You make life when you play. You create something from nothing. You make something good happen. And that is blessed to me. I have lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing. Actors and musicians—they are saints to me. You do not understand. I am speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I am speaking of those who will not accept a useless life, just because there were born into it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things. There is blessedness in that. There is sanctity. There is goodness in that. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine. Events will take their course, it is no good our being angry at them; one is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account. How can we wisely turn them to the best account? What powers do we have to guide and influence the direction of our destiny? How does one both shape one’s destiny and live as an expression of it? This day we fashion destiny, which is our web of fate we spin. It has been years and years since I had walked in the witches’ place. The moon was bright enough to see the charred stakes in their grim circle and the ground in which nothing ever grew even one hundred years after burning. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
The new saplings of the forest kept their distance. And so the wind struck the clearing, and above, clinging to the rocky slope, the village hovered in darkness. A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I had felt as a child when I had heard those awful words “roasted alive,” when I had imagined the suffering. What one individual has done another can aspire to; the destiny that one mortal has challenged and finally mastered another has it in one’s power to confront courageously also. In its externals each person’s destiny is their own; seen from within it is the destiny of mortals made manifest in one individual. One does not fulfill our destiny for us, but one shows us how we in our turn may fulfill it. Destiny sets limits for us physically, psychologically, culturally, and equips us with certain talents. However, we do not simply ask: How do we act within those limits or how do we develop those talents? We ask the more crucial question: Does the confronting of these limits itself yield us constructive values? Can one, in other words, turn misfortune into fortune and keep fortune fortunate, turn handicaps into assets and keep assets from becoming handicaps? Is something taught us by the very process of confronting hardship that yields greater benefits than we gave up in our hardships and greater gifts than we lost? There come to mind hosts of examples of persons who have been burdened with a cruel destiny and have turned it to a constructive use. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
I thought of my mother in the castle high up the mountain, and the sadness numbed me until I could not bear it, and Nicki started playing again, telling me to dance and to forget everything. Yes, that is what it could make you do, I wanted to say. Is that sin? How can it be evil? I went after him as he danced in a circle. The notes seemed to be flying up and out of the violin as if they were made of gold. I could almost see them flashing. I danced round and round him now and he sawed away into a deeper and more frenzied music. I spread the wings of the fur-lined cape and threw back my head to look at the Moon. The music rose all around me like smoke, and the witches’ place was no more. There was only the sky above arching down to the mountains. We were closer for all this in the days that followed. What possibilities does our capacity to be active give us in molding our destiny? Which trends in our destiny do we choose to identify with, and which others do we avoid? Do we cringe before our destiny, feeling sorry for ourselves, crying out: If only we could have been such and such? #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If we feel sorry for ourselves, so we shall go down like cowards or, more likely, robots—mechanical human beings who the Universe erases. Or do we confront destiny directly, using it as a stimulus to call forth our best efforts, our greatest sensitivity, our sharpest creative vision? If so, we then are men and women for whom the future cries. We can see the vicissitudes of finding and losing, searching for but fleeing from, our personal destiny in noting how other historical figures have dealt with their destiny. From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security…Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among mortals, but alone with God. I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people—aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. However much a mortal searches Heaven and Earth, the present and the future, for one’s higher destiny, one remains the victim of a perennial vacillation, of an external influence which perpetually troubles one. For the first time I have found myself and am happily in harmony with myself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Many look so hard for their destiny, their destiny is so little apparent to some, because in looking for it one has already made up one’s mind to flee from it. To be continually preoccupied with one’s destiny is also a way of escaping living it out. A sense of abandon is necessary, a sense of throwing oneself into one’s calling. Some people spend most of their days depressed, a psychological state that can be a symptom of a lack of harmony between oneself and one’s way of life, a state opposite to the way God wants us to live. In depression one feels on the rack, one struggles against meaninglessness, against the burden of it not being worthwhile to get up in the morning. There are people who greet every morning with bitter weeping, as if this is where they belong. Are these people in the service of their vocation, or rather, a perpetual deserter from their inner destiny? It is the geniuses, the persons of abundant talents, who have the greatest difficulty in seeking and living out their destiny because their gifts continually present them with so many different possibilities. Hence geniuses are more often depressed and anxious than the rest of us, and more often joyful and ecstatic. Life, especially for creative people, is generally anything but simple and harmonious. It is especially hard for those with a multiplicity of gifts, which troubles and disorients the vocation, or at least the mortal who is its axis. It may well be, the destiny of some people may not rest in an unambiguous vocation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The conflict many of us face when we want to do something for a career, but cannot due to limitations that are out of our control, this is conflict of destinies and shows us that the point where one’s individual inclinations collide head-on with the necessities of life is where we see revealed the deeper density of ourselves. William James, for example, struggled with bad health, poor eyesight amounting at times to blindness, disabilities of his back, and his profound and recurrent psychological depress. However, William James managed to surmount his depression by his belief in freedom. The focus of his depression had been a conflict around the question of whether his actions were caused by prior influences such as childhood conditioning, or did he have some margin of personal freedom of action? He could not prove the latter, and none of his friends could send him proof. No one can prove in positivistic terms the qualities of life such as courage, love, beauty, or freedom. Thus began the important work of William James on will and belief, illustrated by the title of one of his collections of essays, The Will to Believe. “The first act of freedom is to choose it,” he wrote. Anyone who has done psychotherapy knows that this would give the person a point outside the depression from which to view it and would provide some rising above the malady. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
This is the demonstration of the relation of belief to destiny. Does belief—or faith, as some may put it—change the track of destiny? There are many wise persons in this history of the Western World who would answer “yes” to that. They would hold that the state of mind of the beholder influences what one perceives in life, that our minds not only conform to reality but reality also conforms to our mind. Thus, our state of mind influences the reality we experienced around us. Karl Pribram’s recent experiments on the neurology of the brain and its relation to the World would support this, as would Gregory Bateson’s concept that values are constituted in part our beliefs. Out of his problems and his perpetually difficult destiny William James developed a remarkable sense of personal freedom. He was amazingly flexible and board-minded: he was the living example of freedom from cant and constriction. He not only wrote the classical volume on academic psychology, but books on religion, will, mysticism, and education as well. He insisted everlastingly that in human life there are options, however much destiny may limit these options. However, without God, people feel life is meaningless and will just go on and on and on. And that they will not any longer be witnesses to it. They believe that they will not have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in their minds. They feel they will just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
One should guard against being unconsciously insincere, against protesting one’s love of the divine when it is really a mask for love of oneself. Beware lest you call desire of the World search for God. However, more often one’s quest is inspired by mixed motives. On one hand, one is interested in the personal benefits one hopes to get from it. On the other hand, one is also interested in learning the impersonal truth about life. To the young neophyte the quest, with its mysterious traditions and magical promises, is an enchanting and glamorous enterprise. People of rank, fortune, influence, or power may become complacent, satisfied with what they are or have or where they are. However, this is a condition which cannot last. Why? Because the higher purpose of life, embodied in the World-Idea, is also present and will make appropriate change or exert appropriate pressure at the destined time. There is always a number of enquirers who interest themselves in the teaching to a certain extent and then drop it altogether. Why? Because they are not primarily seeking God for his love, but only the hidden powers or personal success of something else, or sometimes, these things only and God as a means of obtaining them. Many comes to this quest in the beginning because of some personal desire. This personal satisfaction is their primary goal. It may be that later, with growth, harmony with God becomes less important to them. A few in the end will come to see that nothing short of pure devotion to God for their own sake is their proper goal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Some churches very early forgot the word of our Gospel that Christ is the truth; and claimed that their doctrines about Christ are the truth. However, these doctrines, no matter how necessary and good they were, proved to be not the truth that liberates. Soon they became tools of suppression, of servitude under authorities; they become means to prevent the honest search for truth—weapons to split the souls of people between loyalty to the Church and sincerity to truth. And in this way they gave deadly weapons to those who attacked the Church and its doctrines in the name of truth. Not everybody feels this conflict. There are masses of people who feel safe under doctrinal laws. They are safe, but it is the safety of one who has not yet found one’s spiritual freedom, who has not yet found one’s true self. It is the dignity and the danger of Protestantism that it exposes its adherents to the insecurity of asking the question of truth for themselves and that it throws them into the freedom and responsibility of personal decisions, of the right to choose between the ways of the sceptics, and those who are orthodox, of the indifferent masses, and Christ who is the truth that liberates. For this is the greatness of Protestantism: that it points beyond the teachings of Jesus and beyond the doctrines of the Church to the being of Christ whose being is the truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
This quest for truth has different attraction for different people. Some find that it replaces the very ordinariness of their lives by exotic, unusual, even dramatic ideas or experiences. Some draw near because of its promise of help sorely needed to cover up their weaknesses. Others need its intellectual concepts to support their withdrawal from orthodoxy. Still others are delighted to get its help in the reinterpretation of orthodoxy, and in its reasonable replies to reasonable questions. If the philosophical code attracts some by its moral nobility, it attracts others through their personal necessity. It should not be thought that all those who read some literature, or attend such lectures, or even join such movements, are seeking more than a simple glimpse. Perhaps most are ordinary people who are satisfied with having a credo to support their lives which enlarges their traditional religion or belief. How do they reach the truth? By doing it, is the answer of the Fourth Gospel. This does not mean being obedient to the commandments, accepting them and fulfilling them. Doing the truth means living out the reality which is Christ who is the truth, making Christ’s being the being of ourselves and of our World. And again, we ask, “How can this happen?” “By remaining in Him” is the answer of the Fourth Gospel, by participating in his being. “Aide in me and I in you,” he says. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The truth which liberates is the truth in which we participate, which is a part of us and we a part of it. True discipleship is participation. If the real, the ultimate, the divine reality which is Christ’s being becomes our being we are in the truth that matters. And a third time we ask, “How can this happen?” There is an answer to this question in our Gospel which may deeply shock us: “Every one who is the truth hears my voice.” Being “of the truth” means, coming from the true, the ultimate reality, being determined in one’s being by the divine ground of all being, by that reality which is present in the Christ. If we have part in it, we recognize it wherever is appears; we recognize it as it appears in its fullness in the Christ. However, some may ask in despair: “If we have no part in it, if we are not of the truth, are we then forever excluded from it? Must we accept a life without truth, a life in error and meaninglessness? Who tells me that I am of the truth, that I have a chance to reach it?” Nobody can tell you; but there is one criterion: If you seriously ask the question, “Am I of the truth?’ you are of the truth. If you do not ask it seriously, you do not really want, and you do not deserve, and you cannot get, an answer! One who asks seriously the question of the truth that liberates, is already on one’s way to liberation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
One may still be in the bondage of strict doctrines of self-assurance but one has begun to be free from it. One may still be in the bondage of cynical despair, but one has already started to emerge from it. One may still be in the bondage of unconcern about the truth that matters, but one’s unconcern is already shaken. These all are of the truth and on their road to the truth. One this road one will meet the liberating truth in many forms except in one form: you never will meet it in the form of propositions which you can learn or write down and take home. However, you may encounter it in one sentence of a boo or of a conversation or of a lecture, or even of a sermon. This sentence is not the truth, but it may open you up for the truth and it may liberate you from the bondage to opinions and prejudices and conventions. Suddenly, true reality appears like the brightness of lightening in a formerly dark place. Or, slowly, true reality appears like a landscape when the fog becomes thinner and thinner and finally disappears. New darknesses, new fog will fall upon you; but you have experienced, at least once, the truth and the freedom given by the truth. Or you may be grasped by the truth in an encounter with a piece of nature—its beauty and its transitoriness; or in an encounter with a human being in friendship and estrangement, in love, in difference and hate; or in an encounter with yourself in a sudden insight into the hidden strivings of your soul, in disgust and even hatred of yourself, in reconciliation with and acceptance of yourself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In these encounters you may meet the true reality—the truth which liberates from illusion and false authorities, from enslaving anxieties, desires, and hostilities, from a wrong self-rejection and a wrong self-affirmation. And it may even happen that you are grasped by the picture and power of Christ who is truth. There is no law that this must happen. Many at all times and in all places have encountered the true reality which is in Christ without know his name—as Christ himself said. They were of the truth and they recognized the truth, although they had never seen Christ who is the truth. And those who has seen Christ, the Christians in all generations, have no guarantee that they participate in the truth which he is. Maybe they were not of the truth. Those, however, who are of the truth and who have encountered Christ who is the truth have one precious thing beyond the others: They have the point from which to judge all truth they encounter anywhere. They look at a life which never lost the communion with the divine ground of all life, and they look at a life which never lost union of love with all beings. The truth which liberates is the power of love, for God is love. The father of the lie binds us to himself by binding us to ourselves—or to that in us which is not our true self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
All sorts of people come to this quest for truth—the truth-seekers, the hallucinated, the ambitious and the meek, the highly intuitive and the utter imbecilic, the joyous and the embittered failures, the really intelligent and the merely curious-but few stay on it. Most are caught soon or late on the detours, the sidetracks, and the return-tracks. If many come to this Quest because they are discontented with living or even despairing of it, some come because they feel the joy of living or even exalt in it. There are a few, however, who come because they seek truth or reality. There are those today as never before whose deep but unconscious spiritual loneliness remains unsatisfied by workaday life. Some people seek truth because of the hunger for the truth for its own sake, or because of the sense of incompleteness of a merely materialistic existence. Love liberates from the father of the lie because it liberates us from our false self to our true self—to that self which is grounded in true reality. Therefore, distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth untied with love; and be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Investigators of the paranormal—we watch and we are always here. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I could not believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I have never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it has all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. Nicolas de Lenfent had been educated all his life to be a little imitation aristocrat. Well, during his first term studying law in Paris, at Pantheon-Assas University, he fell madly in love with the violin, of all things. Seems he heard an Italian virtuoso, one of those geniuses from Padua who is so great that mortals say he has sold his soul to the devil. Well, Nicolas dropped everything at once to take lessons from Wolfgang Mozart. He sold his books—the 17th century Institutio Theologiae Elencticae by Francisco Turrettione, the 16th century Tractatulus Hypocratis Medicorum Optimi de Aspectibus Plantrum Verus Lubam by Pietro d’Abano. He did nothing but play and play until he failed his examinations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nicolas wanted to be a musician. Can you imagine? And his father was beside himself. He even smashed the instrument, and you know what an expensive instrument the Molitor Stradivarius is, and you know what a piece of expensive merchandise means to the good draper. Nicolas promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his rare silver and tortoiseshell verge pocket watch to buy another. He is impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well. On Sunday when I went to mass, he was playing upstairs in his bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands. I gave a little grasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that. Of course, people said he will never be anything. He is too old. That when you are already twenty, you cannot take up the violin. But what do they know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil. Engaging destiny is seen most brilliantly in poets, partly because of their genius with words, but mainly because they live in and write with the awareness of deeper dimensions of consciousness than the rest of us. Whether or not we call these depths subconscious, unconscious, or collective unconscious, they still are arrived at only by intensity of feeling and vision, an ecstasy or a rage that cuts through superficial existence and reveals the profound forms of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
We should expect poets to have a great deal to communicate about destiny and about their own struggles to confront it. And we are not disappointed. I have always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reasons. Many people do not much believe in God and never have. Of course, when they do to mass they say they do. However, it is a duty for them. Real religion long ago died out for many people, especially when Madalyn Murry O’Hair came along and founded American Atheists and challenged mandatory prayer and Bible reading in public schools, but of course she and her sons ended up stealing money from the foundation and absconded. And as fate would have it, David Roland Waters, a convicted felon and former employee of American Atheists was convicted of murdering Madalyn O’Hair, her second son Jon Garth Murray, and her adopted daughter Robin Murry O’Hair (daughter of her son William J. Murray and his high school girlfriend Susan). Now we have all these shootings in the schools since people are removing God from the country founded in his name, as religion has died out in the families of thousands of aristocrats. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Once I remember crying over witches. We were little boys and the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the charred ground. That was a horrid, horrid place. I remember screaming and being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, “Wake up.” However, I had not thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burst alive. When my mother came to get us, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales. The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our village, that they had been innocent. Victims of superstition. There were no real witches. No wonder I had screamed and screamed. However, my mother told a different story, that the witches has been in league with the devil, that they had lighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed the sheep and the children. Still, if no one is ever brunt in the name of God, the World would be better. The good father even said that they had burnt a good number of werewolves in those times, too. They were a regular menace. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Nevertheless, the poet’s way is the opposite to the opaque, placid life. In authentic poetry we find a confrontation which does not involve repression nor covering up nor sacrifice of passion in order to avoid despair, nor any of the other ways most of us use to avoid direct acknowledgment of our destiny. The art of the poets teases out our awareness of our fate; the energy that does into the making of the poem adds to our passion; and by means of the music poets combine with words, the poem takes on a power to express the dignity of our state as human beings. All pains in the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, find their sole speech in that victorious brow. This is an expression for all of us to understand the passions and griefs experienced in engaging our own destinies. The joy and ecstasy from this level is where freedom takes off. All possibilities open up—thou art freed. When we consider how our light is spent, half our days in this dark World and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide could lodge us useless, not to express our freedom is a cruel fate. For many people their failure to see life and its precious capacity is what eats away their souls. However, religious faith is what helps us to accept our destiny, it keeps us from being cynical and sarcastic. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Against Heavens hand or will, one must not argue, nor bate a lot of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer right onward. This thought might lead one through the Worlds vain mask content, through the veil, have we no better guide. This is not a resignation. Resignation usually drains away one’s power and productivity. However, we are still passionate in our defense of freedom. Give us the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties. Help us to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. It is important to have such passionate devotion to the cause one believes in and speak not of resignation, passivity, docility, or loss of energy. Tragic experience can be formed by art into a thing of beauty. This outer power in politics as well as inner power of poetry indicates that we have kept very much alive our dialectical relation to our own destiny and thus our experience of authentic freedom. The World is twofold for mortals in accordance with our twofold attitude. Modern society only recognizes one of these modes, the mode of experience, through which mortals treats the World (including their fellow people), as an object to be analyzed and utilized. Most mortals ignore the second mode, the mode of encounter, through which mortals enter into a relation with the World, engaging as active participants rather than as objective observer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is only by opening ourselves up to this second mode of engaging in the World that we can escape the ills of the modern human condition. Or mortals encounter being and becoming as what confronts one—always only one being and everything only as a being. What is there reveals itself to one in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to one as being. Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically. Measure and comparisons have fled. It is up to us how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for us. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each if for us a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees our association wit the World. The World that appears to us in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to us, and we cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when we cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if one tries to make it surveryable, one loses it. It comes—comes to fetch us—and if it does not reach us or encounter us it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside us, it touches our ground; and id we say “soul of my soul” we have not said too much. However, one must beware of trying to transpose it into our soul—that way one destroy it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it—you must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimation of eternity. The It-World hangs together in space and time. The You-World does not hang together in space and time. The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation. These are the two basic privileges of the It-World. They induce mortals to consider the It-World as in which one has to live and also can live comfortably—and that even offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In this firm and wholesome chronicle the You-moments appears as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether indispensable. Since one must after all return into the World, why not stay in it in the first place? Why not call to order that which confronts us and send it home into objectivity? And when one cannot get around to saying You, perhaps to one’s father, wife, companion—why not say You and mean It? After all, producing the sound “You” with one’s vocal cords does not by any means entail speaking the uncanny basic word. Even whispering an amorous You with one’s soul is hardly dangerous as long as in all seriousness one means nothing but experiencing and using. One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. However, in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn. And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. However, whoever lives only with that is not human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? When we have fears that we may cease to be, before the pen has gleaned one’s teeming brain—keep in mind the chief expression of possibility, the freedom to create, may be taken from one. When one beholds, upon the night’s starred face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that one may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when one feel, fair creature of an hour, that one shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love;–then on the shore of the wide World one stands alone, and thinks till love and fame to nothingness do sink. The words will began to pour out of one as they had out of a poet, and soon one will be talking about things they had felt in their hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words will seem to be essential words they way good friends do on those rare occasions. And friends will come to describe their longings and dissatisfactions, and say things to each other with exuberance. Once night, when the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I had never done before—of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I could not see the towers of my father’s house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Into this Universe, and why not knowing nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; and out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. Up from the Earth’s centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; and many knots unraveled by the road; but not the master-knot of human fate. The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it. We must attack the false wishes of illusions that we all tend to carry—the hope that somehow we shall escape, through our special piety or our self-pity, the common fate of humankind. We simply do not know the ultimate answers. However, despite this fate and the injustices that it implies, we must seize what freedom we can and push on. The mystery will remain a mystery, our destiny cannot be unraveled by reason or by wit. We must pit fortitude against fatalism. Confront fate without becoming fatalistic. As a boy eight centuries ago, studied Sufism and science and as an adult become known as Persia’s outstanding astronomer, who wrote an authoritative text on algebra, who revised the astronomical tables, who persuaded the sultan to reform the calendar, and who in other ways worked diligently in the sultan’s government. Hardly a hedonistic loafer! #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Because something deep down in the subconscious knows that the ego is destructible, sooner or later, in one incarnation or another, a longing arises for what which is indestructible. From this moment one begins, however feebly, to crease indulging the desires, the wishes, of one’s ego, and to replace the by something new and higher. This is the beginning of the Quest, and it may take a religious, a spiritual, or a philosophic form, according to one’s maturity. Many seem to believe their entry into the quest for God will set their life in order and solve their problems forever. This is, of course, mere wishful thinking. It is not their entry but their completion of the quest that could ever do these things for them. The embracing of one’s fate so directly and so clearly—as well as so blithely and courageously—reduced the negative effect of the piddling worries about destiny, and sets one free inwardly for actualizing one’s freedom outwardly. Like Queen Akasha, those persons who often seem the most capable of accepting the inevitable are also the most productive and the most capable of pleasure and joy. We see in these poets that the acceptance of human destiny is the way to put one’s feet on solid ground. We then are not the ready prey of hobgoblins—we are no longer fighting battles against figments of our imagination; no boogeyman or woman is lurking in the closet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We are freed from the hundred and one imaginary bonds; we are loosed from the need to beg others to take care of us. Having confronted the worst, we are released to open up to the possibilities of life. Those of us who dare to face the question of truth may listen to what the Fourth Gospel says about it. The Fourth Gospel speaks a true reality—that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it. If Jesus says, “I am the truth,” he indicates that in Christ the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present, unveiled, undistorted, Christ’s infinite depth, in his unapproachable mystery. Jesus is not the truth because his teachings are true his teachings are. However, Christ’s teachings are true because they express his words. And he is more than any word said about him. The truth which makes us free is neither the teaching of Jesus nor the teaching about Jesus. They point to the truth, but are not a law of truth. Nor are the doctrines about him the truth that liberates. I say this to you as somebody who all his life has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ. However, the more one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have learned from our professors and from the teaching of the Church in all generations, is not the truth that makes us free. “The dead do not share. Though they reach towards us from the grave (I swear they do) they do not band their hearts to you They hand their heads, the part that stares,” Stan Rice from “Their Share” Body of Work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
This century had inherited the Earth in every sense. And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular morality as strong as any religious mortality I had ever known. The intellectuals carried the standards. However, quite ordinary individuals all over America cared passionately about peace and the poor and the planet as if driven by a mystical zeal. Famine they intended to wipe out in this century. Disease they would destroy no matter what the cost. They argued ferociously about the execution of condemned criminals, the abortion of unborn babies. And the threats of environmental pollution and the loss of wild animals and the holocaustal war they battled as fiercely as mortals have battled witchcraft and heresy in the ages past. A classic portrayal of the projection of destiny is found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the fashion typical of the times, Shakespeare uses the three witches, called by him “the Weird Sisters,” as the screen on which Macbeth’s drive for power and ambition are projected. In this tragedy it is crucial that Shakespeare present Macbeth in the beginning as a good man, universally admired and respected by his peers. This sets that stage for Macbeth’s profound and tragic conflict between this, the “public,” side of his personality and his repressed power drives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
A character sketch of Macbeth is given to us by Lady Macbeth near the beginning of the play: “Thy nature; it is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win.’ Macbeth is presented in the hour of his greatest success as leader of the army on the day of victory. This is the moment when we are all open to the greatest temptations of power and ambition and the time when Macbeth is most open to his own sense of destiny. As one Shakespearean scholar states: “Experience has taught that to good mortals the day of greatest achievement proves too often the day of fate; that few natures can withstand the evil promptings to greater glory which come in the day of success.” Macbeth also possesses a poetic nature and an active and pretentious imagination, which reminds us of the role of imagination in the witchcraft of the times. He is always communicating asides to the audience, telling us his inner thoughts: he sees ghost and apparitions and hallucinates the dagger hanging in the air before him. Lady Macbeth rightly states, “Your face, my thane, is as a book were mortals may read strange matters.” During the drama he vacillates between his power drive and his human compassion, as illustrated in his cry after murdering Duncan the king, “Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I wouldst thou couldst!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The play opens on a stormy day with the witches dancing around their fire as they chant on the heath: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Thus, as was the practice of witches, they deny the standard of ethics in their first line. They likewise destroy the standard of aesthetics: the brew around which they dance is made up of such things as “Finger of birth-strangled babe” and “grease that’s sweatn’s from the murderer’s gibbet.” Macbeth’s first words as he comes on the stage with Banquo echoes what the witches have just said, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” He is wholly unconscious of any relation with these supernatural agents of evil. The audience knows that this signifies some link between Macbeth and the witches, some unconscious relationship with the Weird Sisters. The witches then predict that Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and king that Banquo’s children will be king to come. Banquo brushes off the witches’ message, saying it is nothing: “The Earth hat bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.” He asks Macbeth whether they have eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.” However, Macbeth, with his poetic nature and already drawn into a relationship with occult powers, cannot brush the witches’ predication aside, especially since they are the screen on which he projects his unconscious urgings. The witches, indeed, are constituted by Macbeth’s own unconscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
One might ask: Why does Banquo see the witches at all if they are projections of Macbeth’s suppressed evil hopes and fears? Shakespeare was writing a drama, not a psychoanalytic paper, and took whatever poetic license he needed. However, it is a fact that when we project our own evil, we can make it sound rational enough to get our friends to see it even though they do not take it as seriously as we do. Macbeth cannot rid his imagination of these prophecies from the witches. When other lords arrive to inform him that he has indeed been rewarded for the victory by being appointed Thane of Cawdor, Banquo cries, “What, can the devil speak true?” But Macbeth ponders the dilemma in an aside, this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, why hath it given me earnest of success, commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart known at my ribs, against the use of nature? He is so caught up and overwhelmed by these thoughts that he can only add another paradox: “Nothing I but what is not.” Thus, he again agrees with the witches’ denial of the base of ethical standards. However, his vacillation goes on: “If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me without my sir.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We see in this the drama of the damnation of a great soul, the struggle of a once good man with his destiny. Lady Macbeth plays the part of a human representative of fate, a situation similar to Macbeth’s own projection on the witches. Her portrait is drawn by Shakespeare as the opposite of Macbeth’s: she is not poetic but practical, cold, calculating, even ruthless. She crimes in speaking of nursing her baby, “I would, while it was smiling in my face have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums and dash’d is brains out, had I so sworn as you have done.” As the representative of fate, she used every kind of persuasion from scorn to cajoling to force Macbeth “to screw his courage to the sticking point,” until finally her husband, in a salute to her steellike will, adjures her to “bring forth men-children only!” Murder follows murder as this fate is lived out—the assassination of Banquo and the killing of Macduff’s wife and children. Macbeth is vacillating and remorseful all the while, until at the end he becomes desperate. The “milk of human kindness” is now lost in his deeper and deeper inner conflict, depression, and ultimate destruction. Like the rest of us, Macbeth cannot take responsibility for his own fate. He goes back three times to the witches for reassurance. Hecate, queen of the witches, states to her minions, “Thither he will come to know his destiny. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
And she instructs her witches on how they will delude Macbeth further: “Raise such artificial sprites as by the strength of their illusion shall draw him on to his confusion. He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear his hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear. And you all know, security is mortals’ chiefest enemy. Macbeth’s life has become empty, as in the “tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, but more than that: “There is nothing serious in mortality; all is but toys.” True to Hecate’s prediction, Macbeth does come back again “to know his destiny” and is bolstered by the witches’ statement that he will not die “till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” and no one “born of woman” will be able to kill him. Both of these turn out to be illusions. And in the last scene Macduff marches on stage with MacBeth’s head. It is not by accident that this drama, which is so psychoanalytic, is also the one where Shakespeare makes his most specific references to mental healing. After Lady Macbeth, herself at last the prey of overwhelming guilt, walks in her sleep, trying to wipe out of the blood on her hand, and Macbeth and the doctor he has called watch her, Macbeth pleads with the physician, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When the doctor answers, “Therein the patient must minister to himself,” Macbeth expostulates, “Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.” Relevant also is the doctor’s earlier remark: “More needs she the divine than the physician.” The destiny of Macbeth, we assume, is a combination of the design of his own nature in the conflict with the external situation in which he finds himself. This conflict confronts us all, and to the extent that we can embrace it, we avoid the need to repress it and then to project it upon somebody or something outside ourselves. Dramatic tragedies have such a powerful impact on us because we observe on the stage a good person who, like Macbeth, may be universally admired and respected by his peers but who succumbs to the conflicts that were always present in himself and who then slowly disintegrates before our eyes. Good people, as we have said, have a capacity for evil that balances their goodness. The saints throughout history have declared—and there is no reason to doubt their judgment—that they were also great sinners. This does not necessarily mean that they did specific evil things—which may or may not be the case. It does mean that, ethically speaking, goodness and evil are to be understood at one’s sensitivity to the effect of one’s actions and thoughts on oneself and on one’s community. Holy men and woman are saints precisely because of their highly developed sensitivity to goodness and evil. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In the unconscious mind, a person’s goodness is in direct proportion to one’s potentialities for evil. The unconscious this compensates for and balances consciousness. As one becomes sensitive to one’s greater good, one also has the potentiality for greater evil. It is the latter that the witches represent. The higher we are able to go, the lower we can sink. The necessary thing is to be able to acknowledge and confront one’s evil fate. A tragedy is a situation, like Queen Akasha’s in The Queen of the Damned, in which she cannot take control of her destiny nor even rebel against her destiny as it has already been block off by supernatural powers. The spirits were only visible at night, and they were never visible for more than a second, and usually only when the spirits were in rage. Their size was enormous. They would tell the witches that they could not imagine how big they were. That they exert great force upon the physical World is beyond doubt. Otherwise how could they move objects as they do in poltergeist hauntings? And how could they have brought the clouds to make the rain? Whatever their material makeup is, they have no apparent biological needs, these entities. They do not age; they do not change. And the key to understanding their youthful and whimsical behavior is possessed in this. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Why witches attract them or interest them I do not know either. However, that is the crux of it; they see the witch, they go to her, make themselves known to her, and are powerfully flattered when they are noticed; and they do her bidding in order to get more attention; and in some cases to be loved. And as this relationship progresses, they are made for the love of the witch to concentrate on various tasks. It exhausts them but it also delights the, to see human beings so impressed. However, imagine now, how much fun it is for them to listen to prayers and try to answer them, to hang about altars and make thunder after sacrifices are offered up. When a clairvoyant calls upon the spirit of a dead ancestor to speak to one’s descendants, they are quite thrilled to start chattering away in pretense of being the dead ancestor, though of course they are not that person; and they will telepathically extract information from the brains of the descendants in order to delude them all the more. Akasha, a beauty of the royal family, was brought into Enkil’s kingdom to be his wife, she was not drawn from his people, but from the city of Uruk in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. The Nile farmers were horrified that the beautiful Akasha would set about at once to turn them away from their barbaric habit of making war for human flesh. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
And it was so, tribes were no longer allowed to hunt for flesh and the flesh of the dead would be secured in linen wrappings at great expense, and these intact bodies were to be displayed for all to see, and the placed in tombs with proper offerings and incantations of the priest. Akasha and Enkil convinced them that if the bodies were preserved in these wrappings on Earth, the spirts of the dead would fare better in the realm to which they had gone. In other words, the people were told, “Your beloved ancestors are not neglected; rather they are well kept.” They worshipped the god Osiris, and he Sun god, Ra. Then years later, Akasha and Enkil requested the witch twins Mekare and Maharate to visit them because they had heard of their great powers. However, upon visiting Akasha, the twins brought an evil spirit with them, one named Amel that has worked evil for wizards and could torment people, bedevil them, even prick them as if he were a swarm of gnats! He could draw blood from humans, and he declared; and he liked the taste of it. When the twins saw Enkil and Akasha, they were upon their thrones. The Queen was a woman of straight shoulders and firm limbs with a face almost too exquisite to evince intelligence, a being of enticing prettiness with a soft treble voice. As for the King, he was no loner a soldier, but a sovereign. His hair was plaited, and he wore his formal kilt and jewels. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As the Queen started to ask the witch twins how they work their magic, and Amel was there lurking, waiting. Within an instant the wind hand begun. It howled through the courtyard and whistled through the corridors of the palaces. The draperies were torn by it; doors slammed; fragile vessels were smashed. The Queen was in a state of terror as she felt it surrounding her. The king tried to protect her and told her he had witnessed this spectacle before, but she had never witnessed the slightest proof of the supernatural. The spirit had entered her and after the twins visited the kingdom, a great darkness pervaded, until the villagers blamed the King and Queen and killed them. As the blood was leaving Akasha bodies, a blood mist surrounded her and she came back to life. Then she brought the king back to life. People worshipped them as gods because they had vanquished death, but they felt betrayed by the Sun God Ra and could not go in the Sun or even endure bright lights. Akasha and Enkil had become the first vampires, and it was a fate they did not want for they foresaw what would happen if people found out or if other vampires were created. They created one, Khayman, to test their powers, and he would ultimately lead to their downfall by protecting their enemies, and they tried to turn Earth into the Kingdom of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Societies also go through the process of repression and projection that produces witches and witchcraft. Sometimes it takes the form of scapegoating, as when it was used against underrepresented groups in our times. Every nation in wartime shouts out to its people the atrocities committed by the enemy and projects its own repressed aggression on the enemy. Thus freed of their own guilt at killing and given tangible devils to fight, the people can unite on the side of God, democracy, and freedom. Like the good people of the Middle Ages, we are the righteous ones, struggling against the representatives of Satan as Akasha and Enkil believed themselves to be doing. When we are told that we cannot talk with certain people because they do not believe in God and an afterlife, we can see this in our own country. And The Queen of the Damned was a warning about even associating with people who play with dark forces, as you see how that spirit, Amel, he predated humans and had never been in a body cursed Akasha and her King. Whether we take the statement about not tampering with evil as sincere or just as something made by officials simply as a way of enlisting the support of the religious masses, the dynamics are the same. It is the dynamic of witchcraft all over again. Witchcraft led to torture and burning at the sake in past centuries, and such behavior can lead us and our World into unimaginable tragedy—atomic warfare. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
If we are to have compassion and empathy for others who are different from us, but whom we must co-exist, coming to terms with our own destiny is essential in a World with possibilities of unprecedented cruelty. Many among us, Christians and secularists, point to their tradition which goes back to the Church Fathers, or to the popes, or to the reformers, or to the makers of the American Constitution. Their church or their nation is their mother, so they have all the truth and do not need to worry about the question of truth. Would Jesus tell them, perhaps, what he told the Jews—that even if the church or that nation is their mother, they carry with them the heritage of the father of untruth; that they truth they have is not the truth which makes free? Certainly there is no freedom where there is self-complacency about the truth of one’s own beliefs. There is no freedom where there is ignorant and fanatical rejection of foreign ideas and ways of life. There is not freedom but demonic bondage, like we see among many from the Pocket/Greenhaven community in Sacramento, California USA, where laws and rights do not matter because one’s own truth is called the ultimate truth. For this an attempt to be like God, an attempt which is made in the name of God or some other entity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I know what these creatures are. I have always known. There has never been the slightest doubt with me. This is such a raw and painful moment. I am striving to reach you, and you are only telling me farewell. I have said other things, that I would tell you the whole story, that I would open the files to you, that you are needed on this very matter by us all. When persons cannot or will not acknowledge and confront aspects of their destiny—such as a sudden infirmary, an inexplicable death, the birth of a child with special needs—the destiny become repressed. It is then often projected on figures outside themselves, such as gods, sorcerers, demons, and witches. I do not use the word project pejoratively. Projection is a common and normal function of the human mind, and we all do it continuously in less pretentious ways then those cited here. Many talented people experience their visions in art or music as coming at least partially from outside themselves. As an artist paints a landscape, it is impossible to tell how much comes from the landscape that one presumably sees and how much is projected from one’s own sense of form. Indeed, one’s genuine art depends on what one projects rather than on what exists objectively out there. The line between inner and outer reality is impossible to draw sharply, as the physics as the brain studies of Karl Pribram make clear. However, here we will be talking mainly about the destructive aspects of the projection of destiny as it shows itself in witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Witchcraft has been a sad and serious problem in European and the West since the twelfth century, particularly in the Catholic and Protestant churches. In the thirteenth century the Inquisition petitioned Pope Alexander IV (1254-61) for permission to add witchcraft to the ecclesiastical functions to be judged by the Inquisition. The pope refused, but he left the door open by stating his belief that all witches were the servants of Satan. By the end of the fifteenth century, witchcraft was assimilated with heresy, and those found guilty by the Inquisition of practicing witchcraft were burned at the stake. If a person did not believe in witchcraft, one’s very disbelief put one in danger of being accused of heresy. If you believed that no compact does or can exist between the Devil and a human being or that there is no sexual intercourse between the Devil and human beings, or that neither devils nor witches can raise tempests, rain-storms, hail-storms and the like, you were already suspect of being in league with Satan. Even the leaders of the Protestant Reformation believed in witches. Luther wrote, “Paul reckoneth witchcraft among the works of the flesh, which is not lust or lechery, but a kind of idolatry. For witchcraft convenath with the devil. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
John Calin also was a believer in such sorcery and frequently quoted a passage from the New Testament: “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the World.” Witchcraft not only denied the ethical standards of the day, but also the aesthetic ones. The customary repulsive aspects of the witch’s sabbath are present in extant documents: “The corpses of newly-born children were eaten by them; they had been stolen from their nurses during the night; all manner of revolting liquids were drunk and there was no savour in any of the food.” It is easy to understand that the aspects of destiny that we have called cosmic, like the eruption of volcanoes or Earthquakes, associated as these phenomena are wit emotions of awe and terror, should be seen as the workings of some supernatural power. However, the commonplace things of life were also susceptible, in any imaginative or hysterical persons, to being called the work of witches. Thus, continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil. Male importance, to cite and example among the many things projected, was widely cited as being caused by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
A couple, let us say, had been preparing for weeks to be married, and in the evening, after the strain and stress of the marriage ceremony, the groom finds himself important. Out of his bewilderment, anger, and feelings of inferiority, he could well have fantasies that some enchantment caused this embarrassing phenomenon. Pierre Bayle wrote in the early eighteenth century: “Several men are unable to consummate their marriage, and believe that this importance is the effect of a spell. From then on, the newlyweds regard each other with an evil eye, and their discord at times descends into the most horrible enmity; the sight of one makes the other shiver.” It I said, he adds, that witches say certain words during the nuptial benediction, which is called “knotting the braid.” “That is why there are some good mothers who consent to anticipating the wedding night in order to foil the witch.” Thomas Aquinas takes up this question under the rubric “Whether the effect of sorcery are in impediment to matrimony.” While he concludes that witches cannot impede the consummation of a marriage, the stronger spirits of evil, like demons and the devil, can do so. The catholic faith insists that demons do indeed exist and that they may impede pleasures of the flesh by their works. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Anne Marie de Georgel declares when she was washing her clothes one morning near Pech-David above the town, that she saw a man of huge stature coming towards her across the water. He was dark-skinned and his eyes burned like living coals; he was dressed in the hides of beasts. This monster asked her if she would give herself to hum and she said yes. Then he blew into her mouth and from the Saturday following she was borne to the [witch’s] Sabbath, simply because it was his will. There she found a huge he-goat and after greeting him she submitted to his pleasure. The he-goat in return taught her all kinds of secret spells; he explained poisonous plants to her and she learned from him words for incantations and how to cast spells during the night of the vigil of St. John’s day, Christmas Eve, and the first Friday in every month. He advised her if she could, to make sacrilegious communion, offering God and honouring the Devil. And she carried out these impious suggestions. Anne Marie de Georgel then admitted that she has not ceased to do evil, practicing all manner of filthiness during the years which passed from the time of her initiation to that of her imprisonment. Sometimes these victims make theological statements of considerable sagacity. This Anne Marie went on to say that the struggle between God and the Devil had gone on since eternity and would have no end. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Sometimes one is victorious, sometimes the other, and at this time the situation was such that Satan was sure to triumph. How ironical that her being burned at the stake was itself a demonstration of the triumph of Satan. Why are witches predominately female? Whereas some of the pronouncements from Inquisition use the phrase witches of both sexes, there is no doubt that witches are chiefly woman. (The term for a male witch, warlock, is unfamiliar and rarely used.) The Malleus Maleficarum (1486) writer by two leaders of the Inquisition in Germany, H. Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, often called an “encyclopedia” of witchcraft, has one section entitled “Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions?” The authors write (with seemingly perverse delight) “concerning witches who copulate with devils,” and they seek the methods by which such abominations are consummated. On the part of the devil: first, of what element the body is made that he assumes; secondly, whether the act is always accompanied by the injection of semen received from another….whether one commits this act more frequently at one time and place…and whether the act is invisible to any who may be standing by. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
These authors speak often of the fragility of females and state, concerning women, that when they are governed by a good spirit, they are most excellent in virtue; but when they are governed by an evil spirit, they indulge in the worst possible vices. Indeed, the word woman is used to mean the lust of the flesh. However, women also have brought beatitude to men, and have saved nations, lands and cities, as did Esther, Judith, and Deborah. Referring to the fact that original sin is blamed on Eve, Institoris and Sprenger remark that “we find a change of name from Eva to Ave [as in ‘Ave Maris’] and the whole sin of Eve is taken away by the benediction of Mary.” This condescending diatribe against women makes one winces, but it also casts light on the dynamics of the repression and projection of destiny. It seems obvious that this lust of the flesh is largely a projection of the men’s own unacknowledged sexuality. The femme fatale phenomenon throws light on the helplessness a man may feel under the attraction of a beautiful woman, especially if she is unavailable to him. Many men resent such attractions, as though these waves of passion take control of their own lives away from them. Throughout history, paintings of the courtesan, the prostitute, the beautiful but possibly insensitive woman bear witness to the power of the femme fatale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Sex is a vivid part of our destiny in that we had no say about whether were born male or female. Sex seems to take over our bodies willy-nilly. Our biological development brings with it new and, to the pubescent, strange and powerful desires and fantasies. Growing boys and men often experience sex as intrusion and the powerful yearnings as something beyond their control. The conflicts males have about their sexuality can be accentuated by monastic life, as illustrated by Saint Anthony’s sexual temptations in the desert and by Origen’s self-castration. All of this generates hostility toward the women on the man’s part. However, good men repress this hostility—perhaps under a Victorianlike code of putting women on a pedestal—even though this hostility is shown in semirecognizable form in men’s groups, men’s humor, and so on. Male anger arises from the situation in which the woman seems to hold power over his glands, some secret influence over his internal organs that may be shown in his involuntary erections. This at first surprises him, then bewitches (the word is apt) him, and finally enrages him. It is easy to imagine these uncontrollable and tantalizing surgings of emotion as evidence that one has been bewitched. So strong can the repression be that one never pauses to consider that the source maybe one’s own destiny in reference to sexuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
What better way to handle this bewildering attraction, this succumbing to the charms of the femme fatale, than by ascribing the secret influence to a witch? Sometimes the witches are young women whose only crime is their beauty, and sometimes the witches are antiquated and wizened and senile. However, the man can easily remind himself that the antiquated witches had this magic power in their youth, and they still remember the secret of it even though they do not tell. The bewitched man, attracted in ways he can do nothing about, passes on to another his suspicion that so and so has witchly powers. Others become suspicious, and soon so and so becomes a witch. Her denial only adds to the conviction. The erstwhile attracted man can tell himself he acted righteously and helped rid the World of the harmful one. Thus, his hostility and his erotic passion are relieved a thousandfold as the woman is burned at the stake. All along there were protest against the cruel and inhuman treatment in the attack on so-called witchcraft, but the protesters objected at the risk of being accused themselves. One Jesuit and poet, Frederick Spee, assigned to the task of confessor to witches condemned to death in Wurzburg, was appalled by the method of the trials and in 1631 published an anonymous attack on the persecutions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
In 1583 Reginald Scot subtitled his book in witchcraft proving that the Compacts and contracts of Witches with Devils and all Infernal Spirits…are but Erroneous Novelties and Imaginary Conceptions, and laying bare The Unchristian Practices and Inhumane Dealing of Witch-tryers upon Aged, Melancholy and Superstitious people in extorting Confessions by Terrors and Tortures. Toward the period a number of people argued that the fears of witchcraft were themselves the result of superstition and the human imagination. Pierre Bayle, in 1703, in a public letter, asserts that one hears among the common people that “an illness has been given to such and such persons by a witch.” However, he argues that these “are an effect of the dominion that the imagination exercises over the other faculties of the body and soul.” The diseases mentioned are maintained by the anxieties of the mind and by the panic-stricken terrors of the soul. He tells of a nun who sincerely felt herself possessed and adds, “see what the imagination is capable of, once unhinged by too contemplative a life.” Bayle reminds the person to whom one is writing that “you did not put too much stock in what I wrote to you about the bitterness that accompanies the devout life. You have persisted in telling me that mystics seem to you to be the happiest mortals in the World. It was thus necessary to convince you by means of a great example that they do not always enjoy those ineffable sweetnesses that you have read in their writings.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
We note here Bayle’s insight that the evil projected on witches was the result of mental difficulties on the part of the mystics and others who repressed their own evil tendencies and pretended to experience perpetual sweetness and peace. Bayle points out that witchcraft is the effect of an intense but twisted imagination. “Remove this cause,” he states like a modern psychotherapist, albeit in overly simplistic terms, “give a full confidence to the ill person, and he will have a tranquil mind, and that will be his cure.” In the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne tells us of talking at length to “a prisoner…a real witch in ugliness and deformity, long very famous in that profession,” and gives his conclusion: “It seemed to me a matter rather of madness than of crime.” In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes also became convinced that the belief in witchcraft was a delusion based on self-persuasion. Even the Grand Inquisitor of Spain came to see that self-delusion in the persecution of witches, and the fact that the presentation of witches itself led, by its suggestive self-fulfilling effects, to the appearance of the symptoms of witchcraft. There was, finally, the touching recantation of the twelve jurors of Salem (where a score of convicted witches had been put to death), who solemnly stated: “We justly fear we were sadly deluded and mistaken, … [and] do therefore humbly beg forgiveness.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Witchcraft and the persecution of witches were ultimately overcome by Cartesian rationalism, the philosophical belief that the body and the mind were separate and dud not influence each other. In our day this rationalism takes the form of the factual, scientific explanation of the adversities that befall us. I propose, however, that this solution is not enough. What are we to do with the destructive projections (which have been and can be shifted to underrepresented populations as well as witches) that are not cured by the clear and simple ideas of the rationalists? Parents may want to know the facts concerning the crippling of their child in an auto accident, but this does not assuage their grief. Sadness and grief, joy and exultation are emotional responses, while scientific explanations are rational phenomena. Thus the acknowledging and confronting of death, serious illness, the fact that one was born into a certain race and culture at a certain historical period (to cite some random aspects of destiny) are essentially feeling, emotional phenomena. Logical data are on a different plane. A healthy society must make room in poetry, art, and music for the expression of those emotional and mythic activities. This is why our forbears, like Bayle and Hobbes, spoke so often of the role of imagination in the projections on witches. It also may throw light on why women were regarded as being more disposed to superstition, since women in Western culture by and large react more emotionally than do men. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Light is thrown on the more emotional aspect of female behavior by contemporary research into the differing functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, begun by Dr. R.W. Sperry at the California Institute of Technology, and is not accepted in scientific quarters. These studied demonstrate that the left hemisphere, broadly speaking, channels logical, rational aspects of our experience, and the right hemisphere channels mainly the emotional, poetic, artistic ones. In our culture, women are reputed to develop the right-brain functions, and men depend more on the left brain. Thus, it can be asked whether women, in our culture, are more addicted to what Institoris and Sprenger called evil superstitions. We here state that this was simply a question of women being emotional, poetic, and imaginative. This can be said only in a general sense, and should not be made into a rule. There are many exceptions, however. In witchcraft women were being punished for being more poetic, more emotionally sensitive, more intuitive than men (all things that could be regarded as fragile). This is also why our argument here does not fall under Calvin’s stricture when he attacks the trifling philosophy about the holy Angels which teaches that they are noting but good inspirations or those impulses which God arouses in mortal’s minds, [and] those mortals…who babble of devils as nothing else than evil emotions of perturbations which come upon us from our flesh. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
However, the acknowledgement of fate and other aspects of one’s destiny is by no means a trifling matter. On it depends our freedom as human beings and our very existence. We note that it is the conventionally good people—the faithful Catholics and Protestants, the ethical bourgeois citizens, the monks and nuns—who seem to have been most ready to ascribe witchcraft to other persons living on the fringes of their communities. These good people are most apt to repress the evil tendencies within themselves and to pretend that fate does not exist, and therefore, they are most likely to project their unacceptable urges on to other persons. Thus, goodness without the humility that John Bunyan expressed on seeing a condemned mortal being taken to the gallows, “There but for the grace of God go I,” can itself lead to evil. Whenever I hear the customary platitudes “I love everyone” or “I have no enemies” or “Illness does not exist since God is spirit,” I sigh and find myself wondering: Which aspect of destiny is the person repressing? Where will the projected energy rear its destructive head?” “Very little is more worth our time than understanding the talent of Substance. A bee, a living bee, at the windowglass, trying to get out, doomed, it cannot understand,” Stan Rice Untitled Poem from Pig’s Progress (1976). #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
If you were never to see me again, that would only make things worse. If you go on as you are, you will not live another five days. Do you remember anything I said to you earlier? There is nothing I can do to make you want to live, is not that so? Will you listen to me, then? Really listen? You are going to weep over me? Anxiety over about death is generally castration anxiety, because no one has ever actually experienced literal death, and, therefore, death cannot be in the unconscious. However, who has ever experienced literal castration? Many people do not address death because they like the illusion of the invincibility of psychoanalysis. For to confront and acknowledge death—our own death and the death of others is the emergence of destiny, now in the sense of necessity, in its extreme and ultimate form. To admit this aspect of destiny, this confession of finitude, would be to admit that psychoanalysis—and Dr. Freud and Dr. Fromm and all the rest of us mortals as well—would have to give up the craving for invincibility. This is to accept our finiteness and our mortality. It is to join the club of the human, the club of the finite, the vincibly, the vulnerable, the vulnerable; the club of the poignant mortals. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
The awareness of death is required by the yes-no characteristic of human consciousness. Consciousness is never static: it knows one thing because that is opposite to something else. It experiences things dialectically, like an electric current with positive and negative poles. We become aware of something by virtue of its contrast with its background. If they fly were perfectly still, the frog would never see it. However, the fly moves once, and the frog takes aim; the fly moves again and the frog gobbles it up. Again, we hear the echo of the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus: “People do not realize that what is opposed to something is also identical with it.” Life is the opposite of death, and thoughts of death are necessary if we are to think significantly of life. Who has not thought at some moment of great joy, “I hope I never die!” Or on seeing some breathtakingly beautiful view of the Alps “This makes me feel like eternity-I am beyond life and death.” Or not toiling at some challenging task “May Heaven help me to live long enough to finish my work.” Or at some moment of discouragement “Death would be better than this!” Or at a time of great fatigue, “He giveth his beloved rest.” We need not talk about thoughts of suicide at all. For all the above illustrations are of the poignancy of life, and they all contain references to death. The most intense experiences of life bring with them the most intense experiences of death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Mortals pass their whole lives in error when they might pass them in truth. They do wrong when they might do good. The result is suffering when it might be peace. When all the chief decisions of a mortal’s life are made in a condition of spiritual ignorance, what other results may be expected than unfortunate ones? It is a bitter moment—and the consciousness of one’s error falls painfully upon one—when one discovers that the aims one pursued have led one up a blind alley and that the ambitions one nurtured have yielded only ashes for one’s hands. The parable of the Prodigal Son now assumes an intimate meaning for one. One may derive an astringent wisdom from all these unpleasant consequences of the lower ego’s activities. It has indeed been like a blind mortal tremblingly feeling one’s way and moving from one mishap to another, making one false step after another. When one see how the littler personal self has brought one so much pain, sorrow, disappointment, and waste of years, that even when it brought one success the latter turned out to be false and deceptive, one will become yearn to get away from it altogether. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
In all of us, open or hidden, admitted or repressed, the despair of truth is a permanent threat. We are children of our period as Pilate was. Both are periods of disintegration, of a World-wide loss of values and meanings. Nobody can separate oneself completely from this reality, and nobody should even try. Let me do something unusual from a Christian standpoint, namely, to express praise of Pilate—not the unjust judge, but the cynic and sceptic; and of all those amongst us in whom Pilate’s question is alive. For in the depth of every serious doubt and every despair of truth, the passion for truth is still at work. Do not give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Do not be deduced into a truth which is really your truth, even if the seducer is your church, or your party, or your parental tradition. Go with Pilate, if you cannot go with Jesus; but go in seriousness with him! Twofold are the temptations to evade the burden of asking for the truth that matters. The one is the way of those who claim to have the truth and the other is the way of those who do not care for the truth. They point to their traditions which goes back to Abraham. Abraham is their father; so they have all the truth, and do not need to be worried by the question which they encounter in Jesus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
The World is twofold for mortals in according to their twofold attitude. One perceives the being that surrounds one, plain things and beings as things; one perceives what happened around one, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processed and capable of being measured against and compared with those others—an ordered World, a detached World. This World is somewhat reliable; it as density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands—right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure—and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take if for your truth; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for your; but you cannot encounter others with it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you wee to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The necklaces she wore were all modern jewelry, but the profusion made them look archaic, pearls and gold chains and opals and even rubies. Against the luster of her skin, all this ornament appeared somehow unreal! It was caught up in the overall gloss of her person; it was like the light in her eyes, or the luster of her lips. She was something fit for the most lavish palace of the imagination; something both sensuous and divine. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” reports John 1.14, 17. Truth and freedom will make you free. The question of truth is universally human; but like everything human it was first manifest on a special place in a special group. It was the Greek mind in which the passionate search for truth was most conspicuous; and it was the Greek World in which, and to which, the Gospel of John was written. The words, here said by Jesus, are, according to ancient custom, put into his mouth by the evangelist who wanted to show the answer of Christianity to the central question of the Hellenic mind: the question of truth. The answer is given also to us, for we, too, ask the question of truth. And some of us ask it as passionately, and sometimes as desperately, as the Greeks did. “One who does what is true, comes to the light,” reports John 3.21. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Mortals become an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relationship to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in cull consciousness. “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you the Spirit of truth, whom the World cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you,” reports John 14.16, 17. Only now can the other basic word be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I—and object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become henceforth—but as it was waiting for the new relational event. Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Now, however, the detached I is transformed—reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects—and this approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it and joins wit it to form the other basic word. The mortal who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity. One bends down to examine particulars under the objectifying telescope of distant vision to arrange them as mere scenery. In one’s contemplation one isolates them without any feeling for the exclusive or joins them without any World feeling. The former could be attained only through relation, and the latter only by starting from that. Only now one experiences things as aggregates of qualities. Qualities, to be sure, had remained in one’s memory after every encounter, as belonging to the remembered You; but only now things seem t one to be constructed of their qualities. Only by drawing on one’s memory of the relation—dreamlike, visual, or conceptual, depending on the kind of mortal one is—one supplements the core that revealed itself powerfully in the You, embracing all qualities: the substance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Only now does one place things in a spatio-temporal-casual context; only now does each receive its place, its course, its measurability, its conditionality. The You also appears in space, but only in an exclusive confrontation in which everything else can only be background from which it emerges, not its boundary and measure. The You appears in time, but in that of a process that is fulfilled in itself—a process lived through not as a piece that is a part of a constant and organized sequence but in a duration whose purely intensive dimension can be determined only by starting from the You. It appears simultaneously as acting on and as acted upon, but not as if it had been fitted into a causal chain; rather as, in its reciprocity with the I, the beginning and end of the event. This is part of the basic truth of the human World: only It can be put in order. Only as things cease to be our You and become out It do they become subject to coordination. The You knows no system of coordinates. “Let us love one another; for love is of God, and one who loves is born of God and knows God. One who does not love does not know God; for God is love,” report 1 John 4.7, 8. Having got this far, we must also make another pronouncement without which this piece of the basic truth would remain an unfit fragment: an ordered World is not the World order. There are moments of the secret ground in which World order is behold as present. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Then the tone is heard all of the sudden whose uninterpretable score the ordered World is. These moments are immortal; none are more evanescent. They leave no content that could be preserved, but their force enters into the creation and into mortal’s knowledge, and the radiation of its force penetrated the ordered World and thaws it again and again. Thus the history of the individual, this the history of the race. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” reports John 8.31, 32. The decision to embark on this Quest may ripen for a long time in one’s unconscious mind before it is openly and slowly made, or it may explode impulsively in a wholly unpremeditated way. One has entered upon the quest for no other reason than that one has been inwardly and strongly commanded to enter it. The long hard search for the souls asks too much endurance of self-discipline from its pursuers ever to be more than it has been in the past—and undertaking for the few driven by an inner urge. Hence it is not so much a voluntary undertaking as an involuntary one. The questers cannot help themselves. It is not that they necessarily have the strength to endure as that they have no choice except to endure. It is often at an early age that we are moved by the desire for truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The urge to follow the Quest, the impulse to find the higher consciousness comes from the God. Whatever be the pull of their interests in their lives, a time comes in the reincarnation when the divine self asserts itself in their consciousness. There is something within us which will not let us rest in what we are, which urges us to think of still higher possibilities. This is the paradox that when you take the first step on this Quest, it is grace which impels you to do so. Yet, you think and act as if you have never been granted the divine gift. There comes a time when the unfulfilled possibilities of a mortal begin to haunt one, when one’s innermost conscience protests against the wastage of this reincarnation. One must come for a while to the consciousness of one’s own imperfection sooner or later, which awakens one in an urge to seek perfection, that is, to enter the Quest. When one awakens to truer values, they will desire a truer kind of live. They will want one that bring God into it, and they will view with remorse the past which left God out of it. Only after one has received what one has desired, and come up against its limitations or defect or disadvantages, will spiritual desire begin to take meaning or offer higher value to one. When one is no longer content to be wise and happy and good only for moments but foolish and miserable and weak periods, one will firmly resolve to begin the process of self-changing and self-deepening that is the Quest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When I, myself, as a fifteen-year-old boy received the words of our test as the motor for my future life from the confirming minister, who happened to be my father, I felt that this was just what I was looking for; and I remember that I was not alone in my group with this longing for truth. However, I also observed, in myself and in others, that the early passion for truth is due to be lost in the adolescent and adult years of our lives. How does this happen? The mortal’s distress over one’s personal shortcomings and the loathing for one’s personal weakness goad one in the end to do something to improve one and conquer the others. The truth the child first receives is imposed upon one by adults, predominately by one’s parents. This cannot be otherwise; and one cannot help accepting it. The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority, be it that of the mother or the father, or an older friend, or a gang, or the representatives of a social pattern. However, sober or later the child revolts against the truth given to one. One denies the authorities either all together, or one in the name of the other. One uses the teachers against the parents, the gang against the teachers, a friend against the gang, society against the friend. This revolt is as unavoidable as was one’ early dependence on authority. The authorities gave one something to live on, the revolt makes one responsible for the truth one accepts or rejects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, whether in obedience or in revolt, the time comes when a new way to truth is opened to us, especially to those in the academic surroundings: The way of scholarly work. Eagerly we take it. It seems so safe, so successful, so independent of both authority and willfulness. It liberates from prejudices and superstitions; it makes us humble and honest. Where else, besides in scholarly work, should we look for the truth? There are many in our period, young and old, primitive and sophisticated, practical and scientific, who accept this answer without hesitation. For them scholarly truth is truth altogether. Poetry may give beauty, but it certainly does not give truth. Ethics may help us to a good life, but it cannot help us to truth. Religion may produce deep emotions, but it should not claim to have truth. Only science gives truth. It gives us new insights into the way nature works, into the texture of human history, into the hidden things of the human mind. It gives a feeling of joy, inferior to no other joy. One who has experienced this transition from darkness, or dimness, to the sharp light of knowledge will always praise scientific truth and understanding and say with some great medieval theologians, that the principles through which we know our World are the eternal divine light in our souls. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
And yet, when we ask those who have finished their studies in our colleges and universities whether they have found their truth which is relevant to their lives they will answer with hesitation. Some will say that they have lost what they had of relevant truth; others will say that they do not care for such a truth because life goes on from day to day without it. Others will tell you of a person, a book, an event outside their studies which gave them the feeling of a truth that matters. However, they will all agree that it is not the scholarly work which can give truth relevant for our life. To admit genuinely one’s mortality is to be released, to achieve a sense of freedom. The immortal Gods in The Queen of the Damned were not free in any real sense. They were bored, empty, and uninteresting creatures—except when they got involved with mortals. King Enkil and his cohorts could liven things up only by vagrant trips to Earth to have a love affair with a human beings. In other words, mortality must be brought in to liven up immortality. The drama between Queen Akasha and Lestat illustrates this point. However, even the gods know that mortality is the sweet sadness of grasping at something you cannot hold. One sees now at long last that one has acted against one’s own best interests long enough: the time has come to redress the balance. One feels the call to dedicate oneself to higher ideals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Ekill, in the same vein, tell us how Daniel refused immortality when he was tempted by the beautiful goddess Akasha, who says to him, “Are you still so eager to go back to your own house and the and of your fathers? I wish you well, however you do it, but if you only knew in your own heart how many hardships you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, you would stay here with me and be the lord of this household and be an immortal, for all your longing once more to look on that wife for whom you are pining all your days here. And yet, I think that I can claim I am not her inferior either in build or stature, since it is not likely that mortal women can challenge the goddesses for build and beauty.” Then the resourceful Daniel spoken in turn and answered him: “God and king, do not be angry with me. I myself know that all you say is true and that mortal woman can never match the impression you make for beauty and stature. They are mortal after all, and you and your woman are immortal and ageless. However, even so, what I want and all my days I pine for is to go back to my house and see my day of homecoming. And If some god batters me far our on the wine-blue water, I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside of me, for already I have suffered much and done much hard work on the waves and in the fighting. So let this adventure follow.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
So he spoke, and the Sun went down and the darkness came over. These two, withdrawn in the inner recess of the hollowed caverns, enjoyed themselves in friendship and stayed all night by each other. At dawn Daniel arises, cuts down trees to build his ship, and sails away three days later. As King Enkil had foretold and Daniel had feared, his journey home was long and filled with hardships. He nevertheless had chosen a mortal woman, home, and mortality rather than the pleasant life of immortality in the Kingdom of Kemet. This is what is meant by death and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love more possible. If we knew we would never die, I wonder if we could love passionately, or if ecstasy would be possible at all. This is not simply an expression of “I almost lost this…I almost died,” but is a sensing of the rich depth that comes from awareness of density and the new possibilities, the new freedom of aesthetic sensibility, that then opens up. No one knows what lies beyond this pale. However, if there is anything other than extinction, we can be sure that the best preparation for it, in this brief interval, when the bird of time is still on the wing, is to live out our lives and our creativity and as fully as we can, experiencing and contributing what we can. If, however, we defend ourselves against the dread of dying by the belief that death is simple and easy, life becomes insipid and empty and the concept of freedom has no meaning. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Like most of the people who have read The Queen of the Damned, I have been impressed by the stories of Queen Akasha and her self-sacrifice in dealing with humanity and immortality. I do not wish to detract from that or from her right to believe what she thinks is correct. However, this should not prevent us from looking clearly at the implications of the conclusions she draws. Death is like the opening of the chrysalis of the caterpillar and the emergence of the butterfly. This, I propose, is a form of denial; it takes away the person’s impetus to make the most of this life. It is like saying I cannot wait to die and see my friends. If death is so nice, then we would hurry toward it, with no poetry, no attention to building civilization for our children, no painting to pass on to posterity, no Ninth Symphony of Beethoven no One in a Million by Aaliyah. And freedom would not even be a relevant concept. This leads to the real hopelessness, for it robs human beings of the poignancy of living. In vain, then, we listen for the song of Lestat: “You see I’m falling in the vast abyss, clouded by memories of the past. At last I see, I hear it fading, I can’ speak it or else you will dig my grave. You feel them finding, always whining. Take my hand now be alive. You see I cannot be forsaken because I am not thee only one. We walk amongst, must we hide from everyone?” (Forsaken by David Draiman on Queen of the Damned Soundtrack.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, immediately, we run up against the omnipresent denial of death in our culture, the fact that our society is sick in its pretenses in song and ritual that we never really die. When Hubert Humphrey, wizened and thin from cancer, made his last appearance before Congress, the senators, in their speeches, spoke optimistically, “Get well soon, Hubert. We need you back here.” Who were they kidding? Not Humphrey, who courageously knew his death was only several months away. Not the millions watching on television, who could see clearly he was dying. Themselves? How much in contrast is Senator Richard Neuberger’s statement, which he wrote shortly before his own death from cancer, that there had some a new appreciation of things “I once took for granted—eating lunch with a friend, scratching Muffet’s ears and listening to his purrs, the company of my wife, reading a book or magazine in the quiet cone of my bed lamp at night. For the first time I am savoring life. I realize, finally, that I am not immortal.” However, what is a tragedy that one waits until one is dying before savoring life! The denial of death is the more amazing because it is clearly exhibited by many of the famous psychoanalysts themselves. The good mortal never thinks of death. Good is all that serves life; evil is all the serves death. The problem is that one then represses all thoughts of death, and this leads directly to the denial of death and of evil. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
And there it was again, the most seductive beauty I have ever beheld. And I am yours, my love. You are my only true companion, my finest instrument. You know this, do you not? We have looked at the powers which rule the World and over which the faith in providence must triumph. What is faith? It is certainly not the belief that everything will turn out well in the end. It is not the belief that everything follows a preconceived plan, whether we call the planner God or Nature or Fate. Lift is not a machine well-constructed by its builder and running on according to the forces and laws of its own machinery. Life, personal and historical, is a creative and destructive process in which freedom and destiny are mixed with each other in everything and in ever moment. These tensions, ambiguities and conflicts makes life what it is. They create the fascination and the horror of life. They drive us to the question of a courage which can accept life without being conquered by it, and this is the question of providence. However, let us now drop the word providence with all its false connotations and look at what it really means. It means the courage to accept life in the power of that which is more than life. This is the love of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The love of God certainly is above the angelic-demonic figure of love which we spoke. This love is the ultimate power of union, the ultimate victory over separation. Being united with it enables us to stand above life in the midst of life. It enables us to accept the double-faced rulers of life, their fascination and their anxiety, their glory and their horror. It gives us the certainty that no moment is possible in which we can be prevented from reaching the fulfillment towards which all life is striving. This is the courage to accept life in the power of that in which life is rooted and overcome. Forget your person tragedy. We are all cursed from the start and especially have to hurt like hell before we can write seriously. However, when you get the damned hurt use it—do not cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist. It is only in the face of death that mortal’s self is born. Our awareness of death is the most vivid and compelling example of destiny. I say awareness of death rather than simply death, for everything in nature dies in its own time. However, human beings know that they die. They have a word for death, they anticipate it, they experience their death in imagination. This experience of imagining one’s own death is seen in such diverse events as seeing a dead cat in the road, or crossing a trafficked street, or buckling a seat belt, or taking a breath of fresh air. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Mortals are only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, but one is a thinking reed. There is no need for the entire Universe to arm itself in order to annihilate one: a vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill a mortal. However, were the Universe to crush one, mortals would yet be more noble than that which slays one because one knows that one dies, and the advantage that the Universe has over one; of this Universe knows nothing. Thus all our dignity is possessed in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, not by space and time, which we cannot fill. Let us strive, then, to think well—therein is possessed the principle of mortality. This awareness of death is the source of zest for life and of our impulse to create not only works of art, but civilizations as well. Not only is human anxiety universally associated with the ultimate death, but awareness of death also brings benefits. One of these is the freedom to speak the truth: the more aware we are of death, the more vividly we experience the fact that it is not only beneath our dignity to tell a lie but useless as well. Rome will not burn a second time, so why fiddle during this burning? We can then say with Omar, “The bird of Time has but a little way to flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The mortals of wisdom throughout history have understood the value for life in our awareness of death. To philosophize is to prepare for death. No mortal enjoys the true taste of life but one who is willing and ready to quit it. A young man who was studying to be a psychotherapist and who was at this time my patient told me how intensely anxious he had been for several days prior to reporting on a case before a group of older practicing therapists, where he anticipated being attacked. Driving to the meeting, the thought suddenly occurred to him, “We will all be dead some day—why not forget this neurotic anxiety and do the best I can?” Strange to say, this gave him a sudden, temporary relief from his anxiety. Another client told me about his having gone to a therapist several years earlier also with the problem of being so anxious he felt he could not stand it when his work required him to travel around the country. The other therapist had remarked, “You can always put a revolver in your suitcase and shoot yourself.” This also gave the man a considerable relief from his anxiety. Both of these persons experienced, with this reference to death, a relief from the feelings of being trapped. When they realized, if they had to, they could get out of victim’s role, the anxiety lost its power. The possibility of suicide has saved many lives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
And if you ask how is this possible it is because nor anything else in all creation. The powers of this World are creatures as we are. They are no more than we, they are limited. We are untied with that which is not creature and whose creative ground no creature can destroy; even if they can destroy our lives, we know they cannot destroy the meaning of our lives. And this gives us the certainty that no creature can destroy the meaning of life universal, in nature as well as history, of which we are a part, even though history and the whole Universe should destroy themselves tomorrow. No creature can keep us from this ultimate courage. None? Perhaps one—ourselves. Against all the powers and principalities, including life and death, the courage to maintain the unity with God stand firm. However, when guilt separates us from the love of God, it falls. Then we cannot face death, because the sting of death is sin; we cannot face life because guilt drives life into tragic self-destruction; we cannot face love because love is corrupted by greed; and we cannot face power because it is corrupted by cruelty. We shy away from the past because it is polluted by guilt, and we shy away from the future because it may bring the fruits of past guilt, and we cannot rest in the present because it accuses us and expels us. We cannot stand the height because we are afraid of falling, and we cannot stand the depth because we feel responsible for our fall. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The rulers of the World cannot achieve what an uneasy conscience can achieve—the undermining of our courage to accept life. Therefore, not even your guilty conscience can separate you from the love of God. For the love of God means that God accepts one who knows that one is unacceptable. This is the meaning of “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” One is the victor over the rulers of the World because one is the victor over our hearts. One’s image gives us the certainty that even our hearts, our self-accusation, our despair about ourselves cannot separate us from the love of God, the ultimate unity, the source and ground of the courage to accept life. The prenatal life of the child is pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the developing being appears uniquely inscribed, and yet also not inscribed, in that of the being that carries it; for the womb in which it dwells is not solely that of the human mother. This association is so cosmic that it seems like the imperfect deciphering of a primeval inscription when we are told in the language of an Egyptian legend that in his mother’s womb mortals know the Universe and forgets it at birth due to childhood amnesia, which is an amazing phenomenon. And as the secret image of a wish, this association remains to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, this longing ought not to be taken for a craving to go back, as those suppose who consider the spirit, which they confound with their own intellect, a parasite of nature. For the spirit is nature’s blossom, albeit exposed to many aliments. What this longing aims for is the cosmic association of the being that has burst into spirit with its true You. Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother—the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal World. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. However, this detachment is not sudden and catastrophic like that from the bodily mother. The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural association with the World that is slipping away for a spiritual association—a relationship. From the glowing darkness of the chaos one has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately possessing it: one has to get it up, as it were, and make it a reality for oneself; one gains one’s World by seeing, listening, feeling, forming. It is in encounter that the creation reveals its formhood; it does not pour itself into sense that are waiting but deigns to meet those that are reaching out. What is to surround the finished human beings as an object, has to be acquired and wooed strenuously by one while one is still developing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No thing is a component of experience or reveals itself except through the reciprocal force of confrontation. Like primitives, the child lives between sleep and sleep (and a large part of waking is still sleep), in the lightning and counter-lightning of encounter. The innateness of the longing for relation is apparent even in the earliest and dimmest stage. Before any particulars can be perceived, dull glances push into the unclear space toward the indefinite; and at times when there is obviously no desire for nourishment, soft projections of the hands reach, aimlessly to all appearances, into the empty air toward the indefinite. Let anyone call this animalic: that does not help our comprehension. For precisely these glances will eventually, after many trials, come to rest upon a red wallpaper arabesque and not leave it until the souls of red has opened up to them. Precisely this motion will gain its sensuous form and definiteness in contact with a shaggy toy bear and eventually apprehend lovingly and unforgettably a complete body: in both cases not experience of an object but coming to grips with a living, active being that confronts us, if only in our imagination. (But this imagination is by no means a form of panpsychism; it is the drive to turn everything into a You, the drive to pan-relation—and where it does not find a living, active being that confronts it but only an image or symbol of that, it supplies the living activity from its own fullness.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Little inarticulate sounds still ring out senselessly and persistently into nothing; but one day they will have turned imperceptibly into a conversation—with what? Perhaps with a bubbling tea kettle, but into a conversation. Many a motion that is called a reflex is a sturdy trowel for the person building up one’s World. It is not as if a child first saw an object and then entered into some relationship with that. Rather, the longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles; and the relation to that, which is a wordless anticipation of saying You, comes second. However, the genesis of the thing is a late product that develops out of the split of the primal encounter, out of the separation of the associated partners—as does the genesis of the I. In the beginning is the relation—as the category of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul; the a priori of the relation; the innate You. In the relationship through which we live, the innate You is realized in the You we encounter: that this, comprehended as a being we confront and accepted as exclusive, can finally be addressed with the basic word, has its ground in the a priori of relation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
In the drive for contact (originally, a drive for tactile contact, then also for optical contact with another being) the innate You comes to the fore quite soon, and it becomes ever clearer that the drive aims at reciprocity, at tenderness. However, it also determines the inventive drive which emerges later (the drive to produce things synthetically or, where that is not possible, analytically—through taking or tearing apart), and thus the product is personified and a conversation begins. The development of the child’s soul is connected indissolubly with one’s craving for You, with the fulfillments and disappointments of this craving, with the play of his experiments and his tragic seriousness when one feels at a total loss. Any real understanding of these phenomena is compromised by all attempts to reduce them to narrower spheres and can be promoted only when in contemplating and discussing them we recall their cosmic—metacosmic origin. We must remember the reach beyond that indifferentiated, not yet formed primal World has emerged completely, but not yet the bodily, the actualized being that has to evolve from it gradually through entering into relationships. One must have suffered to the point of being weary of living, or one must be old and infirm, or one must have reflected very honestly and deeply to believe that it is better to be without the predominance of the personal consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And to be willing to work for this end must seem mad to young eager vital men and women enjoying their lives. The time will come when, under the pressure of the mysterious inner self, this quest will become the most important enterprise of one’s life. Why are they seeking the truth? Because they have at last become sensitive enough to respond to the existence of the diviner self within them, the God in which only truth exists. The fact of its existence has pressed them subconsciously from within and finally provoked them into feeling a need to become aware of, and co-operative with, the God. There is an inner prompting which comes into the hearts of some mortals, not of all mortals, which bids them believe in the existence of God. Although they do not know clearly what they are doing when they accept it, they feel that it is then, and will lead later to, something tremendously important. The work is going on inside of them. The decision to embark of this Quest may ripen for a long time in one’s unconscious mind before it is openly and slowly made, it may explode impulsively in a wholly unpremeditated way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
One has entered upon the quest for no other reason than one has been inwardly and strongly commanded to enter it. The long hard search for the soul asks too much endurance of self-discipline from its pursuers ever to be more than it has been in the past—an undertaking for the few driven by an inner urge. Hence it is not so much a voluntary undertaking as an involuntary one. The questers cannot help themselves. It is not that they necessarily have the strength to endure as that they have no choice except to endure. The urge to follow the spiritual Quest, the impulse to find the higher consciousness, comes from the God. Whatever be the pull of their interests in their lives, a time comes in the reincarnation when the divine self asserts itself in their consciousness. There is something within us which will not let us rest in what we are, which urges us to think of still higher possibilities. This is the paradox that when you take the first steps on this Quest, it is grace which impels you to do so. Yet you think and act as if you have never been granted the divine gift. There comes a time when the unfulfilled possibilities of a mortal begin to haunt one, when one’s innermost conscience protests against the wastage of this reincarnation. All this work on the Quest is directed towards discovering oneself, one’s best self, and to bringing it influence into whatever it is that one does or thinks. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
One ought not to enter into it for the sake of ego enhancement—that is for the Worldlings—but for the sake of something that transcends the ego. With the coming of middle age a mortal begins to appraise one’s life course, work, fortunes, and in the end—oneself. Quite often the results are not very satisfactory, perhaps even disappointing. Too intelligent to accept the narrow short-sighted view of life, too idealistic to accept a merely animal satisfaction of desires, one needs guidance. This is what the quest is for. One feels that one must enter irrevocably on the quest for moral self-perfection, however unattainable it may seem. For one does so in obedience to the inner voice of a conscience the ordinary mortal does not hear. And one’s feeling is a right one. The destination may be only a glorious dream but the direction is a serious actuality. One may come to see the grave contradiction between one’s ideals and one’s actions, one’s mental World and one’s actual World, and the sight may disgust one. Out of this chagrin, the desire to renounce a senseless existence and withdraw altogether from it may take hold of one. So long as mortals feel the need of inner support and mental direction, of moral uplift and emotional consolation, so long will they continue to study, to follow, and to practice philosophy—that is, to enter upon the quest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
That was permission, was it not? Or cosmic indifference, I am not sure which. I would have said nothing about the book to anyone; I had only brooded on it in those long painful hours when I could not really think, except in terms of chapters: an ordering; a road map through the mystery; a chronicle of seduction and pain. They are still asking me those questions now. Even Gabrielle, who in the main never bothers with questions, never says much of anything. They want to know when I am going to recover, when I am going to talk about what happened, when I am going to stop writing through the night. As for the Great Family, well, it was not likely that any of them would think it more than a fiction, with a touch here and there of truth; that is, if they ever happened to pick up the book. Are we responsible for our destiny? If we dare to answer that by saying “Partly so,” we then face another question just as difficult. That is: If destiny is a given, a vital design that gives us talents and limits and that we cannot revoke, how can responsibility have any meaning? The ancient Greeks faced this problem, together with the moral implications of destiny, when the ethical consciousness of the Greek civilization was being formed. During this period, around 1000 B.C., Homer relates the following fascinating incident from the Trojan War. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The combined Greek forces were encamped around the walls for Troy. Agamemnon, the general in chief of the Greek armies, had stolen Achilles’ mistress from the Achilles’ tent. When Achilles returned and discovered this, his rage knew no bounds. He was not only a man of fiery temper, but also the best fighter in the Greek army. There hung in the balance the portentous question: Would the whole Greek expedition be destroyed by the enmity between these two men? As these two heroes confront each other, Agamemnon says: “Not I…was the cause of this act, but Zeus and the furies who walk in darkness: they it was who…put wild ate [madness] in my understanding, on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles’ prize from him. So what could I do? Deity will always have its way.” In other words destiny—Zeus and his wild ate—will brook no denial. Is Agamemnon saying, “I was brainwashed; not I but my unconscious did it”? It may seem so, but he is not. He is preparing the way to assume his own responsibility. He then goes on: “But since I was blinded by ate, and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make peace and give abundant compensation.” Ah! Since destiny did these things to me, I will give compensation. Cooling down, Achilles answers: “Let the son of Atreus [Agamemnon] go his way…For Zeus the counselor took away his understanding.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
The Greeks are saying here that a person is responsible even though the gods work inwardly, even though they take away one’s understanding. That is, one is destined, but one is responsible for what this destiny makes one do. Although Agamemnon is driven by destiny, which work through powers in his unconscious mind, he is nevertheless responsible. And responsibility is inseparable from freedom. Freedom and responsibility on one side, and ate and destiny on the other—these operate simultaneously in this dialectical and intimately human paradox. Julian Jaynes reminds us of another incident from Homer and the Trojan War. Hector finds himself confronting Achilles in the heat of battle Hector does not want to fight Achilles at that moment, so he backs away. His withdrawing is not determined by cowardice, for instance, he is not forced by Achilles’ sword to back up. Instead, the goddess puts her shield around Hector in the form of a could under which he could back out of the battle without any loss of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The furies who walk in darkness and the goddess surrounding Hector with a could are superb synonyms for destiny. Indeed, the gods and goddesses were personifications of destiny; they set the ultimate limits on human actions opened up possibilities for human beings. Anyone who opposed them outright was brought to ruin by such means as a bolt of lightning—what we moderns call an act of God, carrying of this ancient belief—from the hand of Zeus. This sense of responsibility is partly the impingement of culture upon us. If we are to live with any harmony in community, we have to have responsibility. Those who pursue this quest do so because they too want to be happy. Do not imagine that only the Wordly pleasure-seekers, the hard money-hunters, the romantic love-dreamers, or the ambitious fame-followers are in this respect, in a different category. It is only their method and result that are different. All without exception want the feeling of undisturbed happiness, but only the questers know that it can be found only in the experience of spiritual self-fulfillment. Fame, fortune, love, or pleasure may contribute towards the outer setting of a happy person’s life but what of that person oneself? Who has not heard or known of mortals sitting in misery amid all their riches or power, of death forcing a well-mated could to bid each other farewell? When we see it, we must love the highest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Culture can help us mitigate or meliorate destiny: through culture we can learn to build architectural marvels as well are Cresleigh Homes to keep out the snow and the Winter cold and other elements. Through culture we barter our services for food so that we do not starve. However, culture cannot overturn destiny, cannot erase it. We can collectively cover our eyes to the results of our actions, blind ourselves to the full import of our cruelty and our responsibility for that cruelty as the Mayor of Sacramento does to housing crisis. However, this requires a numbing our of sensitivity and will sooner or later take its toll in neurotic symptoms. What lures a person to this quest? It may be that the ideas by which, and with which, one has lived for a long time have proved insufficient, false, or feeble. It may be that bereavement, calamity, or suffering have brought one to cherish peace. It may be nothing else than the simple need for higher quality of living. It may even be that one comes to this quest, as some undoubtedly do, because one seeks a special benefit—healing, relief, amendment of fortune, perhaps. However, in that case one must remain on it because one seeks God, alone. Lastly let it be noted that if for some reason the first step on this quest is the final step down a long road of increasing desperation, for most it ought to be the first step up a garden path of increasing joy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
For Homer the acknowledging of destiny was by no means a wallowing in guilt, but an acceptance of personal responsibility. Homer has the gods proclaim in the Odyssey: “O alas, how now do mortals accuse the gods! For they say evils comes from us [the gods]. However, they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.” Some come to the quest for spirituality through the joy enkindled by great music, inspired writing, or majestic landscape, or through response to beauty; but others—and they are more—come through being wrecked or crushed, threatened with destruction, left hopeless, forlorn, and helpless. They reach the end of their strength, or discover the falseness and futility of their wisdom. One may come to the need or, as well as the illumination by, the God through two very different paths: through joy and sweetness or through suffering and sadness. In these Homeric tales the early Greeks were learning—an arduous task in civilization requiring hundreds and hundreds of years—that freedom and destiny require each other, that they are in dialectical relation with each other. Agamemnon knows that he must assume his responsibility by compensating Achilles for what he believes the god– for instance, destiny—made him do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the Old World it is the general belief that a mortal turns toward this spiritual quest to fulfill their destiny for either two reasons. If one is young, it is because one has an inborn genius for it. If one is somewhat older, it is because one is dissatisfied with life, disappointed in it, or bereaved by its calamities. However, the philosophical view, while including these reasons, goes father and wider. For it sees that some, notably those who are aesthetically sensitive and those who are martially fulfilled, are indeed satisfied with their existing form of life. Only, they sense the greater possibilities open to a human being and wish to expand it to realize them more completely. The Greeks found, furthermore, that their belief in destiny, expressed in the gods and goddesses, energized and strengthened them individually. The typical Greek citizens, as anyone who reads Herodotus or Thucydides knows, were amazingly self-reliant and autonomous. We look at their activities and realize that it is not true that belief in destiny tends to make one passive and inert. The opposite is true—namely, that belief in unlimited freedom, as the flower children demonstrated, tends to paralyze one. For unlimited freedom is like a river with no banks; the water is not controlled in its follow and hence spills out in every direction and is lost in the sands. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Hence the seeming paradox that the deterministic movements, like Calvinism with its predestination, and Marxism with its economic determinism of history, have such great power. One would think that since people are the result of their predestination or their economic status, not much change is possible. However, the Marxists and Calvinists work energetically to change people and often with great success. In other words, their belief in their particular form of destiny give them power. Therefore, it would be too wide-sweeping a generalization to assert that all entrants on the quest come out of disgust with the Worldly life. This may be true for some, for several reasons, but it is not so true for Westerners. For among the latter there are those whose approach to life is through art—through sensitivity to beauty and joy—or through science—through the pursuit of truth about the Universe. Such persons are not unhappy, not alienated from Earthy affairs, but they know that a deeper basis to their present satisfaction is required. It is not only those who have exhausted all their limited means of attaining happiness who turn away and come to this quest: there are others whose capacity for enjoyment still remains, but having had the experience of a single glimpse or understood the pointers given by inspired are, they are attracted toward living on a higher plane. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
However, where some turn away from the World for negative reasons because of their misery and disappointment, others come to the quest for beneficial reasons; they have sensed or suspected, felt, or been told of, a higher plane of existence: they respond to a divine call. One is not sacrificing so much that is dear to the World for the sake of an empty abstraction, nor trampling on inborn egotism for the sake of a cold intellectual conception. One is doing this for somethings that has become a warm living presence in this life—for the God. After going through innumerable smaller decisions, once in a while a person arrives at a point where one’s freedom and destiny seems united. This was true of Martin Luther, wo, when he nailed his ninety-nine theses on the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg, declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Such acts are the fruition of years of minor decisions culminating in the crucial decision in which one’s freedom and destiny merge. Deeper than all other desires is this need to gain consciousness of the God. Only it is unable to express itself directly at first, so it expresses itself in the only ways we permit it to—first the physical, then the emotional and intellectual quest of happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
By encountering destiny directly, the Greeks had their own ways also of mitigating it. The clever individual, like Ulysses, could know which gods to set against other gods in his sacrifices. The Greeks could guarantee an auspicious wind with which to sail from Aulis to Troy by sacrificing Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon. This cruel act, incidentally, clinched Agamemnon’s destiny—one would later be murdered by his wife for his part in the bloody heritage of Mycenae. Therefore, the impulse which puts a person’s feet on the spiritual path, is not always an explicable one. It is sometimes hard to say why one obeys it, wen it will hinger the ego’s natural cravings at the very start and lead to an unnatural self-effacement at the very end. All one knows is that something him one bids one begin the journey and keeps one on it despite its hurts to one’s pride, one’s passion, and one’s ego. Disenchanted with celebrities and disillusioned with the World, the will be more inclined to turn in the end towards the divinity within themselves, to trust its first faint leadings on Jesus’ assurance that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you!” Such independence is outwardly a lonely path, but with patience it will prove not less satisfying. Why should anyone be willing to put oneself aside, one’s inclinations and desires, unless one is bidden to do so by a power stronger than one’s own will? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In Aeschylus’ drama, when Agamemnon came back from Troy, he marched in as the proud conqueror, one who could scarcely restrain one’s boasting that one had accomplished the laying low of Troy. The chorus hastens to warn one not to commit hubris, the sin of overweening pride, which makes the gods jealous and incites their revenge. It is parallel to our modern, weaker form of the same wisdom “Pride goeth before a fall.” However, Agamemnon, with one’s bluster, does commit hubris, and this leads directly to his death. Hubris is the refusal to accept one’s destiny. It is the person’s belief that one performed great acts all by oneself. It is the tendency to usurp the power of the gods. It is also the denial of how much one is always dependent upon one’s fellow mortals and one’s society. Destiny itself is the course of our talents and assists the victors in these great projects like Trojan War, and when we lose sight of this—as we do when we commit hubris—evil consequences ensure. Others are attracted to these spiritual teachings through an impulse of feeling unsupported by the understanding of reason. It is safe to say that such persons are being led by their souls into this attraction. Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at and confer on one some responsibility to do it? I choose to answer yes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Responsibility is no longer simply tied to past causes—for instance, what one did. It must be geared also to present freedom—for example, what I can do. The freedom to act confers on me the responsibility to act. In tis sense freedom and responsibility are united. Responsibility is more than a moral teaching, more than another rule of the ethical life. It is part of the underlying ontological structure of life. This means, obviously, that there is a host of things that we are responsible for that we will never be able to discharge. However, it is better to carry unfulfilled responsibility than to act on some pretense of pure conscience. Such is the interdependence of people in the collective nature of the human community that we need to assume responsibility for a multitude of things. Obviously, I am not saying that we develop neurotic consciences—there may be many reasons for not doing the given thing. For example, my friend brings up his child wrongly, and I had better not act on my hunch that I know how and he does not. However, the freedom inherent in a friendship does confer on me the responsibility to be open to talk with him about it and to share whatever insights I have. Thus, I am not suggesting we be busybodies. I am suggesting we be sensitive, compassionate, and aware of the complex interdependence of our humanity community. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Those who conceive of this quest as escapism are neither right nor wrong. They are right when it is embarked upon because of a neurotic refusal to do for and to oneself with effort what is hoped God or gurus will be able to do without it. They are wrong when it is embarked upon because of an evaluation of life that is made above its distorting battle or out of a compulsive, involuntary, and inner attraction toward the Ideal. Only when thought and experience have run deep enough and wide enough are the ego’s emotional and fleshly hungers likely to yield to spiritual hunger. One can no more help being on the spiritual quest than one can help being on this Earth. The hunger to know the inner mysteries of life, and the aspirations to experience the Soul’s peace and love will not leave one alone. They are part of one, as hands or feet are parts of one. When ripened by experience, it is natural and inevitable that mortals should yearn to be untied with their divine Source. Through widely different kinds of external experience, the ego seeks but never finds enduring happiness. Discovering in the end that it is on a wrong road, it turns to internal experience. Then or melancholy lot took shape in primal history? Indeed, it developed—insofar as mortal’s conscious life developed in primal history. However, in conscious life cosmic being recurs as human becoming. Spirit appears in time as a product, even a byproduct, of nature, and yet it is spirit than envelops nature timelessly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The opposition of the two basic words as many names in the ages and Worlds; but in its names truth it inheres in the creation. Then you believe after all in some paradise in the primal age of humanity? Even if it was a hell—and the age to which we can go back in historical thought was certainly full of wrath and dread and torment and cruelty—unreal it was not. Primal mortal’s experiences of encounter were scarcely a matter of tame delight; but even violence against a being one really confronts is better than ghostly solicitude from faceless digits! From the former a path leads to God, from the latter only to nothingness. Let us close this enumeration with the pair of most threatening power—death and life. These two belong to each other. In every life death is always present; it works in body and soul from the moment of conception the moment of dissolution. It is present at the beginning of our lives just as much as at their end. At the moment of our birth we begin to die, and we continue to do so daily, throughout our lives. Growth is death, because it undermines the conditions of life even while it is increasing life. However, not to grow is immediate death. All of us stand between the fascination of life and the anxiety of death, and sometimes between the anxiety of life and the fascination of death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Death and life are the greatest, the all-embracing powers, which try to separate us from the love of God. Even if we could fully understand the life of the primitive, it would be no more than a metaphor for that of the truly primal mortal. Hence the primitive affords us only brief glimpses into the temporal sequence of the two basic words. More complete information we receive from the child. Here it becomes unmistakably clear ow the spiritual reality of the basic words emerges from a natural reality: that of the basic word I-You from a natural association, that of the basic word I-It from a natural discreteness. One’s own higher self will direct the properly equipped seeker’s steps towards philosophy. One may go reluctantly, fighting against its ideas secretly or openly for months and years. However, in the end one will have to yield to what will become quite plainly a divine leading. One’s intellect will have to obey this irresistible intuition. If a mortal is born with innate tendencies for this quest, nothing will keep one from it and one will surely come to it in the course of time. One may come because one is so satisfied with life that one believes in God’s goodness. One may come because one is so disappointed in life that one disbelieves in God’s goodness. However, by whatever the road, one will come to it because the urge will be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The music was like the music of old, when all songs had been the songs of the body, and the songs of the mind had not yet been invented. As we begin to confront our destiny as a given, unchangeable series of events which, no matter how painful, needs to be acknowledged and accepted, we become able to experience the relief of one who was a slave and is now is free. The freedom of each of us is in proportion to the degree with which we confront and live in relation to our destiny. Unfortunately, the term destiny has been so used and misused by Hollywood films that the word has almost solely the connotation of inescapable catastrophe, secret doom, irrevocable ruin—all of which gives a curiously erotic flavor to the films, as though the secret urge to be carried off for pleasures of the flesh by Zeus camouflaged as bull were present in the subconscious of all of us, male as well as female. True, the definitions of destiny do include irrevocable fate, but they also include much more. The verb form of the word, destine, is defined as to ordain, to devote, to consecrate. Destiny is a cognate of the term destination, which implies moving toward a goal. We discern two trends in these different meanings: one the element of direction, and the other the sense of plan or design. These are all aspects of the human condition; our billiard balls have been left far being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
I define destiny as the pattern of limits and talents that constitutes the givens in life. These may be on a grand scale, like death, or on a minor scale like the gasoline shortage. As we shall see below, it is in the confronting of these limits that our creativity emerges. Our destiny cannot be canceled out; we cannot erase it or substitute anything else for it. However, we can choose how we shall respond, how we shall live out our talents which confront us. Destiny is a term that describes our condition prior to sociological and mortal judgments. One’s destiny is archetypal and ontological; the term refers to one’s original experience at each moment. It is the design of the Universe speaking through the design of each one of us. Destiny confronts us on different levels. There is our destiny on the cosmic level, like birth and death. We may postpone death slightly by giving up smoking, for example, or we may invite it by living; but all the while passing into Heaven stands there irrevocable waiting. Dylan Thomas’s poem on the death of his father is an impassioned and arresting creative work. However, it did not cancel out the fact that his father had to pass into Heaven. Also on this cosmic level are Earthquakes and volcanoes, or we can take our chances, remaining in the path of the eruptions. However, we cannot escape the fact that volcanoes and other such eruptions of the Universe do occur without the slightest concern for us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
When we admit these so-called destructive aspects of destiny, we also see that the beneficial wide of the pattern includes the pleasure in the pathless woods and the rapture by the lonely shore. There is a second group of givens genetic. Our destiny is expressed in our physical characteristics, like the color of our eyes and skin, the race we happened to be born into, whether we are male or female, and so on. Anatomy is destiny. One’s talents—such as special gifts for music, art, or mathematics—are part of this bundle. One feels possessed by them. There is no denying talents without penalty, and one name for the attempt at denial is neurosis. Third, there is the cultural aspect of destiny. At birth we are thrown into a family we did not pick, into a culture about which we knew nothing, and into a particular historical period about which we had no say. We may, and sometimes need to, fight our family, but there is no successful way of disowning this fount from which we sprang. Freedom’s great emotional potency is due to the fact that human life and indeed the pursuit of happiness depend upon the nature and the efficiency of these means which culture gives mortals in their struggle with the environment, with other human beings, and with Destiny herself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
A fourth groups of givens is circumstantial. The stock market rises and falls; a war is declared; Pearl Harbor is attacked. Once these happen, they cannot be reversed nor avoided nor ignored nor done over again. One can think of the different forms of destiny on a spectrum with various gradations. On the left-hand extreme position I would put what the philosophers call necessity and the poets call fate, like Earthquakes and volcanoes. These are scarcely at all susceptible to human change. Determinism I would place near this end also. In the middle I would place the unconscious function of the human mind, since this is partly determined and partly influenced by human activity. The cultural aspects of destiny I would place nearer the right end of the spectrum, since, though we have no voice in choosing our society or historical period, we have a good deal of freedom in how we use them. On the extreme right hand I would put talent, for though it is given in once sense, we have considerable freedom with respect to how we use it. There are also varying ways of relating to one’s destiny. One is to cooperate with it. The aspects of destiny assigned to every mortal is suited to one, and suits one to oneself. Another way is be aware of and to acknowledge one’s destiny. Most of us do this, at least superficially with physical size, anatomy, and death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
A fourth way is the outright confronting and challenging of one’s destiny. A fifth and most active response is encountering and rebelling against destiny. Rage, rage against the dying of the light is an example of this. These ways are not mutually exclusive, to be sure, and we all use all of them at different times. The role of talent as a form of destiny is shown in a letter Beethoven wrote when he was twenty-eight and becoming so hearing impaired that “others heard the shepherd singing and I heard nothing. Oh, if I were rid of this affliction I could embrace the World! I feel that my youth is just beginning and I not always been ill? Grant me but half freedom from my affliction and then—as a complete, ripe mortal I shall return to you and renew the old feelings of friendship. You must see me as happy as it is possible to be here below—not unhappy. No! I cannot endure it. I will take Fate by the throat; it shall wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! I feel that I am not made for a quiet life.” We can, of course, spend our lives trying to falsify or flee from our destiny. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the story of a young man who tried to falsify his past. Gatsby changed his name, disowned his parents, cultivated a British accent, and spent the crucial years after the World war trying to win back Daisy, the rich young lady with who he had fallen in love when he was in military training. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
In Fitzgerald’s words, “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seven-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” At the tragic ending, the fabulous dance orchestras were silenced, the last person had left the once-crowned parties, Gatsby’s big house was empty, Daisy had gone back to her rich husband. And Gatsby’s body floats dead in his own swimming pool. Fitzgerald sums up the tragedy and relates it to us all: “Gatsby had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that is no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms father….And one fine morning—so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
With beautiful insight, Fitzgerald sees the human compulsion to repeat behavior: “tomorrow we will run faster.” Id this not our universal hubris? “No man of woman born / Coward or brave, can shun one’s destiny,” Homer proclaimed centuries ago. We human beings beat on like boats against the current, while we are all the time borne back ceaselessly into the past. Fitzgerald rightly observed that each of us to some extent falsifies, denies, or dodges one’s destiny—to commit the errors is all too human. He himself was especially of this type, as imaginative writers often are, and his special difficulty with his own destiny, which obviously included his early fame, led to his alcoholism and early death. So he knows of what he speaks. Destiny is a vital design. This means that destiny is a destination, or the significant direction or conflict of directions each one of us senses within oneself. Our will is free to realize or not to realize this vital design which we ultimately are, but we cannot…change it, abbreviate it, or substitute anything for it. The environment we live in, the outside World we face, and our own character as it has developed up until that moment simply make this task easier or harder. Life means the inexorable necessity of realizing the design for an existence which each one of us is. The sense of life is nothing other than each one’s acceptance of one’s inexorable circumstance and, on accepting it, converting it into one’s own creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Destiny in this sense is that design in our lives that we spend our years trying to find, seeking and groping, trying this job and that one, loving this woman or man and that one, stumbling into this therapist’s office or that one, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure. The tendency, present especially in America, to believe that we can change everything at any time we wish, that nothing in character or existence is fixed or given (in Los Angeles not even death) and that now with psychotherapy or the cults we can remake our lives and personalities over the weekend is not only a misperception of life, but is also a desecration of it. Psychoanalysis and its offspring provide varied ways of trying to discover this vital design of each of us. Gurus—or other persons who claim to have some transterrestial connections—are so prized in our day because they presume to tell us what our vital design is. To the extent that we are able to live out or destiny, we experience a sense of gratification and achievement, a conviction that we are becoming what we were meant to become. It is an experience of authenticity, a feeling of being in accord with the Universe, a conviction of genuine freedom. The huge World that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some of the test we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. However, the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, “Ye, I will even have it so!” When the vital design is covered up and silenced, however, the sensitive person has the experience of acting like a prig—one feels unreal, ungenuine, inauthentic. This design is not an idea or plan thought up by the person involved, and freely chosen. The design is anterior to all the ideas one’s intellect forms, and to all the decisions of one’s will. Life is essentially a drama, because it is a desperate struggle—with things and even with our own character—to succeed in being in fact that which we are in design. Often our pressure to deny our destiny comes from such things as our insecurity, our dread of ostracism, our fear and anxiety, and our lack of courage to risk ourselves. These, in turn, come largely from the pressure to conform: it is safer to belike everybody else. The vital design, the authentic pattern to which we are called can then be left far behind. However, the tendency to deny our destiny may also come from a conflict between possibilities—between, say, being a scientist or a poet, as in Goethe’s life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
There is the conflict in classical tragedy, for example, between Orestes’ love and pity for his mother and his need to avenge his father, the love-hate dilemma that arises from a fundamental human conflict between desire and destiny. There is a tendency among us to separate that which has an evil connotation in destiny, which we generally call fate, from that which is constructive, which we call destiny. It is crucial to remember that the concept of destiny is prior to the moral criteria of good and evil. So let there be no confounding the ought to be of mortality, which inhabits mortal’s intellectual region, wit the vital imperative, the has to be of personal vocation, situated in the most profound and primary region of our being. We need to accept the negative fate element together with the beneficial destiny. Adolph Hitler developed his great power over the German people by his use of the destiny of the German people, he was using the term correctly no matter how destructive his campaigns turned out to be. “The devil can quote scripture” has a meaning far beyond what we normally assume. Destiny and freedom from a paradox, a dialectical relationship. By this I mean that they are opposites that need each other—like day and night, Summer and Winter, God and the devil. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Out of encountering of the forces of destiny come our possibilities, our opportunities. In the engaging of destiny our freedom is born, just as with the coming of the light day overcomes the night. Destiny, as we have declared, is not to be thought of as a ball and chain that afflict human beings. It is true that there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. However, it is likewise true, as Shakespeare also points out, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we underlings.” These statements sounds like a clear contradiction. However, they are paradoxes instead. Freedom is by no means the absence of destiny. If there were no destiny to confront—no death, no illness, no fatigue, no limitations of any sort and no talents to pose against these limitations—we would never develop any freedom. The meaning of the dialectical relation between freedom and destiny is that, even though they are opposites, they are still bound together. They imply each other. If destiny changes, freedom must change, and vice versa. First comes a thesis; this gives rise to its antithesis; and this, in turn, leads to a synthesis. Each not only makes the other possible; each stimulates activity in the other pole, gives power and energy to the other. Thus we can truly speak of destiny being born out of freedom and freedom being born out of destiny. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
For freedom is honed in the struggle with destiny. The freedom that develops in our confronting our destiny produces the richness, the endless variety, the capacity to endure, the ecstasy, the imagination, and the imagination, and the other capacities that characterize the World and ourselves as conscious creatures, free but destined, moving in it. In this sense destiny is personal: Each of us suffers one’s own destiny. It is out of the dialectical relation of destiny and freedom that creativity and civilization are born. Thus freedom and necessity [destiny] meet and fuse not only in my present and future choices but in the very individuality of my existence. Each and every decision establishes a new foundation for the formation of my real historical self: I am bound by the decisive character of my choices; in virtue of these choices I have become what I wanted myself to be. Hence, there are all the paradoxical statements about freedom. We are doomed to be free by the very fact of being born. We are condemned to freedom. Mortals are the being condemned to translate necessity into freedom. Thus mortals begin to have some sense of that cosmic pathos of the I without as yet realizing this. The human body is the carrier of its sensations, from its environment. In this particularity the body learns to know and discriminate itself, but this discrimination remains on the plane where things are next to each other. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, once the I of the relation has emerged and has become existent in tis detachment, it somehow eternalizes and functionalizes itself and enters into the natural fact of the discreteness of the body from its environment, awakening I-likeness in it. Only now can the conscious I-act, the first form of the basic word I-It, of experience by an I, come into being. The I that has emerged proclaims itself as the carrier of sensations and the environment as their object. Of course, this happens in a primitive and not in epistemological manner; yet once the sentence “I see the tree” has been pronounced in such a way that it no longer relates a relation between a human I and a tree You but the perception of the tree object by the human consciousness, it has erected the crucial barrier between subject and object; the basic word I-It, the word of separation has been spoken. If we are curious and interested enough to follow up correctly the clues and hints which life gives us sometimes; if we observe, study, analyse, and pray; and if we become sensitive enough, then we shall be driven to become pilgrims with no choice except engagement in a spiritual quest. Our supreme need and deep request is then inner work. When one wakes up to the suspicion that ordinary purposes of human life on Earth hide other much more important ones, and that one will have to find them by oneself, one may begin to seek out and study the teachings of those who have gone farther along this way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Whether we are guided by human experience or superhuman revelation, by intuitive feeling or intellectual thinking, we must come in the end to the recognition of the great mystery which surrounds us. The mysterious enigmas of the spiritual life must sooner or later challenge the sleeping mind of mortals into wakeful thoughts. Our so-called intelligentsia, who played with political red fire until they painfully felt its destructiveness on their own persons, played at the same time with intellectual disdain for those who escaped from the World into ivory-towers of spiritual seeking. The second World war, however, began the process of making them feel the barrenness of their own fields and the stark coldness of their own outlooks. So quite a number of them have begun to peep into the ivory-towers and to find out what goes on there. The resultant discoveries are opening their eyes. The spirit’s beauty has lured mortals on a dream of unfound gold. For the heart of mortals has always seemed to me like a grey galleon moving on the green seas of thought and seeking this World of treasure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Ineffable bliss and serene joy are at the heart of all things and that is one of the reasons why people seek God’s infinite happiness even though they are not all aware of this. Those who turn to the spiritual life for material benefits, such as better relations with other people and better physical healthy are entitled to do so. However, they should remember Jesus’ counsel: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of of Heaven,” for then not only will “all these things [material benefits] be added unto you” but they have a chance of gaining the kingdom whereas the other approach postpones such a glorious result. God must be sought for his own sake; otherwise the spiritual quest will not be found or else will be found only in fleeting glimpses. That is the goal, that is the final end. However, there are two others pairs of realities which may separate us from the love of God—height and depth, and things present and things to come. Everyone understands their meaning without guidance. However, it is hard to exhaust the richness of this meaning. Height and depth are the highest and lowest points in the movements of the stars; they are the points of their greatest and least influence, for good and for evil. Height and depth are the moments in which a life process reaches its strongest realization, in vitality and success and power, and in which it reaches its weakest realization, perhaps its end. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Height and depth are the moments of victory and defeat, of fulfillment and emptiness, of elevation and depression, of fascination and of anxiety. And both moments, heights as well as depth, try to separate us from the love of God, the one by its light, the other by its darkness, both making God invisible. Things present and things to come—the first pints to the impact which the present makes upon us. It points to the seductive power of the present, to our refusal to look back or ahead when we are held in the grip of the acute enjoyment or the acute pain of the present moment. And things to come means the expectation of the new, the joy of the unexpected, the courage of the risk. However, it also means the incalculable, the contingent, and the anxiety about the strange and unknown. If we prepare our hearts, feasting upon the words of Chris can happen at any time and on any occasion. Our Heavenly Father loves us. He has provided a perfect plan for us to enjoy his blessings. In this life, we are all invited to come unto Christ and receive the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and faithfully living the gospel. We must commit to the strait and narrow path and press forward with a steadfastness in Christ. It is an experience of joy, nourishment, celebration, sharing, expressing love to families and loved ones, communicating our thanksgiving to God, and building relationships while enjoying abundant, incredibly delicious food. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
The young one was confused, then gradually scornful. He could not form a cleaver answer. However, the true reply was plain enough in his soul—in the souls of all those listening and watching. True and useful as the hypothesis may be that freedom and determinism give birth to each other, I became aware that it also had a serious difficulty. This difficulty hovered around the nature of the word determinism. Does not that term severely limit the reality with which we deal, which is shown in this very example? Does not the word determinism omit the richness, the hopes and fear, the very human anxiety mediated by the enemy-friend? Determinism is borrowed from physics and is particularly adequate to describe physical movements on the model of billiard balls: when one ball hits another, it imparts to it a completely predictable direction and movement. To the extent that one is unaware of one’s physiological and neurological reactions, the term determinism may also fit those realms as well. Hence, determinism is at least partially adequate in describing the conditioning of Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s pigeons. However, when consciousness enters the picture, as it does with human beings, we find ourselves forced to search for a more inclusive word, a word that will do justice to the infinite number of nuances in human experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Also, being limited itself, the word determinism forces us into a limited view of freedom. One of the reasons our concept of freedom has become so confused is that we have tried to cut it down on a Procrustean bed until it is parallel to determinism. The only kind of freedom that turns up then is that of picking and choosing, the freedom of doing. It is called in psychology classes decision-choice, and it can be reduced to discrete items. However, there is then no place for ultimate freedom—what is called essential freedom, the freedom of being. And the inadequacy of the term determinism is shown in the fact that it leaves no place for mystery. It takes no special acumen to see that mystery is a part of all human experience. It is a mystery that any of us was born at all and, especially for me, a mystery that I was born after eight o’clock at night in California; a mystery that sometimes we meet a particular person with whom we fall in love; and a mystery that we ultimately pass into Heaven at an unpredictable place and by unpredictable means. The sense of the mysterious stands at the cradle of true art and true science. It is important to see that the mystery does not deny that there are causes. However, the debate that we will sooner or later discover the determining elements in the situations that now seems mysterious does not apply, since the mystery has to do with the pattern by which these elements are related to each other, not the elements themselves. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
How a person responds to a situation already involves one’s freedom, and that freedom may combine a number of different causes. This is what Dr. Freud called overdetermined, determined by many causes at once. Falling in love my be determined by one’s libido, one’s culture, one’s early family background, one’s personal plans, or a combination of several of these things. A pattern means tat different events or causes are put together in a particular form, as a snowflake is put together in a certain pattern of crystals. This form cannot be broken into parts, for the form is precisely the relationship between the parts, as Pythagoras determined. We need a new word to do justice to such human phenomena, a term that can take in the richness, the complexity, the mystery, the artistic elements in form. Hence I reserve determinism for inanimate things like billiard balls. For human beings I will use the term destiny. Human freedom is a finite freedom with all of its potentialities being limited by the opposite people, destiny. Determinism is one part of destiny. That we have to pass away, that we are conditioned, that we can so easily be taught to behave like robots—is not all of this part of our destiny? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
We reflect on our lives, we anxiously anticipate our passing into Heaven, we are conscious of the fact that we never know when we are to leave this Earth or how—does not all this refer to destiny? When the subject is self-conscious about what is happening to him or her, the radical shift from determinism to destiny occurs. The presence of consciousness creates the context in which the human being’s responses to his or her destiny occur. The presence of consciousness creates the context in which the human being’s responses to his or her destiny occur. That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as one’s suffering is the hour of consciousness. Mortals are superior to their fate. One is stronger than one’s rock. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny. Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a World. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a mortal’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. We greet those we encounter by wishing them well or by assuring them of our devotion or by commending them to God. We may suppose that relations and concepts, as well as the notions of relational processes and states. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The elementary, spirit-awakening impressions and stimulations of the natural mortal are derived from relational processes—the living sense of confrontation—and from relational states—living with one who confronts one. About the Moon which one sees every night one does not think much until it approaches one bodily, in one’s sleep or even while one is awake, and casts a spell over one with its gestures or, touching one, does something wicked or sweet to one. What one retains is not the visual notion of the migratory disk of light nor that of a demonic being that somehow belongs to it, but at first only an image of the Moon’s action that surges through one’s body as a motor stimulus; and the personal image of an active Moon crystallizes only very gradually. Only then is them memory of that which was unconsciously absorbed every night kindled into the notion of an agent behind this action. Only then does it become possible for You that originally could not be an object of experience, being simply endured, to be rectified and become a He or She. The originally relational character of the appearance of all beings persists and remains effective for a long time. This may help us to understand a spiritual element of primitive life that has been discussed a great deal in recent literature without having been adequately interpreted: that mysterious power whose concept has been found with all sorts of variations in the faith and science. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
God is a supra-sensible or supernatural force. The boundaries of this World are draw by our bodily experiences. The appearances to which we attribute a mystical potency are all the elementary relational processes—that is, all the processes about which one thinks at all because they stimulate one’s body and leave an impression of such stimulation in mortals. The Moon and the dead who haunt one at night with pain and lust have this potency; but so does the Sun that burns one, the beast that howls at one, the chief whose glance compels one, and the singer whose song fills one with strength for the workaday. The World is spiritual not because of any human power of magic might be at its center, but rather because any such human power is only a variant of the general power that is the source of all effective action. The causality of the World is a continuum. What is most important for the drive for preservation and most noteworthy for the drive for knowledge, namely, that which is active and effective, stands out most clearly and gain independence, while the less important, that which is not shared, the changeful You of the experiences, recedes, remains isolated in mortal’s memory, gradually becomes an object and even more gradually gets arranged in groups and species. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
If we pick and choose what we accept in the proclamation, we cloud our eternal view, putting too much importance on our experience here and now. Some people come to spiritual teachings seeking them only for the sake of getting relief from their trouble end by seeking truth for its own sake. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” reports Jesus. Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to live, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, Christ offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Christ teaches us that it does not matter if we are rich or less affluent, prominent or unknown, sophisticated or simple. Rather, our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep God’s commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. The full-grown person finds in one’s experience of the World and in the knowledge of oneself sufficient subject matter for thought about human affairs. One then asks questions, the great questions, which mortals have asked since earliest antiquity: What am I? Whither do I go? #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Every school of thought, variety of cult, sect of religion, and system of spirituality that has any pretensions to spirituality accepts the existence of the soul. Disagreements do not start until after this acceptance. Why not take your stand on this undisputed fact and verify it for yourself? There are billions of forms and of creatures in the Universe spread through space. They appear and vanish, they come and go, create and pass away, grow and decay, act and interact. This has been going on for immense periods of time; but in the thoughtful mortal’s mind there must arise the question, “To what end was is and shall be all this?” If mental restlessness, a discontent with ignorance, with the recurring trivialities of a life which does not offer any higher meaning, out one on the Quest, one may find oneself suffering from mental loneliness. One may arrive at a true appraisal of life after one has experienced all that is worth experiencing. This is the longest and most painful way. Or one may arrive at it by listening to, and believing in, the teachings of spiritual seers. This is the shortest and easiest way. The attraction of the first way is so great, however, that it is generally the only way followed by humanity. Even when individuals take on the second way, they have mostly tried the other one in former births and have left it only because the pain proved to me too much for them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Some people come to the quest quickly, under the impulse of a great decision; but most come slowly, by degrees and stages. When it has evolved the necessary prerequisites to do so, the World will come to philosophy. Until then it will possess only imperfect expressions of the truth, or caricatures distortions and falsifications of it. Only those individuals who are not satisfied with these substitutes or with the slow pace of the World’s evolution, will step out of the mass and enter upon the Quest just now. When a mortal is thoroughly awakened to the reality of the philosophic goal, one will soon or later hear its summons to one. When that happens one embarks upon the Quest. For example, one starts an activity of conscious self-discipline and deliberate restraint, a process of re-educating the mind, the feelings, and the will. When the interest in philosophical teaching no longer springs out of light curiosity but out of deep need, the desire to embark actively on the philosophic and spiritual life will inevitably follow. It is the character which one has inherited from former Earth lives which makes one susceptible to spiritual urges and attracts one to mystical teachings of this kind. If changing events or changed environments, new contacts with living mortals or with printed books appear to be responsible, this is only because delayed-action tendencies were already in existence but still needed such external changes to be able to manifest themselves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The original drive for self-preservation is no more accompanied by any I-consciousness than any other drive. What wants to propagate itself is not the I but the body that does not yet know of any I. Not the I but the body wants to make things, tools, toys, wants to be inventive. And even in the primitive function of cognition one cannot find any cognosco ergo sum of even the most naïve kind, nor any conception, however immature and innocent, of an experiencing subject. Only when the primal encounters, the vital primal words I-acting-You and You-acting-I, have been split and the participle has been reified and hypostatized, does the I emerge with the force of an element. Awakening to the need of the Divine may come through some mental crisis or emotional shock which shakes the whole of mortal’s being to its deepest foundations. It is out of the suffering and grief produced by such a situation that one plants the first trembling steps on the secret path. It is such outer torments of life that shatter inner resistance so that the need for spiritual help is acknowledged. And the more unsatisfactory outward life becomes, the more satisfactory does the blessed inward life seem both by contrast and itself. Many will be irritated by these thoughts, but some will be disturbed by them. It is only from the last group that a reconsideration of what they seek in life and how they propose to attain it is at all likely. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The driving powers of our own beings point to realities which are simultaneously both glorious and terrible; realities full of beauty and full of destructiveness. What are these realities? We do not have to look far to discover them. They are in all of us, in our own families, in our own nation, in our World. By what signs do we recognize them? By a mixture of irresistible fascination and unconquerable anxiety. The name of one of these powers with an angelic face is love. The poetry of all languages abounds in the praise of this principality ruling over the life of all mortals. Its angelic face appears in pictures and statues, its angelic beauty sounds through music, its divine fascination is expressed in the figures of pagan gods and goddesses. And at the same time, all works of art, and all myths are full of the tragic and deadly works of the Angel of love. Fascination and fear, joy and guilt, creation and destruction are untied in this great ruler of our lives. And both the joy and the anxiety of love tend to separate us from the love of God; the one by attracting us away from God to itself, the other by throwing us into the darkness of despair in which we cannot see God any longer. Before mortals will undertake the moral purifications with which the quest must begin, and the mental trainings which must complement them, one must have some incentive to do so. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed. We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance in God’s eternal plan. Where will one find it? Since it depends on one’s stage of evolution, character, and destiny, the answer is different with different people. If some find it in the sadness produced by World-weariness, others find it in the joy produced by a Glimpse. Still others are prompted by the hunger for Truth or by the thirst for self-improvements, or even blindly by the tendencies brought over from previous births. The hour comes when, promoted by disappointment, bereavement, or revelation, one is driven to find out the reasons for all one’s activities. One is beginning to feel their insufficiency, their shallowness. Such inquiry, if persisted in, will in the end put one upon the quest. Amongst the multitude of those who are attracted toward such teaching, it is inevitable that there should be those who are only casually interested, those who are tremendously in earnest about it, and those who are to be found somewhere between these two groups. If the teaching favourably commends itself to any individual from the first contact as being requisite to one’s needs, this is often a sign that one has followed it in earlier existences. One disciple who picked up the Quest again in this life described it as a feeling of reunion, of coming home. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Another principality, angelic and demonic at the same time, is power. It has the severe manly beauty which we see in some pictures of the great Archangels. It is itself a great Angel, good and evil, just as love is a mighty principality, and it is the builder and protector of cities and nations, a creative force in every human enterprise, in every human community, in every human achievement. It is responsible for the conquest of nature, the organization of states, the execution of justice. Its mighty ally is another Angelic figure, good and evil, namely, knowledge. We are all in their bondage. World history is the realm in which the reign of the Angel power is most manifest in all its glory and in all its tragedy. There is no need to say more about it to the people of our time. Every morning brings us news about this ruler of our World. And we all are grasped both by the Angelic fascination of its creativity and by the demonic terror of its destructiveness in our personal lives as well as in the lives of our nations. And when power is allied with knowledge—a knowledge undreamed of even before in the history of humankind—fascination as well as terror are infinitely increased. Both separate us from the love of God, the one driving us to the adoration of power and knowledge, the other driving us to cynicism and despair. God is blessing you, but every person prospers according to one’s own genius. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
