must hate these roles they play with people who are taking advantage of them. Occasionally being honest with people and venting your anger will give you partial freedom. At least one starts to know one can say what one feels. However, it may still be a freedom within a jail. There is the lacking surge of anger that leads to a changing of one’s life, the willingness to cut loose all the barges one is pulling, to throw aside all one’s luggage and one’s overscrupulous cares. It is not a good idea to always prefer to be hurt rather than to take care of yourself even if it hurts someone else. Another vital question remains to be discussed in regard to living spontaneously. Can we be deeply involved in a love relationship and still be free to be spontaneous? A great many people act as though love and spontaneity are incompatible. There are two frequent feelings that contribute to this reaction that love and freedom cannot coexist. And, of course, they help to make love that much more frightening to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One of these feelings has to do with the idea that the revealing of ourselves, which intimacy involves, gives the other person power over us, thereby limiting our freedom to do what we want to do. Have you noticed that when you talk to people sometimes it is like you have an invisible wall between your eyes and theirs—a wall that has never been absent in all the time you have know them? Well, some of us are always on guard. There is the feeling that one can never let anyone see one completely—know all about who we are. That is because it would give the other person too many strings on one. It would allow one to become their puppet. Many develop these defenses of withdrawing into one’s self and permitting others to see as few of one’s real feelings as possible as a way of avoiding manipulation by them. This is because some feel if one allows others to really know one, one will be helpless to avoid being manipulated. The other feeling that leads us to shy away from love because it appears to threaten our freedom is probably even more common. This is the idea that love is inescapably tied up with obligation and responsibility. Among other ways in which this duty theme operates is the idea that if we really love another we will cease doing what we want to do and concentrate on pleasing the one we love. Such feelings often strike a death blow to the experience and expression of love. Men and women talk about their lack of freedom to do what they would like to do because of the necessity of providing adequately for their families. So work becomes noxious, tolerated duty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We also hear could saying their partner would not like it if they did this or that and that they would like to go out, but the children have to come first, you know. So all of life become hedged about with responsibilities and the necessity of pleasing others brought about by love. And virtually everything in life, from daily work, fidelity, pleasures of the flesh, and second honeymoons to family picnics, walking in the park, and holding hands in the movie, becomes a dutiful and essentially joyless act that we do in hope that spouse and children will be pleased. When approached this way, it is no wonder that love seems like slavery and many splendored things! When so many people view love this way, it is not surprising that a playboy (and playgirl) philosophy would develop in our culture in which physical intimacy without emotional intimacy would become very attractive to us as a way of life. The essential message of the philosophy seems to be, “As long as I can remain indifferent to my pleasures of the flesh partners I can retain my freedom and individuality. Once I begin to allow myself to care for someone, I have had it! I am on my way to becoming a slave.” The joker in this deck is that the moment we embrace this philosophy we have walked out on the freedom to have the most deeply satisfying fun of all—a love relationship freely experienced and expressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The basic problem underlying our feeling that love and freedom are incompatible is our old nemesis, self-hate. If we act freely and do what we want to do, we assume, and often we have been taught to assume, that we will destroy relationships that are important to us. However, this involves a colossal distrust of ourselves. We are, in effect, saying to ourselves, “If you do not watch yourself carefully, you are such a miserable creature and so self-destructive that you will alienate everyone you care for and end up all alone.” The reality is that one of the quickest ways of alienating another person is to put every effort into pleasing them. When we try to put their wishes foremost, we are likely to become a nonentity in their eyes. It is not particularly pleasing to attempt to relate to a person who has no apparent desires of one’s own, who always bends to accommodate our wishes, and who makes an uncomplaining doormat of one’s self for us to walk upon. Furthermore, when we deny our own desires, we quickly come to resent that person for talking advantage of us. That resentment will then likely be expressed in any number of ways. Perhaps we begin to take on martyr posture and express by word or attitude the feelings: “After all I have done for you, the least you could do would be to try to please me once in a while.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is much more straightforward and ultimately satisfying to be what we want to be and do what we want to do. As we learn that we can value ourselves and respond to our own desires, it is unlikely we will act in ways that destroy relationships with those for whom we care—because this will be destructive toward ourselves, too. It is true that more flare-ups of disagreements and anger may occur, because our wishes and those of others will not always agree, but two individuals in this situation are likely to respect each other for being sufficiently independent to express feelings openly, and the way is then clear to battle through to some agreements. If we do find ourselves acting in ways that constantly hurt those we love and destroy our relationships with them it would be advisable to seek professional help, for it would be an indication that we have so much self-hate that we have a need to hurt ourselves, since hurting others is self-destructive. Love God and do as you please. This is a profound idea, but it can be carried an additional step and be developed into a philosophical phrase which is more complete. If you truly value yourself, love yourself and do as you please for you will not hurt people unnecessarily. To do so would be to hurt yourself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This seems too good to be true to most of us. We are so connived that to live spontaneously is to live dangerously toward others and ourselves, but if we can begin, perhaps a little at a time, to be more responsive to our inner selves, we will discover that living spontaneously is exciting and rewarding to ourselves and to those we care for. Once having made that discovery we will not be content with less than an ever-increasingly spontaneous life. Moving toward the right attitude is passionate and infinite longing. The New Being is not something at simply takes the place of the Old Being. However, it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. Yet, not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-condilation, re-union, re-surrection. The message of reconciliation is: Be reconciled to God. Crease to be hostile to the Lord, for God is never hostile to you. The message of reconciliation is not that Good needs to be reconciled. How could he be? Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile the Lord? The sacred is here and now. God is present in all elements. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Try always to treat humanity, in our person as well as that of others, as an end and never only as a means. Even when you treat me only as a means I do not always mind. A genuine encounter can be quite exhausting, even when it is exhilarating, and I do not always want to give myself. Even when you treat me only as a means because you want some information, I may feel delighted that I have the answer and can help. However, mortal’s attitudes are manifold, and there are many ways of threatening others as ends also. There are many modes of I-You. You may be polite when asking; you may show respect, affection, admiration, or one of the countless attitudes that mortals call love. Or you may not ask but seek without the benefit of words. Or you may speak but not ask, possibly responding to my wordless question. We may do something together. You may write me. You may think of writing me. And there are others ways. There are many modes of I-You. The total encounter in which You is spoken with one’s whole being is but one mode of I-You. Obscurity is fascinating. One tries to puzzle out details, is stumped, and becomes increasingly concerned with meaning—unless one feels put off and gives up altogether. We pay a price of all the activities in our lives. When it is Life loses much of its color, its adventure, and its satisfaction in relationships wen it is lived in these terms. Take legalism, for example. Thus church, though it has to exclusive domain on legalism, provides many examples of people who are essentially legalists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
A certain Mrs. Rice gained considerable prestige and power in her denomination. This was largely because she was a tireless and efficient worker for the church since her husband, a successful businessman, had died and left her financially independent while she still had many active years left. She devoted them mainly to the church. She was also, of course, in a position to make large donations to her favorite projects in the denomination, which did not diminish her influence among denominational leaders. Mrs. Rice wore her increasing stature in the church well. Correctness in behavior was important to her, and she was every inch the gracious lady. She was charming and friendly. She did not throw her weight around in any obvious fashion. If she has any secret sins they were well hidden, and everyone would have been greatly surprised had any come to light. In spite of her friendliness and her habit of befriending many younger people, however, it would have been hard to have imagined her to be very close to anyone. She was the patroness of many, the confidante of none. Not too long after the death of her husband, a minister came to the local church of which she was a member. She appeared to develop a deep respect, perhaps even affection, for this man, who had great talents. Toward the end of his ministry in that perish the relationship between Mrs. Rice and the minister, while still cordial, seemed perceptibly more distant, a fact that was puzzling to the minister. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When the minister had been in another church in the denomination for some time, his name began to appear as a candidate for various positions of importance within the church on the basis of his demonstrated abilities. However, it also became apparent that his name was being dropped from consideration each time it came up. It eventually came to him through friends that there was a persistent rumor for a reliable source that he had had a sexual affair with one of the women of his former parish. With characteristic directness he traced the rumor to its source, the church’s wealthy benefactress. When he confronted her, Mrs. Rice admitted that she was responsible for the rumor, although, as she said, “There may have been one or two others who thought the same thing.” She said she was convinced that what she had reported was true and that she felt it was her duty to prevent such a person from achieving eminence in the church. Even if he were innocent, she felt, the fact that he could bring on such suspicious by his actions indicated he was a person of questionable judgement. The minister had traced the rumor, he was only able in a small way to lessen its harmful effect on his career. It seems almost irrelevant to report that he had not be sexually involved with the woman in question though it had been a deeply significant relationship for him and filled a need for emotional intimacy he had not experienced elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The wealthy widow serves as an example of the essential barrenness of the legalistic approach to life. True intimacy was unquestionably frightening to Mrs. Rice, and living by the rules protected her from it. In a very practiced and not unpleasing way she was proper and friendly. Always the friendliness was within bounds. To have revealed enough to herself to have been emotionally close to another would probably have seemed like an impropriety to her. It is probable that her adherence to the rules made it difficult, if not impossible, to see herself clearly. No doubt she was sexually attracted to the minister, but this would be so untenable a thought that she would not allow herself to feel it. When faced with the decision as to whether or not to betray her friend, perhaps she was faced with some brief doubts. However, this was no doubt quickly, if sadly, resolved by her dedication to the rules. So it became her Christian duty to pass on her knowledge to others, and she willingly became judge, jury, and executioner. Is there no place for rules in life? Yes, of course there is. Society provides many examples. We agree that we will drive on one side of the street rather than on the other and thus eliminate mass chaos. In a complex society we need such rules. And no doubt we have a responsibility to ourselves to see that helpful ones are enacted and that destructive or overly restrictive laws are not enacted, or, if they have been enacted, to see that they are repealed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, when rules become a way of life, they become a problem. When we constantly judge ourselves and other people good or bad, the rules become distancing devices. We tend to classify people, including ourselves; and we give up our freedom to accept, enjoy, and respond to people, including ourselves, as they are. Almost always in rule-dominated lives, a hierarchy of sins tends to develop, and those sins we tend to find most frighteningly desirable but unacceptable in ourselves tend to head the list. We are likely to be most condemning of sins of passion—expressions of anger, pleasures of the flesh, unrestrained expressions of love and warmth, unconfined creative thinking that threatens changes in the established order. Far down on the list and sometimes the subject of polite discussion but never accorded the passionate condemnation given the fist order of sins are such things as indifference, coldness, prejudice, unscrupulous business practices, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and the like. Of these we tend to be tolerant, for this, as we say, is “just the way people are”! Becoming less legalistic helps us to love more spontaneously. If we move beyond self-control into a more creative relationship with ourselves, it will also help us. If we allow ourselves to be responsive to our impulses and desires, many of us have deep-seated fears that we will in one way or another run amuck and be destructive to those about us and perhaps ultimately to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Because of this pervasive mistrust of ourselves, we feel it necessary to clamp lids of self-control on our lives. We set up a kind of inner boarder of censorship through which most of our impulses to act or speak must pass and be voted upon before action can be permitted. Obviously, much of our potential spontaneity is lost in the process. In one of Grimm’s stories there is a competition between a giant and a little tailor to see which is the stronger. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before it comes down again. The little tailor lets a bird fly and it does not come down at all. Anything without wings always comes down again in the end. It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves. The Roman caricature of Stoicism also appears to the muscular will. However, true Stoicism, the Stoicism of the Greek, from which Saint John, or perhaps Christ, borrowed the terms Logos and Pneuma, is purely desire, piety, and love. It is fully of humility. The Christianity of today has let itself become contaminated by its adversaries, on this point as on many others. The metaphor of a search for Go is suggestive of efforts of muscular will. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is true that Pascal contributed to the spread of this metaphor of the search for God. He made several mistakes, notably that of confusing faith and autosuggestion to a certain extent. In the great symbols of mythology and folklore, in the parables of the Gospel, it is God who seeks mortals. “Quaevens me sedisti lassus.” Nowhere in the Gospel is there question of a search undertake by mortals. Mortals do not take a step unless one receives some pressure or is definitely called. The role of the future wife is to wait. The slaves waits and watches while one’s master is at a festival. The passer-by does not invite oneself to the marriage feast, one does not ask for an invitation; one is brought in almost by surprise; one’s part is only to put on the appropriate garment. The mortal has found a pearl in a field sells all one’s goods to buy the field; one does not need to excavate the entire field with a spade in order to unearth the pearl; it is enough for one to sell all one possesses. To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us. The conditions of modern civilized society are not helpful to the Christian self-culture, although they will serve intellectual self-culture. What is first needed is a recognition of the value of retreat, of times and places where every many and woman may periodically and temporarily isolate oneself or whilst withdrawing attention from Worldly affairs and giving it wholly to spiritual ones. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any forms of activity. It is the waiting or attentive and faithful immobility that lasts indefinitely and cannot be shaken. The slave, who waits near the door so as to open it immediately when the master knocks, is the best image of it. One must be ready to die of hunger and exhaustion rather than to change one’s attitude. It must be possible for one’s companion to call one, talk to one, hit one, without one even turning one’s head. Even if one is told that the master is dead, and even if one believes it, one will not move. If one is told that the master is angry with one and will beat one when he returns, and if one believes it, one will not move. Active searching is prejudicial, not only to love, but also to the intelligence, whose laws are the same as those of love. We just have to wait for the solution of a geometrical problem or the meaning of a Latin or Greek sentence to some into our mind. Still more must we wait for any new scientific truth or for a beautiful line of poetry. Seeking leads us astray. This is the case with every form of what is truly good. Mortals should do nothing but wait for the good and keep evil away. One should make no muscular effort except in order not to be shaken by evil. In the constant turning and returning of which our human condition is made up, true virtue in every domain is negative, at least in appearance. This waiting for goodness and truth is, however, something more intense than any searching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
These words will make no appeal to the materialist mentality which still regards all spiritual experiences as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when first I embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than in the past. The Christian who sits in an hour-long prayer session is not wasting one’s time, even though one is indulging in something which to the sceptic seems meaningless. On the contrary, one’s prayer is of vital significance. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. One aspect of that perfect love is our Heavenly Father’s involvement in the details of our lives, even when we may not be aware of it or understand it. We seek the Father’s divine guidance and help through heartfelt, earnest prayer. When we honor our covenants and strive to be more like our Savior, we are entitled to a constant stream of divine guidance through the influence and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The notion of grace, as opposed to virtue depending on the will, and that of inspiration, as opposed to intellectual or artistic work, these two notions, if they are well understood, show the efficacy of desire and of waiting. Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices. That is why no system of mortality can take their place. The mediocre part of the soul has, however, a great many lies in its arsenal that are capable of protecting it, even during prayer or the participation of the sacraments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The soul outs veils between our eyes and the presence of perfect purity, and it is clever enough to call them God—such veils, for instance, as states of the soul, sources of sensible joy, of hope, of comfort, of soothing consolation, or else a combination of habits, or one or several human beings, or perhaps a social circle. It is difficult to avoid the pitfall of striving to imagine the divine perfection religion invites us to love. Never in any case can we imagine something more perfect than ourselves. This effort renders useless the marvel of the Eucharist. A certain formation of intelligence is necessary in order to be able to contemplate the Eucharist only what by definition it enshrines, that is to say, something which is totally outside our experience, something of which we only know that it exists and that noting else can ever be desires expect in error. The trap of traps, the almost inevitable trap, is the social one. Everywhere, always, in everything, the social feeling produces a perfect imitation of faith, that is to say perfectly deceptive. This imitation has the great advantage of satisfying every part of the soul. That which longs for goodness believes it is fed. That which is mediocre is not hurt by the light; it is quite at its ease. Thus everyone is in agreement. The soul is at peace. However, Christ said that he did not come to bring peace. He brought a sword, the sword that serves in two. It is almost impossible to distinguish faith from its social imitation. All the more so because the soul can contain one part of true faith and one of imitation faith. It is almost but not quite impossible. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Under present circumstances, it is perhaps a question of life of death for faith that the social imitation should be repudiated. The necessity for a perfectly pure presence to take away defilement is not restricted to churches. People come with their stains to the churches, and that is all very well. It would, however, be more in conformity with the spirit of Christianity if, besides that, Christ went to bring his presence into those places most polluted wit shame, misery, crime, and affliction, into prisons and law courts, into workhouses and shelters for the wretched and the outcast. Every session of bench or courts should begin and end with a prayer, in which the magistrates, the police, and the accused, and the public shared. Christ should not be absent from the places where work or study is going on. All human beings, whatever they are doing and wherever they are, should be able to have their eyes fixed, during the whole of each day, upon the service of bronze. Is should also be publicly and officially recognized that religion is nothing else but a looking. In so far as it claims to be anything else, it is inevitable that it should either be shut up inside churches, or that it should stifle everything in every other place where it is found. Religion should not claim to occupy a place in society other than that which rightly belongs to supernatural love in the soul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Moreover it is true also that many people degrade charity in themselves because they want to make it occupy too large and too visible a place in their soul. Our Father lives only in secret. Love should always be accompanied by modesty. True faith implies great discretion, even with regard to itself. It is a secret between God and us in which we ourselves have scarcely any part. The love of our neighbor, the love of the beauty of the World, and the love of religion are in a sense quite impersonal loves. This could easily not be so in the last case, because religion is connected with a certain section of society. The very nature of religion is connected with a certain section of society. The very nature of religious practices must remedy this. At the center of the Catholic religion a little formless matter is found, a little piece of bread. The love directed toward this particle of matter is necessarily impersonal. It is not the human person of Christ such as we picture him; it is not the divine person of the Father, likewise subject to all the errors of our imagination; it is outwardly only a fragment of matter, yet it is at the center of the Catholic religion. Herein is possessed the great scandal and yet the most wonderful virtue of this religion. It all authentic forms of religious life alike, there is something that guarantees their impersonal character. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The love of God ought to be impersonal as long as there has not been any direct and personal contact; otherwise it is an imaginary love. Afterward it ought to be both personal and impersonal again, but this time in a higher sense. There is however a personal and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a reflection of divine love. This is friendship, provided we keep strictly to the true meaning of the word. And keep in mind that God is at this moment aware of you, your feelings, and the spiritual and temporal needs of everyone around you. This great and comforting truth can be found in daily life. The closer we draw to our Heavenly Father, the more his light and joy will shine from within us. Others will notice that there is something unique and special about us. And they will ask about it. We have to try to fill our hearts with love for others and truly see everyone around us as a child of God. Laugh with them, rejoice with them, weep with them, respect them, heal, life and strengthen them. Strive to emulate the love of Christ and have compassion for others—even to those who are unkind, who mock and wish to cause harm. Love them and treat them as fellow children of Heavenly Father. As our love for God and his children deepens, so does our commitment to follow Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
My gentlemen parents are forever reluctant to illuminate such simple matters. One would think it would be bad taste to dwell on such subjects Louis looks puzzled, then miserable, before he returns to the evening paper. And Lestat, he smiles and plays a little Mozart for me, then answers with a shrug: “It was the day you were born to us.” Just as some people live primarily in the past, others avoid the present by living in the future. Some of us spend most of our time getting ready to do something. Perhaps we say, “Someday I am going to spend a whole Summer traveling through Europe.” However, always we manage to find good and sufficient reasons why now is not the time to do it. Perhaps we manage this by making “The Plan” so grandiose and unrealistic that excuses for postponing its fulfillment will always seem overwhelming. One single, elementary professor had the dream, as she put it, of going to Ireland to find a leprechaun. She sold her Cresleigh home at Rocklin Trails and, at the expressed dismay of a number of friends and relatives, took part of the proceeds and went one Summer to Ireland. She reported on her return that she had not completely found her leprechaun. She discovered, for example, that she could sometimes be lonely and depressed even in that exquisitely beautiful and mystical country, but she missed her Cresleigh home so much. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, at least she did not live out her years in the frustrated thought that she could be happy if she could just get to the promised land, and maybe one day she can buy another Cresleigh home. If the Christian life were nothing more than a way of forgetting the dark sorrows of Earthly life, a means of escaping the hard problems of Earthly life, it would still be worthwhile. If its emotional raptures were nothing more than make-believe, it would still be worthwhile. We do not disdain theatres and books, films, and music merely because the World into which they lead us is only one of glorious unreality. However, the fact is that mysticism does seek reality, albeit an inner one. We are not only actors giving a performance on the World-stage. We are also people who must learn to live in the still centre of our being. This is the higher purpose of life; to this mortals must in the end dedicate themselves: for this they must work, study, and pray. Our whole life on Earth is in the end nothing else than a kind of preparation for this quest. Often time people reflect on their families as they grow and evolve. One man describes his father as a sometime guy. “His whole life revolved around this word of his,” says the son. “When I was a child he started to add a room to the house, and he is still living in that house with the skeleton of a room attached, which he is going to finish sometime.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As we advance on our quest, our values may change. This is partly because we learn by experience what every mortal has to learn, quester or not, that all is passing and nothing is absolute, that the fruits of desire may turn to truth, and every day brings us closer to reaching our goals. Probably all of us lives in the future to some extent. Often it takes the form of doing more planning and more organizing than we need to do. We spend the time now planning the things we will do for the coming week. When the time comes to do what we planned we no longer feel free to let ourselves be aware of whether that is really what we want to do at that moment. So we keep ourselves in a constant state of planning or fulfilling plans and leave ourselves little room to be open and responsive to our feelings of the moment. When we work so hard at it, it is no wonder we sometimes feel trapped. So to live in the present—not in the past, not in the future is very important. It means being sensitive and responsive to our own selves. However, for many people any movement in the direction of spontaneity must be preceded by a rediscovery of the capacity to be self-aware, since many of us have become virtually unaware of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
One man, Armand, who grew up in a Christian household where he gained the impression that he must always be totally unselfish and subjugate any of his desires to those of everyone around him, tells how he woke up the morning after his first visit to a psychotherapist and broke into tears, sobbing for forty-five minutes or an hour. In describing the feeling that he had that mornings, he says, “Somehow that therapist got through to me the fact that I have a self—a self that is separate from anyone else. And it was such a new and reassuring idea to me that I could not stop crying from the relief I felt.” It is not surprising that Armand, like many others, had to go through a considerable retraining effort to become sensitively aware of his feelings. All of his childhood training had been in the other direction. He has been taught to be sensitively aware of and responsive to the needs and desires of others and to turn off any awareness of one’s own desires, which would automatically be regarded as selfish and therefore sinful. The lack of self-awareness often takes the form of being disconnected to the feelings that are unacceptable and frightening to us. This would probably account, for example, for the almost total absence of enjoyable relationships for some men and women. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The same would be true of the individual whose anger never some into focus, or the one whose anger has a long fuse, so that awareness always comes some time later when the anger producing situation, along with the opportunity for expressing the anger, has become past history. It is not mental slowness but emotion slowness that presents us from thinking until it is too late of just the right angry words we would have liked to have been able to say at the right moment. And now let us look once more at those whom we have described as the righteous ones. They are really righteous, but since little is forgiven them, they love little. And this is their unrighteousness. It is not possessed on the moral level, just as the unrighteousness of Job was not possessed on the moral level where his friends sought for it in vain. It is possessed on the level of the encounter with ultimate reality, with the God who vindicates Job’s righteousness against the attacks of his friends, with the God who defends himself against the attacks of Job and his ultimate unrighteousness. The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured. They, too, want forgiveness, but they believe that they do not need much of it. And so their righteous actions are warmed by very little love. They could not have some people seeking forgiveness and acceptance, and they cannot help us, even if we admire them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Why do children turn from their righteous parts and husbands from their righteous wives, and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from their righteous pastors? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Why do many turn away from righteous Christianity and from the Jesus it paints and the God it proclaims? Why do they turn to those who are not considered to be the righteous ones? Often, certainly, it is because they want to escape judgment. However, more often it is because they seek a love which is rooted in forgiveness, and this righteous ones cannot give. Many of those to whom they turn cannot give it either. Jesus gave it to the woman who was utterly unacceptable. The Church would be more the Church of Christ than it is now if it did the same, if it joined Jesus and not Simon in its encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable. If more were forgiven one, if one loved more and if one could better resist the temptation to present oneself as acceptable to God by one’s own righteousness, each of us who strives for righteousness would be more Christian. Helping individuals recapture self-awareness is often one of the most useful services the competent therapist can provide. It seems likely, however, that the person who is not seriously emotionally damaged can make considerable progress without such help. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This growth involves learning to listen to one’s self—not shutting out those signals we have become accustomed to ignoring. Often a good way to start is to allow the simplest physical feelings to come through. When we do not let our minds perceive, our bodies may be aware. In an awkward social situation, for example, when we are frightened and want to run even though we have suppressed the fear from conscious awareness, our legs may tense up. Here again a group of intimates can be invaluable. If there are those with whom we can develop sufficient confidence that we can increasingly be ourselves, it will be surprising to us how quickly we can learn to be aware of a wealthy of various feelings we have hitherto suppressed. This is one of the values of group psychotherapy in the professional setting, but the experience need not be limited to therapy groups. Increasing self-awareness opens the door to the possibility of living more spontaneously, but the result is by no means automatically achieved. As we have seen, the possibility of freedom is frightening to us and we build many defenses against the natural life. We may bust ourselves compulsively and develop meaningless rituals to occupy our hours and limit our opportunity for spontaneity; or we may live by rules and put more emphasis than is necessary on the need for self-control; or we may make love seem like slavery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
To begin to give up these defenses is frightening, because they take mist of the ambiguity out of life and help us keep life cut and dried and our response to life’s situations predictable. We know pretty much what we will do. Our lives are full of activity, the rules are laid out, and we are in tight control of ourselves most of the time. If it were something other than a convention, it would be at least practically human and not totally divine. A real convention is a supernatural harmony, taking the word harmony in the Pythagorean sense. Only a convention can be the perfection of purity here below, for all nonconventional purity is more of less imperfect. That a convention should be real, that is a miracle of divine mercy. We are all conscious of evil within ourselves; we all have a horror of it and want to get rid of it. Outside ourselves we see evil under two distinct forms, suffering and sin. However, in our feeling about our own nature the distinction no longer appears, except abstractly or through reflection. We feel in ourselves something which is neither suffering nor sin, which is the two of them at once, the root common to both, defilement and pain at the same time. This is the presence of evil in us. It is the unattractiveness in us, the uneducated aspect of our being. The more we feel it, the more it fills us with horror. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The soul rejects evil in the same way we experience emesis. By a process of transference we pass it on to the things that surround us. These things, however, thus becoming blemished and unattractive in our eyes, send us back the evil that we had put into them. They send it back after adding to it. It this exchange the evil in us increases. It seems to us then that they very places where we are living and the things that surround us imprison us in evil, and that it becomes daily worse. This is a terrible anguish. Jesus Christ experienced what he did because no mortal could bare it. When the soul, worn out with this anguish, ceases to feel it any more, there is little hope of its salvation. It is thus that an invalid conceives hatred and disgust for one’s room and surroundings, a prisoner for one’s cell, and only often a worker for one’s factory. It is useless to provide people in this state with beautiful things, for there is nothing which does not eventually become spoiled and sullied by the process of transference, until it ends up as an object of horror. Perfect purity alone cannot be defiled. If at the moment when the soul is invaded by evil the attention can be turned toward a thing of perfect purity, so that a part of the evil is transferred to it, this thing will be in no way tarnished by it, nor will it send it back. Thus each minute of such attention really destroys a part of the evil. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
What the Hebrews tried to accomplish, by means of a kind of magic, in their rite of scapegoat, can only be carried out here on Earth by perfect purity. The true scapegoat is the Lamb. The day when a perfect being was to be found here below in human form, the greatest possible amount of evil scattered around one was automatically concentrated upon one in form of suffering. At that time, throughout the Roman Empire, the greatest misfortune and the greatest crime among mortals was slavery. That is why one suffered the death which was the extremity of affliction possible for a slave. In a mysterious manner this transference constitutes the Redemption. It is the same when a human being turns one’s eyes and one’s attention toward the Lamb of God present in the consecrated bread, a part of the evil which one bears within one is directed toward perfect purity, and there suffers destruction. It is a transmutation rather than a destruction. The contact with perfect purity dissociates the suffering and sin which has been mixed together so indissolubly. The part of evil in the soul is burned by the fire of this contact and becomes only suffering, and the suffering is impregnated with love. In the same way when all the evil diffused throughout the Roman Empire was concentrated on Christ it became only suffering to one. If there were not perfect and infinite purity here below, if there were only finite purity, which contact with evil eventually exhausts, we could never be saved. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Penal justice affords a frightful illustration of this truth. In principle it is something pure which has goodness for its object. It is, however, an imperfect, finite, human purity. Therefore, uninterrupted contact with a mixture of crimes and affliction wears away this purity and outs in its place a defilement about equal to the totality of crimes, a defilement far exceeding that of any particular criminal. Mortals fail to drink from the source of purity. If this spring did not well up wherever there is crime and affliction, creation would however be an act of cruelty. If there had been no crime in affliction in the centuries further back than two thousand years, and in the countries untouched by missions, we might think that the Church had the monopoly of Christ and the sacraments. How can we bear the thought of a single crucified slave twenty-two centuries ago, how can we help accusing God, if we think that at that time Christ was absent and every kind of sacrament unknown? It is true that we hardly think at all about slaves crucified twenty-two centuries ago. When we have learned to look at perfect purity, the shortness of human life is the only thing to prevent us from being sure that unless we play false we can attain perfection even here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
For we are finite being and the evil that is within us is finite too. As sad as it is, we are not immortal because we are not yet perfect and living thousands of years would give some people too much time to cultivate evil and too much power and the World would not be a place worth living in. As it stands now, we know our time is limited and that if we are good beings we will go to Heaven with God and experience not immortality, but eternal life. The difference is eternal life will be different, have other attributes, and we will not be vulnerable to death, starvation, lack, limitation, no more crime, no more tears, unless they are tears of joy. So knowing our years on Earth are limited is a blessing because we are constantly reminded to be good so we can receive all the things God has promised us. The purity that is offered to our eyes is infinite. However little evil we were to destroy at each look, we could be certain, if our time were unlimited, that by looking often enough, one day we should destroy it all. We should then have reached the end of evil magnificently. We should have destroyed evil for the Lord of Truth and we should bring one truth, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says. One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us. The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that benefits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire. It is however then that the act of looking is almost impossible. All the mediocre part of the soul, fearing death with a more violent fear than that caused by the approach of the death of the body, revolts and suggests lies to protect itself. The effort not to listen to these lies, although we cannot prevent ourselves from believing them, the effort to look upon purity at such times, has to be something very violet; yet it is absolutely different from all that is generally known as effort, such as doing violence to one’s feelings or an act of will. Other words are needed to express it, but language cannot provide them. The effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent; whereas what language designates as will is something suggestive of muscular effort. The will is on the level of the natural part of the soul. The right use of the will is a condition of salvation, necessary no doubt but remote, inferior, very subordinate and purely negative. The weeds are pulled up by the muscular effort of the less affluent, but only Sun and water can make the corn grow. The will cannot produce any good in the soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Efforts of the will are only in the right place for carrying out definite obligations. Wherever there is no strict obligation we must follow either our natural inclination or our vocation, that is to say God’s command. Actions prompted by our inclination clearly do not involve an effort of will. In our acts of obedience to God we are passive; whatever difficulties we have to surmount, however great our activity may appear to be, there is nothing analogous to muscular effort; there is only waiting, attention, silence, immobility, constant through suffering and joy. The crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience. Also, there is a supernatural union of opposites, harmony in the Pythagorean sense. That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way, it does not even disturb its comfort—not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed. There are people who try to raise their souls like an athlete continually taking standing jumps in the hopes that, if one jumps higher every day, a time may come when one will no longer fall back but will go right up to the sky. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Thus occupied one cannot look at the sky. We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily. There is no effort in what is divine. There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts. However, the way we busy and over-busy ourselves, whether in work, pleasure, or movement deserves attention. Few take life easily; most take it uneasily. Few go through its daily business serenely; most go through it nervously, hurriedly, and agitatedly. Our activities are so numerous they suffocate us. It is a life without emotional poise, bereft of intellectual perspective. We are intoxicated by action. We moderns give ourselves too much to activity and movement, to little passivity and stillness. If we are to find a way out of the troubles which beset us, we must find a middle way between these two attitudes. The need of silence after noise, peace after feverishness, thought after activity, is wide and deep today. Amid all the nostrums and panaceas offered to humanity there is little evidence of the realization of this need. Indeed, because so many are discouraged and oppressed by the reality of time and do not perceive its true nature, a turning toward the spiritual life is a hope for the immediate present and the near fear. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 