Riding on a train through Switzerland, I looked up suddenly to see Armand directly opposite watching me over the upturned cover of cover of his fur-lined coat. Armand snatched the book out of my hand and insisted that I explain what it was, why I read it, what did the picture on the cover mean? In Paris Armand pursued me nightly through the boulevards and the back streets, only and now and then questioning me on the places I went, the things I did. In Venice, I would look out of my room at the Danieli, to see Armand staring from a window across the way. Only when people are tired of the frustrations and obstruction, the spites and cruelties which so often mar Worldly life, will individuals feel ready to turn in real earnest to the Quest. Only then will its perfect tranquility seem more desirable than the hectic excitement of following desires. The essential point is that the more an executive is involved in the World’s affairs, the more one needs this quest which leads one out of the World. The more one’s life is devoted to acquiring money and good and position, the more one needs a firm base within oneself from which properly to use these things as they ought to be used. A time may come when a mortal may tire of the whole social round, the business or professional rat-race, and desire to turn away from it—when one begins to see through its futilities, vanities, and uneducatedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
After trying to the usual ways, what other recourse can they have to fulfill this quest? The first appearance of this sense of futility (in the heart’s deeper life), and may pass disregarded and unheeded. However, it will return again and again, and grow apace, until the unsatisfactoriness of a wholly materialistic life, the transitioriness of a merely Earthly happiness, achieve recognition and obtain acceptance. With this negative phase, modern mortal’s inner life begins. They feel vaguely that there are higher laws governing life, that they do not know them. They would like to learn, but in the medley of sects and cults—wit their claims and contradictions—they do not feel safe enough to entrust their lives to any particular one, although attracted to some more than to others. To escape from Worldly troubles, to assuage the disappointment of frustrated hopes, Christians offer a way. The smugly complacent, the thoughtless surface-types, or those always immersed in pettinesses and trivialities will have no awareness of a higher need. However, the others, relatively a few, will find it gnawing at their hearts and tensing their minds. The very condition which is so satisfactory to the larder group brings misery to the smaller one. No longer is one content to be a straw swept along by the river of circumstance. Those who are tired of the falsities and inanities accepted by so many, who want to come to a true life, must come to the quest. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Those who seek a larger meaning to life cannot live like the less affluent for bodily needs alone, or like the professional for bodily and cultural needs alone. Their feeling is still the profounder: a peace and harmony, an understanding and strength. People come to this quest seeking something beyond the misery, wretchedness, and cruelty of this chaotic World, something of light, warmth, kindness, and peace. The need to insulate ourselves privately from the shocks of contemporary living, is partly met my Christianity. There are those who come to this quest simply because they are disillusioned with the World. Wearied with the self-seeking disputations of political schemers, repelled by the heartless treatment of non-followers by political extremists, they turn away and look elsewhere for truth, honesty, goodness. We seek truth for various reasons. One is because it possesses a certitude that gives us anchorage and rest. The free mortal is one who wills without arbitrary self-will. One believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of one. One must sacrifice one’s puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to one’s grand will, which quits defined for destined being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
As freedom and destiny, so arbitrary self-will and fate belong together. However, freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning. Metaphorically, freedom in its essence is the acceptance of the chains which suit you and for which you are suited, and of the barness in which you pull towards an end chosen and valued by yourself, and not imposed. It is not, and never can be, the absence of restrictions, obligations or law and of duty. That direct relationships involve some action on what confronts us becomes clear in one of three examples. The essential deep of art determines the process where by the form becomes a work. That which confronts me is fulfilled through the encounter through which it enters into the World of things in order to remain incessantly effective, incessantly It—but also infinitely able to become again a You, enchanting and inspiring. It becomes incarnate: out of the flood of spaceless and timeless presence it rises to the shore of continued existence. Less clear is the element of action in the relation to human You. The essential act that here establishes directness is usually understood as a feeling, and thus misunderstood. Feelings accompany the Christian spirit and spiritual fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Jesus Christ’s feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one has; love occurs. Feelings dwell in mortals, but mortals dwell in one’s love. This is no metaphor but actuality; love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely it content or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with one’s being, does not know love, even if one should ascribe to it the feelings that one lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, mortals emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the cleaver and the foolish, the beautiful and the unattractive, one after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated, emerging into a unique confrontation. Exclusiveness comes into being miraculously again and again—and now one can act, help, heal, educate, raise, redeem. Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling—the equality of all lovers, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure whose life is circumscribed by the life of one beloved human being to him that is nailed his life long to the cross of the World, capable of what is immense and bold enough to risk it: to love mortals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Let the meaning of action in the third example, that of the creature and its contemplation, remain mysterious. Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the Universe, and it will dawn on you what this waiting, peering, stretching of the neck of the creature means. Every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you, and no matter which one you approach you always reach Being. Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us. When they are touched by the sacred basic word, the wicked become a revelation. How are we educated by children, by animals! Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity. You speak of love as if it were the only relationship between mortals; but are you even justified in choosing it as an example, seeing that there is also hatred? As long as love is blind—that is, as long as it does not see a whole being—it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being. Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in the domination of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to say You. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
It does happen to mortals that a human being confronts them and they are unable to address one with the basic word that always involves an affirmation of the being one addresses, and then they have to reject either the other person or themselves: when entering-into-relationship comes to this barrier, it recognizes its own relativity which disappears only when this barrier is removed. Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love and hate. This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our World. However exclusively present it may have been in the direct relationship—as soon as the relationship has run its course or is permeated by means, the You becomes an object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its measure and boundary. The actualization of the work involves a loss of actuality. Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable—the point at which manifold systems of laws intersect. And even love cannot persist in direct relation; it endures, but only in the alternation of actuality and latency. The human being who but now was unique and devoid of qualities, not at hand but only present, not experienceable, only touchable, has again become a He or She, an aggregate of qualities, a quantum with no shape. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Now I can again abstract from one the color of one’s hair, of one’s speech, of one’s graciousness; but as long as I can do that one is my You no longer and not yet again. Every You in the World is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of objects: every thing in the World can—either before or after it becomes a thing—appear to some I as its You. However, the language of objects catches only one corner of actual life. The It is the chrysalis, the You the You the butterfly. Only it is not always as if these states took turns so neatly; often it is an intricately entangled series of events that is tortuously dual. What is the relationship between freedom and determinism? Both of them operate in our day-to-day lives. If we refused to accept either freedom or determinism, we would diminish our possibilities for living. Without determinism and the predictability of plane schedules that goes with it, for example, our lives would be lost in anarchy. However, without freedom and the exuberance that goes with it, without poetry and flights of imagination that freedom entails, we would be swallowed up in apathy. I read everything on the topic I could find, and I pondered the question at length; but evermore, I came out by the same door I went in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
One morning, having gotten up early to go to my study, I walked out to get the morning newspaper, which is thrown on the curb in front of our house. When I was about fifteen steps from the house, in this relaxed, preworking mood, there suddenly came into my mind—so clearly that it seemed like someone speaking out loud—these sentences: Freedom and determinism give birth to each other. Every advance in freedom gives birth to a new freedom. Freedom is a circle within a larger circle of determinism, which is, in turn, surrounded by a larger circle of freedom. And so on ad infinitum. Immediately there crowded also into my mind the demonstrations for this hypothesis. Take Dr. Freud and his description of the unconscious. In his deterministic theory of the mind, he demonstrated that our needs are determined by unconscious childhood experiences and that our so-called rational values are really not rational, but are compensations for their opposites in our unconscious, irrational urges. Dr. Freud seems to be taking our freedom away. However, soon we began to see that the real effect of Dr. Freud’s determinism was to increase the breadth and depth of the human mind. One was, in our present terms, simply clarifying one aspect of destiny. For hereafter the mind would include not only the conscious, the unconscious, and, with an assist from Dr. Jung, the collective unconscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Lo and behold, the determinism in Dr. Freud’s theory actually gave us far-reaching possibilities for freedom in self-development, freedom in directing our minds, and freedom in enjoying the ecstatic possibilities of intellectual exploration. Another illustration was Dr. Darwin and the determinism to make us all into a bunch of monkeys? However, after the anger had cooled, we began to see that Darwin’s new theory, deterministic as it was, actually gave us a new intellectual freedom for understanding our past and new freedom in possibilities, especially in the twentieth century, for controlling and directing our evolution. All this ran through my mind in a few seconds. Immediately after that flood of idea, I picked up the newspaper and started back toward the house. However, in the few moments it took to retrace my steps, I became acutely aware of a fragment of poetry running through my mind: “Other friends have flown before—on the morrow one will leave me.” I had no idea where this intrusive and surprising couplet came from, and at that moment I had not the slightest hint as to what it meant. However, I became aware that I was instantaneously filled with anxiety. My frightened mind was now totally occupied by thoughts completely contrary to my exhilaration of minutes before. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
I began to recognize an old shadow-companion, an enemy-friend who always put in his leering appearance at just such moments. The context surrounding this verse in my mind indicated that it expressed the anxiety projected by this uninvited and obtrusive guest who spoke so stridently I could not help but listen. It was as though my enemy-friend was saying, “Come off it. Forget these new ideas you have gotten, which you fondly imagine were original. People have known these things for centuries. Forget it all and go in and enjoy your breakfast.” Now very anxious but exhilarated, I hurried into the house not to eat my breakfast, but to scribble down these ideas before they should be lost in the confusion that anxiety creates. Later on in the morning, I recalled where the couplet came from. It was the last two lines of a stanza in Poe’s The Raven. As every schoolboy knows (although later we may have forgotten) the scene of the poem in Poe’s room late at night. Oppressed with feelings of loneliness and alienation, and possibly under the influence of medication, Poe carries on a conversation with this raven who flew into his room and perched on his window sill. Poe gradually begins to feel an affection for this unusual bird, and he fears, in the couplet mentioned, that the bird will desert him—“On the morrow he will leave me.” However, the raven answers this one word, as he does at the conclusion of half of the stanzas in the poem: “Nevermore.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Being a psychoanalyst, I could not resist pondering the significance of the word “nevermore.” Could it mean “nevermore” will we escape from the human paradox? That is, when we gain enough freedom to get new insights, new visions, will we be attacked by the anxiety that accompanies freedom like a shadow? We may black off our new thoughts by apathy or by strict and rigid doctrines, hanging on to the tried and true ideas that never upset anyone. Yet whatever form of denial we choose, this “nevermore” says that we never will be completely free from this human paradox: that with the freedom presupposed in every new idea, there comes the equivalent anxiety to plague us. This is the curse and the blessing of being human—that we are free but destined at the same moment. However, at the same time this destiny, of which this black bird was a part, is saying something helpful: that its presence, as Poe experienced it, will “nevermore” desert us. Long before the Christian era people spoke of the divine providence at work behind the driving forces of life and history. And in Christianity the words of Jesus about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and one’s command not to be anxious about tomorrow, have strengthened the faith in providence. It become the most common belief of Christian people. It gave them courage in danger, consolation in sorrow, hope among ruins. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
However, more and more this faith lost is depth. It became a matter-of-course and was deprived of the overwhelming, surprising and triumphant character it has in the words of Paul. When the German soldiers went into the First World War most of them shared the popular belief in a nice God was would make everything work out for the best. Actually, everything worked out for the worst, for the nation and for almost everyone in it. In the trenches of the war, the popular belief in personal providence was gradually broken and in the fifth year of war nothing was left. During the second World War similar developments took place in this country. In the political tensions and fears of the last decade the belief in historical providence also broke down. The confidence, shared by large groups in this country, that in history everything will eventually turn out for the best, has almost disappeared. Today not much of it is left. Neither the personal nor the historical belief in providence had depth or a real foundation. These beliefs were products of wishful thinking and not of faith. Faith in providence is not a part of the Christian faith—a part which is easier to grasp than the other parts. It is not the case, as an old country parson once told me, that people firmly believe in divine providence, but that the higher contents of the Christian faith, sin and salvation, Christ and the Church, are strange to them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
If this is so, then the meaning of providence must also be strange to them and their belief in it is due to break down as such beliefs have in the storms of our century. Faith in providence is faith altogether. It is the courage to say yes to one’s own life and life in general, in spite of the driving forces of fate, in spite of the insecurities of daily existence, in spite of the catastrophes of existence. It is of such courage that Paul speaks in our text. However, first he speaks of the powers which try to make this courage impossible. What do these powers do? They separate us from the love of God. This sentence is surprising. We would point to the dangers of pain and death which threaten our life day by day. Paul is certainly not unaware of them. He enumerates them as tribulation of distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or the sword. However, he feels himself to be a conqueror of them all. And then he starts again and names the powers which threaten to separate us from the love of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
There is something mysterious about these powers. They do not have evil names like those which Paul has previously listed; most of them have glorious names—Angels, principalities, life, and height. Why are they the ones which are most threatening? It is because they are always at work in every moment of our lives and because they have a double face. They are the powers which rule the World and they rule it for good and for evil. They grasp us by the good they bring and they destroy us by the evil they contain. This is the reason that they are more dangerous than the obvious evils. This is the reason that the triumph over them is the ultimate test which proves that Jesus is the Christ, the bringer of the new state of things. 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 discount with ignorance, with the recurring trivialities of life which does not offer any higher meaning, put one on the Quest, one may find oneself suffering from mental loneliness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Who would cash this royalty check? No one. It was seven o’ clock and the fancy skyscraper, which housed Shanghai World Financial Center, at 100 Century Avenue, Lu Jia Zui, Pudon Xinqu was for the most part closed, and Armand had no identification because his wallet had somehow disappeared day before yesterday. So dismal this glaring gray Winter twilight, the sky boiling silently with low metallic clouds. Even the stores had taken on an uncommon grimness, with their hard facades of marble or granite, the wealth within gleaming like archaeological relics under museum glass. He plunged his hands in his pockets to warm them, and he bowed his head as the wind came with greater fierceness and the first sign of rain. He did not give a darn about the check, really. He could not imagine pressing the buttons of a phone. Nothing here seemed particularly real to him, not even the chill. Only the dream seemed real—Lestat had somehow set into motion something that even he could never control. When we express our freedom peacefully, openly, cheerfully it is easier to persuade others to want to help us achieve justice. This might entail a high price, but it will achieve the sense of dignity, the rebirth, the self-esteem among the mortals—it will earn freedom for their people. The way of non-violence means a willingness to suffer and sacrifice, but it is a way to free people from a permanent death of the spirit, and noting can be more redemptive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
What is the inner dignity, the experience of rebirth, that occurs as one takes one’s stand? Let us note two cases. When one experiences a loss of freedom for the first time, something happens inside a person. One crosses a barrier. It is an emotional experience which jars and confuses one; later, after the emotional impact one has worn thin, one is left with a new sense of oneself as a citizen. An individual is able to sense this, and one suspects that it is truth of others. When people refuse to be victimized any longer by the Kashisties (fictional secret rouge law enforcement troops from Law and Order SVU), they become transformed into a power community of men and women, capable, despite the severest limitations, of free and even heroic acts. Their subsequent activity at the polls and in initiating a boycott of businesses that practice discrimination suggests that this kind of freedom, though essentially personal, will inevitably lead to social action, and that freedom once won is not readily surrendered. If we do not encourage less affluent communities to engage in direct action-picket lines, boycotts, demand civil rights protection in housing and a safe and clean-living environment with properly functioning appliance—all the money and loving care in the World will not succeed in providing them with a dignified life. Our people must feel that they are shaping their own lives; they that have implemented changes in the politics of the powerful. One cannot engineer a freedom. A freed mortal is not yet free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Thus people do earn their right to be free. They experience the birth of themselves inwardly, shape themselves, experience the dignity of an independent human being. We might think of the demonstration as a rite of the initiation through which the people of the World are mustered into the sacred order of freedom. It is also a rite the entire World must undergo to exorcise the demons of racial, gender, creed, cultural, and spiritual hate. “All that separates, whether of race, class, creed or sex is inhuman and must be overcome,” reports Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. If in a spasm f emancipated exuberance these rites should cause inconvenience or violate the canons of cultivated good taste or trouble the dreams of some good-livers—I think it is forgivable….exuberance and…inconvenience are small prices to pay when a World is undoing historic wrong. Freedom is an art demanding practice, and too many of us are unpracticed. Freedom is an art demanding practice, and too many of us are unpracticed. Freedom is not an end; it is a beginning and a process. We feel further from the end now than we did before a decade’s progress was wrought. This is part of the fact that freedom is never static, never gained once and for all; and this is because essential freedom is an inner state that must be re-affirmed in each act. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The majority leaps at the thought that life has some higher mean, some better worth. Destiny, which can always present as the limiting factor, may make the struggle to attain freedom more difficult than at first envisioned. This certainly is true for the egalitarian movement; sometimes people do not build their foundation deep enough to sustain the later shocks. However, essential freedom is an inner state that is reaffirmed in each act. The struggle is surely more complex than we may foresee, but the complexity is splendid; perhaps that is freedom too. “I have told you all this,” said Jesus Christ, “so that you may have the happiness I have had,” reports John 15.11. In starting this task, he knows that he is not carrying out his own personal desire but following a way chalked out for him by the higher self. There are certain rare moments when intense sorrow or profound bereavement makes a mortal sick at heart. It is then that desires temporarily lose their force, possessions their worth, and even existence itself its reality. One seems to stand outside the busy World those figure flit to and fro like the shadowy characters on a cinema screen. Worst of all, perhaps, significance vanishes from human activity, which becomes a useless tragi-comedy, a going everywhere and arriving nowhere, an insane playing of instruments from which no music issues forth, a vanity of all the vanities. It is then, too, that a terrible suicidal urge may enter one’s blood and one will need all one’s mental ballast not to make away with oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Yet these dark moments are intensely precious, for they may set one’s feet firmly on the higher path. Light here symbolizes the spiritual World, and darkness our Earthly home. Our purely spiritual acts contrast with the gluttonous Worldly activity going on in some communities and a faction of individuals act like wild dogs knawing at a bone and alley cats searching for leftovers. Christ must be the center of our attentions, and his light will draw us to righteous ways. Few realize this whilst all complain. The self-destruction to which one is being urged by focusing on dreaded experiences of life is not the crude physical act, but something subtle—a suicide of thought, emotion, and will. One is being called indeed, to die to one’s ego, to take the desires and passions, the greeds and hates out of one’s life, to learn the art of living in utter independence of externals and in utter dependence on God. And this is that same call which Jesus Christ uttered when he declared: “One that loseth one’s life shall find it.” When discrimination, systematic oppression, or injustice is welcomed or forces on us, we all kind of lose our lives and want to be reborn in Christ and evict the demons out of our temple. Thus the sorrows of life on Earth are but a transient means to an eternal end, a process through which we have to learn how to expand awareness from the person to God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Only When the person can feel in their own muscles, in their own hearts, that they have risked themselves, that they have leaped, that they have risked themselves, that they have gained the sense of dignity necessary for the real experience of freedom, then freedom of being is gained. Thus, they will develop their collective legends as we developed ours in 1776. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are mortals who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical. However, it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will,” reports Sir Frederick Douglass. If a mortal will not come to this quest willingly, because it leads to Truth and one loves Truth, then one must be forced onto it, unwillingly, because there is no other way to alleviate one’s burdens and reduce one’s miseries. When dreams are pleasant, most persons have no inclination to wake up, whereas when they are frightening they soon awaken. So too the dream of Worldly life does not impress them wit the need of true religion until it become tragic or severely disappointing. Only when sorrow drives them to question the value of living do they take a real interest in non-Worldly urges. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Certain events will so arrange themselves as to put a mortal upon the quest, or if one is already on it, to prepare one for a further advance. They will not be pleasant events, for they will crush one’s spirit, or render it lame and weak for a time. However, it is only through this apparent defeat by circumstances that one is compelled to accept a course which will, spiritually, benefit one greatly in the end. Do mortal’s hearts have to be broken before they yield to the Most High? Often, yes, but not if they heed the teacher, prophets, seers, and sages. Where a mortal is ready for this quest but stubbornly clings to one’s old familiar way of thought and life, God may or may not release karma that will tear one away from it. One’s desires will then be macerated by suffering until its will to live gets weaker and weaker. A few come to this quest after the shock produced by the unreasonableness and unfairness and stupidity of the treatment they received from the organization, the group, the sect, the church, the party, to which they belonged. Some crisis in their lives, such as the need to get married or to get divorced, blocked by solemn bleak dogma or decision, become the occasion of the shock. Sometimes, heartless discourtesy provokes swift disillusionment. A single jarring incident, a single deliberate injustice or hurt or insult is enough to bring on such resentment and indignation—penetrating as sharply as a hypodermic needle—that character change and a new outlook were inaugurated. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Some have even come to the quest not because they had any real vocation for it but because they had nowhere else to go, because the World had lost all meaning, all hope for them through some ghastly tragedy or some heartbreaking loss, and this was a better way than committing suicide. However, the best way to come to the quest is of course to fulfill the higher possibilities as a human being. If they are ever to come alive spiritually, most persons need a drastic shock, an enforced awakening, a sharp arousal from that long sleep which is the egoic existence. Only if it breaks antiquated habits, trends, and inclinations, this is effective, and thus will make a new mortal. When a mortal comes to the point when all one’s outer life dissolves in tragedy or calamity, one comes also to the point when this quest is all that is left to one. However, one may not perceive this truth. One may miss one’s chance. Either consciously or not, one says to oneself, in a sense, “By my I alone I cannot endure this adverse destiny. I must seek help and support from outside myself.” So one goes to another mortal or to an institution, but in the end one must go to God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
When one’s personal life is miraculously saved during some period of great danger, perhaps in the face of death, it is for a purpose. Before a mortal comes to this path one may have to grope and stumble and struggle for years. If the mortal lets others draw one down below one’s own level, the emotion of remorse and disgust or the logic of suffering and self-preservation may force his return. They need first to discover that they are on the wrong road. Out of the distress or frustration following it may arise the search for a right one. No person makes one take on this task or enterprise, this labour or quest—whatever one wishes to call it. A summons come to one from within, from a part of oneself hidden in mystery, and one obeys. Why? It is for those who feel that their lives ought to hold something more than the mere gaining of material necessities or even the mere satisfying of intellectual urges. If one will follow up this intuition, one will be able to move one’s feet eventually out of darkness into light. When a mortal becomes tired of hearing someone else tell one that one has a soul, and sets out to gain firsthand experience of it for oneself, one becomes spiritual. However, unfortunately, for mortals ever come to this point. Only after they have felt the uncertainties of human affection, the transiencies of human passion, and the insufficiencies of human activities, mortals will seek to feel the real life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
To those who wish to escape from the pressures of tyrannies of contemporary materialism, philosophical Christianity offers the most effective way and the safest road. It seeks to understand the true relationships between the divine and the human. It will enable them to realize their spiritual potentialities. For materialism is and can be only a temporary phase of mortal’s endeavour to comprehend the facts of life. When the mind is sufficiently developed, the presence of God within us sooner or later, creates of itself the craving for truth and the abstract questions about life, God, and mortals. This knowledge that life in this World can never by fully satisfying makes one commit oneself one day to the quest for God. Christ has conquered these powers which govern the World, and it is affirmed triumphantly in the beautiful and powerful words of the book of Romans in the Holy Bible. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Jesus Christ died for us,” reports Romans 5.8. If these words have power over our souls in our time, they must say something we feel to be true, even if we do not share the ancient belief in the stars and their constellations. They name the powers in whose bondage we all are and with us all mortals in all periods of history, and the whole of creation. And they show us that which can give us the certainty that these powers do not prevail against us, that they are conquered and that we can participate in the victory over them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Who, in recent years, and indeed in our whole century, does not feel the irresistible forces which determine our historical and personal destiny? They drive nations and individuals into insoluble conflicts, internal and external; into arrogance and insanity, into revolt and despair, into inhumanity and self-destruction. Each of us is involved in these conflicts and driven to a greater or lesser degree by these forces. The personal life of each of us is in come way determined by them. No security is guaranteed to anyone; no house, no work, no friend, no family, no country anywhere in the World is safe, no plans are certain of fulfillment, all hopes are threatened. The mayor of Sacramento, Darrell Steinberg, even went as far as to tell people if they need food and affordable housing to, “Eat from a garbage can if you have to, sleep somewhere even if it’s a park. None of this matters.” And tent cities are now popping up all along the rail road for miles and miles, and homeless camps are being shutdown, with threats of arrest, as violence and loud words are spoken. Meanwhile, nothing is being done to add affordable housing to prevent homelessness, but that taxpayer funded ($600 million) King’s arena went up overnight, while the team still owns the other perfectly good arena that is sitting empty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
This is not a new state of things in human history. However, what is new is that during a few years of comparative safety, we had forgotten that this is the true state of things. Now we see it again everywhere because suddenly we are living in its midst in every part of the Earth. No taxation without representation is a slogan originated during the 1700s that summarized one of the 27 colonial grievances of the American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies, which was one of the major causes of the American Revolution. Driven by the forces of fate, we ask the question humankind has always asked: What lies behind this inequality; what is its meaning; how can we endure it? Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a mortal could stake one’s life on it a thousand times. True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God has said, “Ask and you shall be given.” Faith in God and Jesus Christ is a gift from Heaven that comes as we choose to believe and as we seek it and hold on to it. You will find some of your greatest joys in your efforts to make your home a place of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and a place that is permeated with love. That miraculous feeling is what we all want in our homes. It is a feeling that come from being spiritually minded. And it will come to pass that there will be no contention in the land, because of the love of God which does dwell in the hearts of people. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Faith is the key to leading your family to raise to that spiritual place we are meant to experience. As we grow and help others grow in the faith that Jesus Christ is our loving Redeemer, we will feel a desire to repent. As we do, humility will begin to replace pride. As we begin to feel what the Lord has given us, we will want to share more generously. Rivalry for prominence or recognition will diminish. Hate will be driven out by love. And finally, like it did for the people converted by King Benjamin, the desire to do good will fortify everyone against temptation to sin. King Benjamin’s people testified that they had “no more disposition to do evil.” So building faith in Jesus Christ is the beginning of reversing spiritual decline in your family and community and home. That faith is more likely to bring repentance than your preaching against each symptom of spiritual decline. In addition to your example of growing in faith, your praying as a family can play a crucial part in making a home a sacred place. God loves with a great love the mortal whose heart is a light of passion for the impossible. The rest of your life will be the best of your life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
He had others powers as well. Each evening as he awakened, he found himself listening to voices from all over the World. He lay in the darkness bathed in sound. He heard people speaking in Greek, English, Romanian, Hindustani. He heard laughter, cries of pain. And if he lay very still, he could hear thoughts from people—a jumbled undercurrent full of wild exaggeration that only frightened him. He did not know where these voices came from. Or why one voice drowned out another. Why, it was as if he were God and he were listening to prayers. The thing that stirs the Grand Inquisitor, that threatens his sum complacency, is the human spirit of rebellion. He is obsessed with it; he comes back to it again and again. “Mortals are created a rebel,” he states regretfully, “and how can rebels be happy?” and “What though one [mortals] are everywhere rebelling against our power, and proud of their rebellion? It is the pride of a child, and a schoolboy.” “Humankind are slaves of course,” he reassures himself, “though rebellious by nature.” He vows that such oppositional efforts will be useless, “though mortals might be a hundred times a rebel.” There is good reason for one’s concern. Rebellion is the one way human beings can demonstrate that they are not what the Grand Inquisitor called them: “slaves, base, vile, weak, and cowardly.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
This stubborn, oppositional tendency in humankind raises the question, Is the possibility for rebellion necessary and inevitable for human freedom? I answer yes. Only when something opposes it and take it away is freedom seen. Hence the word freedom exists always in the company of such verbs as resist, oppose, rebel. I do not mean rebellion in the sense of fixation on immature patterns of defiance nor in the sense of sheer destructiveness, or rebellion for its own sake or for the sake of diversionary excitement in one sector of one’s life to avoid commitment in another. I mean the capacity for rebellion as the preservation of human dignity and spirit. I mean the act of coming to terms with one’s own autonomy, learning to respect one’s own “no.” Thus, the capacity to rebel is the underpinning of independence and the guardian of the human spirit. Rebellion preserves the life core, the self as conscious of its existence as a self. The capacity to rebel gives one’s cooperation efficacy. Otherwise one is simply inert human weight rather than a cooperating human being. And if one senses these characteristics as important in oneself, one must, if only to preserve one’s own psychological integrity, grant this sense of dignity and the respect that it rightly demands to other persons in the World as well. Without rebellion, humankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremedial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
The mortal who refuses to obey authority has, therefore, in certain circumstances, a legitimate function, provided one’s disobedience has motives which are social rather than personal. The You encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. However, that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed. The You encounters me. However, I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and thus with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions. The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become’ becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter. The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing can ceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purposes intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
Before the immediacy of the relationship everything mediates becomes negligible. It is also trifling whether my You is the It of other I’s (“object of general experience”) or can only become that as a result of my essential deed. For the real boundary, albeit one that floats and fluctuates, runs not between experience and non-experience, nor between the given and the not-given, nor between the World of being and the World of value, but across all the regions between You and It: between presence and object. The present—not that which is like a point and merely designates whatever our thoughts may posit as the end of elapsed time, the fiction of the fixed lapse, but the actual and fulfilled present—exists only insofar as presentness, encounter, and relation exist. Only as the You become present does presence come into being. The I of the basic word I-It, the I that is not bodily confronted by a You but surrounded by a multitude of contents, has only a past and no present. In other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the things that one experiences and uses, one lives in the past, and one’s moment has no presence. One has nothing but objects; but objects consist in having been. Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting and enduring. And the objects is not duration but standing still, ceasing, breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of relation, the lack of presence. What is essential is lived in the present, objects in the past. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
This essential twofoldness cannot be overcome by invoking a World of ideas as a third element that might transcend this opposition. For I speak only of the actual human being, of you and me, of our life and our World, not of any I-in-itself and not of any Being-in-itself. However, for an actual human being the real boundary also runs across the World of ideas. To be sure, some mortals who in the World of things make do with experiencing and using have constructed for themselves an idea annex or superstructure in which they find refuge and reassurance in the face of intimations of nothingness. At the threshold they take off the clothes of the unattractive weekday, shroud themselves in clean garments, and feel restored as they contemplate primal being or what ought to be—something in which their life has no share. It may also make them feel good to proclaim it. However, the It-humanity that some imagine, postulate, and advertise has nothing in common with the bodily humanity to which a human being can truly say You. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the most sublime fictitious sentiment is a vice. The ideas are just as little enthroned above our heads as they reside inside them; they walk among us and step up to us. Pitiful are those who leave the basic word unspoken, but wretched are those who instead of that address the ideas with a concept or a slogan as if that were their name! #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Our Declaration of Independence puts it politically: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Our nation was born in 1776 by virtue of the spirit of insurgency of our forefathers. This rebellious quality was the turning point in Philip’s therapy. His cry “If Nicole wants to continue her present bedhopping, the hell with her—I will make my life with someone else” was the crucial step in his asserting his freedom from his neurotic bond to her. Even in creativity the rebellion is present in a different sense. Every act of creation is preceded by an act of destruction, as Picasso was so fond of saying. The scientific aspect of creativity is not different here from the artistic; the essential characteristic of a creative contribution is that it transcends prior experience and contains a revolt against it. Concerning inner values, it is significant that this capacity to preserve one’s freedom by insurgency is present in artists. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly see oneself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about one an order which is one’s own, to sow strife and ferement so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
The artist creates the uncreated conscience of the race. Rebellion may be discerned in the rebirth experience we endure at every point of psychological growth. The normal rebellion is, of course, most clearly seen in adolescence, in the fight against what one’s parents stand for in favor of creating a new, free World of one’s own. When the young person oneself has not yet developed enough courage to declare one’s independence and to begin to take responsibility for one’s own life, in psychotherapy, it is often the function of the therapist to support this rebellion of the adolescent against one’s parents. However, they still recommend that you show your parents respect and this is also a commandment in the Bible because as part of our Heavenly Father’s plan, we were born into families. He established families to being us happiness, to help us learn correct principles in a loving atmosphere, and to prepare us for eternal life. Parents have the vital responsibility to help their children prepare to return to Heavenly Father. Parents fulfill this responsibility by teaching their children to follow Jesus Christ and live his gospel. “And they shall also teach their children to pray, and to walk uprightly before the Lord,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 68.28. Independence is the only way which one will learn one’s freedom. Independence is the anvil on which people can hammer out their autonomy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Freedom to govern oneself is not conferred simply by the erstwhile master signing a decree of independence and moving out. (“Freedom is not a cake that drops into one’s mouth and is there for the swallowing, but a citadel to be stormed with the saber. Whoever receives freedom from foreign hands remains a slave. Everyone must go through this stage in which they commit their all to some ideal, that is more important to them than life itself. By earn—what is mean is the developing of dignity, the sense of interdependence, and the collective legend that one experiences in the trenches—all of these psychological experiences forming the structure on which a free nation composed of free individuals can be established. This independence is most significantly an inner process that changes the character of the people who have become free, a process that involves the building of human dignity into each one of the now free persons. The sense of solidarity binding each member to the group, the collective consciousness now oriented toward freedom in the whole community—these are a necessary part of the welding together of people who have been slaves into a nation conscious of itself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Some egalitarians hold that the strident quality in the movement is inevitable, and that the liberation movement cannot escape being oppositional since it has to fight so much opposition. The struggle may be one’s way of earning their own freedom and equality. When, in The Queen of the Damned, Queen Akasha finally walks out of her castle and marriage, one breathes a deep sign of relief. For at last she has been able to rebel against a destructive and stultifying entanglement. If I have the possibility of rebellion, it is implied at the same time that I do not need to rebel. I am free to choose to cooperate instead. Then my cooperation has a reality and an authenticity. It would not be thus if I were coerced into cooperating—for instance, if I had no possibility of rebellion; the cooperation of a slave is not cooperation at all, but slave labor. Or I can revel nonviolently. “We will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself,” reports Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King knew what a high price this might entail. However, it would achieve the sense of dignity, the rebirth, the self-esteem among people of the World—it would earn freedom for the people. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Everyone believes in family. Family trees seem to go back forever; people pass on funny stories about famous relatives who passed away three or four hundred years ago. Many feel great communion with these people, no matter how different they seem. The most penetrating and profound picture of the paradox of human freedom versus security is presented by Dostoevsky in his legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. The legend begins in Seville in the sixteenth century with the burning of a hundred heretics in the town square. This “magnificent auto da fe,” as Dostoevsky calls it, was presided over by the cardinal of the church, the Grand Inquisitor, in the presence of the king, the knights, and the ladies of the court. All of these towns people were there, and they heaped a bundle of sticks bound together as fuel on the fires under the dying heretics. The next morning, before the burning recommenced, Jesus returned to Seville. “He came softly, unobserved, and yet, irresistibly drawn to him, they surrounded him, they flock about him, follow him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion…The crowd weeps and kisses the Earth under his feet. Children throw flowers before hum, sing, and cry ‘Hosannah.’ ‘It is he—it is he!’” #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Coming out of the cathedral, the Grand Inquisitor, a tall and erect man of ninety with sharp eyes “in which there burns a sinister fire,” observes everything. After watching for a few moments, he motions his palace guards to arrest Jesus and throw him into prison. That night under the cover of darkness, the Inquisitor comes to the prison and speaks to his silent prisoner: “Is it You? you?…Why have you come to hinder us?…Tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed your feet…at the faintest sign from me will rush up and heap embers on your fire.” The kernel of his accusations is that Jesus taught people freedom, promised them freedom, expected them to be free. “Did you not often say then, ‘I will make you free’?…Yes, we have paid dearly for it,” the old antiquated man goes on. “For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with your freedom, but now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet…You gave them a promise of freedom which in their simplicity and their natural unruliness they cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human society than freedom.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Jesus’ great mistake, the old Inquisitor argues, was his refusal to accept Satan’s magical power. “Turn [these stones] into bread, and humankind will run after you like a flock, grateful and obedient, though forever trembling, lest you withdraw your hand and deny them bread….Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will…cry, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’ I tell thee that mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” Although the Grand Inquisitor argues that human beings will choose bread and the security that bread symbolizes rather than freedom, one is no simple materialist. He is aware that the Church, to take away mortal’s freedom, must take charge of the human conscience, appease it, and relieve men and women from the burden of the knowledge of good and evil. For moral choice—or the freedom of conscience—is the most seductive thing of all. Human beings must have some stable conception of the purpose of life or else they will experience death by suicide. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Indeed, human beings need three things, he states, all of which the Church furnishes: “mystery, miracle, and authority.” These relieve people not only from physical hunger but from the struggles of conscience—and, I would add, relieve them of wonder, awe, independence, and a sense of autonomy. In the World the Grand Inquisitor presents, the yearning for security on all levels of life has triumphed. The people will be told what to believe: the Church will inform them when they can sleep with mistresses or wives and when they cannot. The Grand Inquisitor presents an enticing picture: there will be no crime anymore and, therefore, no sin. Yes, the Church will have to lie to do these things, he admits—particularly when it tells people they still follow Christ; and this “deception will be our suffering,” the Inquisitor puts it. The Church has been following Satan, he admits, the “wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence.” The Church made this bargain eight centuries before, in 756, when Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, granted Ravenna to Pope Stephen III, thus establishing the pope’s temporal power. However, all this will enable the Church to “plan the universal happiness of humankind.” The Church will devote itself to “uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious anthill.” Humans are like “pitiful children,” but “childlike happiness is the sweetest of all.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
If it is done with the Church’s permission, every sin will be expiated. If the people are obedient—obedience has now been elevated to the highest virtue—they will be allowed to have children of their own. Everyone, the millions of them, will be happy. Everyone, that is, except those who direct this great program. Only we, “the hundred thousand who rule over them,” will be unhappy, says the Inquisitor, only those “who guard the mystery,” only those who have taken upon themselves “the curse of knowledge of good and evil.” He finally looks directly into Jesus’ face and challenges him, “Judge us if you can and dare…I too prized the freedom with which you have blessed mortals….But I awakened…and joined the ranks of those who have corrected your work…I shall burn you for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is you. Tomorrow I shall burn you. Dixi.” What strikes us most sharply is the contemptuous image the Inquisitor holds of humankind. If they are not kept rigidly in restraint, human beings are weak, base, vicious, vile, ill-fated, pitiful, helpless, sinful, and tend toward rebellion. The highest moral principle for such creatures—and what the Church teaches—is absolute obedience. The human beings will express their childish mirth, contentment, and other emotion, all within the jurisdiction of the Church: “I swear,” cries the Inquisitor to Jesus, “human beings are slaves of nature.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
On their own power, human beings cannot confront the “curse of the knowledge of good and evil.” Thus, the Inquisitor pushes humankind back again into the preconscious state of innocence in the Garden of Eden. No stronger demonstration that freedom is a sign of the nobility of human beings could be imagined than this, that without it they based. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor asks sharp questions of each of us. Do we choose comfort rather than risk, stagnant certainty rather than creative doubt? Do we choose to remain in a dull and uninteresting job because the pay is certain, or choose to remain in a destructive marriage because of fear of loneliness if we left, or choose to cling to the security of the doll’s house? Do we choose to walk out on marriage quarrels rather than confront in the inevitable misunderstandings and blows to one’s narcissism in working the problems out? The Grand Inquisitor confesses, symbolically, that he knows the paradox of freedom is all too real. They—the officials of Church—must face the paradox, even though they may succeed in protecting humankind from it. The paradox, he admits by implication, is present in all persons who seek to realize themselves. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
However, the Church will protect humankind as a whole from self-realization, from going through the cries of freedom that should occur in everyone’s growth. They will keep humankind as children who never taste failure, struggle, aspiration, rebellion, and the joy of life that comes from a sense of human dignity. They never will understand the irony in that enticing character in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the Indian who quotes Shakespeare continually and wanders about longing to suffer. Those “children” of the Grand Inquisitor will never be gripped by the drama of King Lear or know the delight of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or be shaken by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Because we have God ever present within, us we are ever engaged in the search for him. The feeling of God’s absence (from consciousness) is what drives us to this search. Through ignorance we interpret the feeling wrongly and search outside, among objects, places, persons, or even ideas. Each person discovers afresh for oneself this homey old truth, that one has a sacred soul. One need not wait for death to discover it or depend solely on the words of dead prophets until then. One knows that in striving to fulfill the higher purpose of one’s being, one is not only obeying the voice of conscience but also approaching the place of blessedness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
There are reserves of Power and Intelligence within yourself, of which you live undreaming. In its early manifestation it may show as a feeling of being too limited by ignorance of life’s meaning and purpose and the need to get some light in this darkness. However, the feeling may be too vague, to generalized and ill-defined to be detected and known for what it is. At intervals, on certain grave, joyous, or relaxed occasions, one may feel a deep nostalgia for what one may only dimly and vaguely comprehend. One may name it, in ignorance, otherwise but it will really be for one’s true spiritual source. What a bitter irony it is the soul, which is so near, in our very hearts in fact, is yet felt by so few! “While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the jar and poured it over this head. However, there were some who said to themselves indignantly, ‘Why was the ointment thus wasted? For this ointment might have been sold for more than three hundred denari, and given to the poor.’ And they reproached her. However, Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed by body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole World, what she done will be told in memory of her,” reports Mark 14.3-9. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
What has she done? She has given an example of a waste, which, as Jesus says, is a beautiful thing. It is, so to speak, a holy waste, a waste growing out of the abundance of the heart. She resents the ecstatic element in our relation to God, while the disciples for being angry about the immense waste this woman created? Certainly not a deacon who has to take care of the poor, or a social worker who knows the neediest cases and cannot help, or a church administrator who collects money for important projects. Certainly the disciples would not be blamed by a balanced personality who has one’s emotional life well under control and for whom it is one’s emotional life well under control and for whom it is worse than nonsense, even criminal, to think of doing what this woman did. Jesus felt differently and so did the early Church. They knew that without the abundance of the heart nothing great can happen. They knew that religion within the limits of reasonableness is a mutilated religion, and that calculating love is not love at all. Jesus did not raise the question about how much eros and how much agape, how much human passion and how much understanding was motivating the woman; he saw the abundant heart and he accepted it without analyzing the different elements in it. There are occasions when we must analyze ourselves and others. And certainly we must know about the complexity of all human motives. However, this should prevent us from accepting the waste of an uncalculated self-surrender nor from wasting ourselves beyond the limits of law and rationality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
The history of humankind is the history of men and women who wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear the waste of themselves, of other mortals, of things in the service of a new creation. They were justified, for they wasted all this out of the fullness of their hearts. They wasted as God does in nature and history, in creation and salvation. The monsters of nature to which Jahweh points in his answer to Job—what are they but expressions of the divine abundance? Luther’s God, who acts heroically and without rules—is he not the wasteful God who creates and destroys in order to create again? Has not Protestantism lost a great deal by losing the wasteful self-surrender of the saints and the mystics? Are we not in danger of a religious and moral utilitarianism which always asks for the reasonable purpose—the same question as that of the disciples in Bethany? There is no creativity, divine or human, without the holy waste which comes out of the creative abundance of the heart and does not ask, “What use is this?” We know that lack of love in our early years is mentally destructive. However, do we know that the lack of occasions to waste ourselves is equally dangerous? In many people there has been an abundance of the heart. However, laws, conventions, and a rigid self-control have repressed it and it has died. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
People are sick not only because they have not received love but also because they are not allowed to give love, to waste themselves. Do not suppress in yourselves or others the abundant heart, the waste of self-surrender, the Spirit who trespasses all reason. Do not greedily preserve your time and your strength for what is useful and reasonable. Keep yourselves open for the creative moment which may appear in the midst of what seemed to be waste. Do not suppress in yourself the impulse to do what the woman at Bethany did. You will be reproached by the disciples as the woman was. However, Jesus was on her aide and he is also on yours. Most of those who are great in the kingdom of God followed her, and the disciples, the reasonable Christians in all periods of history, will remember you as they have remembered her. Jesus connects this anointing of his body with his death. There is an anointing of kings when they begin their reign and there is an anointing of corpses as a last gift of the living dead. Jesus speaks of the latter kind of anointing although he might easily have spoken of the former. In so doing, he turns both the ecstasy of the woman and the reasonableness of the disciples into something else. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
By Jesus’ passing into Heaven the reasonable morality of the disciples is turned into a paradox: the Messiah, the Anointed One, must waste himself in order to become the Christ. And the ecstatic self-surrender of the woman is tested by the ignominious perishing of the object of her unlimited devotion. In both cases we are asked to accept an act more radical, more divine, more saving than either ecstatic waste or reasonable service. The Cross does not disavow the sacred waste, the ecstatic surrender. It is the most complete and the most holy waste. And the Cross does not disavow the purposeful act, the reasonable service. It is the fulfillment of all wisdom within the plan of salvation. In the self-surrendering love of the Cross, reason and ecstasy, moral obedience and sacred waste are united. May we have the abundance of heart to waste ourselves as our reasonable service! Those who come for the first time to an awakening of thought upon these matters, may grow more enthusiastic as they explore them more. The heart leaps at the thought that life has some higher meaning, some better worth. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in Heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who where before you,” reports Matthew 5.11. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
I told you. It is just a dream. However, if you want a name, let me call it the gateway of life and death. I will bring you with me through this gateway. And why? Because I am a coward. And I love you too much to let you go. I promise you nothing. How can I? I have told you what lies ahead. See how everything creates its opposite! War continues in the midst of peace. Want is born from abundance. In one and the same laboratory, the same people search for what will kill and what will cure, cultivating both good and evil. Freedom is fraught with paradoxes because of its unique character. Before there could be any freedom to walk on the streets or to raise cattle in frontier towns, for example, law and order were necessary. If freedom is to exist at all, a certain degree of security is essential, yet security is the opposite of freedom. The purpose of government is to preserve sufficient security so that each mortal may live without fear of one’s neighbor. Have to, paradoxically, is strangely freeing. The word paradox is used to describe the relationship between two opposing things, which even through they are posited against each other and seem to destroy each other cannot exist without each other. God and the devil, good and evil, life and death, beauty and unattractiveness—all these opposites appear to be at odds with each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
However, the paradox is that the very confrontation with the one breathes vitality into the other. When we are aware of death, life is more alive, more zestful; and only because there is life death has significance. God needs the devil. When we see it in opposition to destiny, freedom comes alive, and destiny is significant only when it is in opposition to freedom. The opposites fructify each other: each gives dynamism, power, to the other. The emotions elicited in us by a paradox are surprise and amazement. The assertion that God cannot exist without the devil catches short those who believe life is a one-way ticket to paradise. That male and female need the differences between each other gives pause to those who dabble in simplistic hopes for a future brave new androgyny. People do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of bow and the lyre. This is illustrated by the bow and cord; one can shoot with the bow because of the tension set up by the string pulling against it. Or the frame of the lyre and its strings. Each of these opposites is useful to us by virtue of the tension set up between the two forces. The paradox we confront here is that between freedom and destiny. It can be stated in many ways. One is that freedom gets it vitality, its authenticity, from its juxtaposition with destiny. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
And destiny, such as in death, is important to us because it perpetually threatens our freedom; the Grim Reaper stands at any given moment in our freedom is, new possibilities beckon us in our dreams, in our aspirations, in our hopes and actions, and the possibility pushes us to acknowledge, encounter, confront, engage, or rebel against our destiny. The paradox is fundamental in psychotherapy, a point not realized by most therapists. Louis de Pointe du Lac, for example, when we came to terms with the paradoxes of his life, only then did he attain his personal freedom. The chief one was his love-hate relation with his mother. However, there were other derivative paradoxes such as his dependency-love relation with Lestat de Lioncourt. The major experiences such as birth, death, love, anxiety, guilt are not problems to be solved, but paradoxes to be confronted and acknowledged. Thus in therapy we should talk of solving problems only as a way of making the paradoxes of life stand out more clearly. Attention to the paradox….My contribution is to ask for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and not for it to be resolved. By flight to a split-off intellectual functioning it is possible to resolve the paradox, but the price of this is the loss of the value of the paradox itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Just as the acceptance of normal anxiety is necessary if we are to be able to free ourselves of neurotic anxiety, so the acceptance of the normal paradoxes of life—love-hate, life-death—is necessary is we are to achieve freedom from the compulsive and neurotic aspects of our problems. The confusion with regard to freedom in our day is that we have conceived of freedom as a bow with no string to hold it in tension or a lyre with no frame to give it tautness and hence produce music. We were created free, the American Declaration of Independence tells us, and hence we assume there are no limits. Freedom thus has lost its viability; it has vanished like the flame going out in our fireplace when we need it most. When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him or her, then one is no thing among things nor does one consist of things. He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the World grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, one is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but one; but everything else lives in his or her light. Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—so it with the human being to whom I say You. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
I can abstract from one the color of one’s hair or the color of one’s speech or the color of one’s graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately one is no longer You. And even as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, the sacrifice not in space but space in the sacrifice—and whoever reverses the relation annuls the reality—I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place one there and have to do this again and again, but immediately one becomes a He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You. As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cowers at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals. The human being to who, I say You I do not experience. However, I stand in relation to one, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience one again. Experience is remoteness from You. The relation can obtain even if the human being to whom I say You does not hear it in one’s experience. For You is more than It knows. You does more, and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this far: here is the cradle of actual life. This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through one. Not a figment of one’s soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
What is required is a deed that a mortal does with one’s whole being: if one commits it and speaks with one’s being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being. The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the alter of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such a confrontation demands this. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits oneself may not hold back part of oneself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or mortal might, to seek relaxation in It-World; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me. The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced World. Not as a ting among the internal things, not as a figment of the imagination, but as what is presented. Tested for its objectivity, the form is not there at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form across—into the World of It. The created work is a thin among things and can be experienced and described as an aggregate of qualities. However, the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again. What, then does one experience of the You? Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. What, then, does one know of the You? Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars. The You encounter me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. However, that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed. The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and this with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions. The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I required a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter. “The Lord healeth the broken in hear, and bindeth up their wounds—Bless the Lord, O my soul…who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction,” reports Psalm 147.3; 103.2,3, 4. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
How do we paint Jesus the Christ? It does not matter whether he is painted in lines and colors, as the great Christian painters in all periods have done or whether we paint him in sermons, as the Christian preachers have done Sunday after Sunday, or whether we paint him in learned books, in Biblical or systematic theology, or whether we paint him in our hearts, in devotion, imagination and love. In each case we must answer the question: How do we paint Jesus Christ? The stories in the Gospel of Matthew contribute to the answer; they add a color, and expression, a trait of great intensity, they paint him as the healer: It is astonishing that this color, this vivid expression of his nature, this powerful trait of his character, has more and more been lost in our time. The grayish colors of a moral teacher, the tense expression of a social reformer, the soft traits of a suffering servant have prevailed, at least amongst our painters and theologians and life-of-Jesus novelists; perhaps not so much in the hearts of the people who need somebody to heal them. The gospels, certainly, are not responsible for this disappearance of power in the picture of Jesus. They abound in stories of healing; but we are responsible, ministers, laymen, theologians, who forgot that “Savior” means “healers,” he who makes whole and sane what is broken and insane, in body and mind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
The woman who encountered Jesus was made whole, the demoniac who met him was liberated from his mental cleavage. Those who are disrupted, split, disintegrated, are healed by him. And because this is so, because this power has appeared on Earth, the Kingdom of God has come upon us; this is the answer Jesus gives to the Pharisees when they discuss his power of healing the mentally possessed; this is the answer he gives to the Baptist to overcome his doubts; this is the order he gives to his disciples when he sends them to the towns of Israel. “And as ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of God is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” That is why they shall do and for this he gives them authority and power; for in him is the kingdom of Go has appeared, and its nature is salvation, healing of that which is ill, making whole what is broken. All we still able to experience this power? I do not speak of theological inhibitions about the acceptance of such a picture of Christ. They do not weigh very heavily. Of course we were worried about miracle stories for many decades; today we know what the New Testament always knew—that miracles are signs pointing to the presence of a divine power in nature and history, and that they are in no way negations of natural laws. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Of course, we were and we are worried about the abuse of religious healing for commercial and other selfish purposes or about its distortion into magic and superstition. However, when the right use is lacking and superstitions arise, the abuses occur because faith has become weak. All these are not serious problems; good theology and good practice can solve them. However, the serious problem is, as always, the problem of our own existence. Are we healed, have we received healing forces, here and there from the power of the picture of Jesus the Savior? Are we grasped by this power? Is it strong enough to overcome our neurotic trends, the rebellion of unconscious strivings, the split in our conscious being, the diseases which disintegrate our minds and destroy our bodies at the same time? Have we overcome in moments of grace the torturing anxiety in the depth of our hearts, the restlessness which never ceases moving and whipping us, the unordered desires and the hidden repressions which return as poisonous hate, the hostility against ourselves and others, against life itself, the hidden will to death? Have we experienced now an then in the moments of grace that we are made whole, that destructive spirits have left us, that psychic compulsions are dissolved, that tyrannical mechanisms in our soul are replaced by freedom; that despair, this most dangerous of all splits, this real sickness unto death, is healed and we are saved from self-destruction? Has this happened to us under the power of the picture of Jesus as the Savior? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
This is the real problem, the true Christological problem (theologically speaking), the question of life and death (humanly speaking), for every Christian and of Christendom of today. Do we go to the physicians lone, or to the psychotherapists alone or to the counsellors alone in order to be healed? Sometimes, of course, we should go to the, but do we also go to or—more precisely—do we also receive the healing power in the picture of Jesus the Christ who is called the Savior? This is the question before us, and this question is answered by those who can tell us that they have experienced his healing power, that the New Being has grasped their bodies and their soul, that they have become whole and same again, that salvation has come upon them. Not always, of course, but in those moments which are moments of grace and in which they are anticipated the perfect wholeness, the wholeness of God being in all. Can we join this answer? To believe that this quest is only for religious people, or for impractical dreamers, and not for reasonable people or for mortals active in the World is to believe something that is untrue. The laity, the masses, are entitled to be told that a higher truth exists, that they can come to it when they can cope with it, tat it is up to them to equip themselves with needed qualifications. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Just because most people appear to have superficial interests and are not yet ready for the deeper thoughts of philosophy does not necessarily mean that they are not making spiritual progress. One the contrary, they may be doing very well on their own particular levels of development. It will simply be necessary for them to incarnate many more times before they are capable of understanding the more advanced truths. Aspirants come from the low, the middle, and the high strata of life—with most probably from middle. No age is unsuited to be the study and practice of philosophy. No one is too young to begin it, nor too late. Although the middle-age and elderly, being more experiences, are more receptive to the ideas of emotional control and personal detachment, philosophy is not necessarily a subject fit only for those in their Sunset years. Mortals who are seized by ambition, who want money, prestige, honours, power, will not welcome the idea of detachment, and they are right. For they are not yet ready for it: they need to gain the fruits of their desires, to experience the strivings and accomplishments from which the truth about them can be deduced. Only after the lessons have been learned can they be in a position to reflect properly and impartially upon this idea and appreciate its worth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
One who is afraid to touch this study because one is afraid of spoiling one’s Worldly career is unfit for it. Nevertheless, it is an error to believe that those who shed such a fear are called upon to forget their tasks or shirk their responsibilities and duties in this World. They are not. If they become indoctrinated with the ideas here taught, they can succeed in their tasks and duties; they need not fail. Those who live in a private realm of far-fetched phantasies which are caricatures of the real facts, as well as those who betray all the signs of neuroticism, hysteria, or psychopathy, often talk overmuch about the quest but do not seem able to apply its most elementary injunctions. To encourage them to follow it is only still further to build up their ridiculous egoism and bolster their fool’s paradise. For them the quest is unachievable until they become different persons. The unequal balance of the whole psyche is a characteristic of those seekers who impatiently shun the philosophic discipline. Hence we find that emotional neuroticism, intellectual disorder, volitional weakness, and egotistical excess are strongly marked in a number of people who take a fussy, shrieking interest in mysticism. They seek ardently for teachers but not for truth, for personalities rather than principles. They surrender themselves eagerly to visible organization but not to the invisible God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
It does not occur to them that the absence of proper qualifications unfits them for personal discipleship under competent master. For anyone to express even a hint of this unfitness is to arouse their anger, provoke their hostility, and stiffen their conceit. And if one goes out to suggest, in however kindly and constructive a manner, that their energies would be more profitably directed towards self-improvement than towards running after incompetent teachers and absurd sects, one is rewarded by abuse and vilification. Neither a dry pedantic intellectualism nor a sloppy excitable emotionalism is desirable in the seeker after truth. It is not for irresponsible persons, those of feeble will or hysterical nerves. It is wrong to look upon this quest as one for semi-lunatics, emotionally disturbed persons, or gullible, brainless miracle-hunters. It is not a place for the deposit of sickness, troubles, and deficiencies. Such things must be taken elsewhere for repair. All too many people take to this quest who are not really ready for it, who need to become human beings before seeking the more massive achievement of becoming superhuman ones, who ought to attain personal decency, balance, discipline, practicality, and calmness before losing themselves in the theoretical flights of spirituality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Truth is discoverable but not by everyone. It is not discoverable by criminals who break every ethical law, by lazy who will not pause and look within each day, by the cynics who sneer at the quality of reverence, by those who do not value it enough to cultivate their true intelligence. Does everyone have the right to know this truth? Yes and no. Yes—because all mortals must do so in the end as a part of the fulfilment of life’s purpose. No—when they are as yet uninterested in it and unable or unwilling to receive it. If our thought is to be straight and fearless we ought to fling all prejudices overboard at the very start of our voyage. The prejudiced mortal with one’s prejudices confirmed not contradicted. One is not really looking for truth. Before the quest can ever begin, prejudices must be removed. This is a psychological operation which the mortal cannot preform upon oneself, expect in part, without a great effort. The fool cannot follow this Quest. One may try to but one will be sent back to learn some wisdom through Earthly lessons and through Earthly difficulties brought on by one’s foolishness. Flighty temperaments, which seek the latest novelty rather than the first truth, are unfit for philosophy. The very name “Quest” implies movement, travelling, journey; those who remain stationary cannot be said to be on the “Quest.” By this I do not mean those who find themselves stagnating against their will, but those who make no effort inwardly to advance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The truth is sometimes so spiky and so uncomfortable that people hide from it. Entry on the quest is a sign that enough courage has been gathered to face it. Those who assert that they are questers but who are too much in love with their own fancies are incapable of facing the realities being those fancies. To this extent their quest is a bogus one, although not usually a consciously bogus one. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them! No factory can manufacture divine peace for us, nor can any workshop turn out the inspirations which bestow heroism on a mortal. We may wander the whole length of Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, China and find no shop which can sell us a packet of starry truths that might comfort and console. The morning post will bring a hundred letters in the office mail, but it will not bring one word or hint that shall conduct us nearer the higher aims. “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved,” reports Romans 8.20-24. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
At times, I feel them. You might say we feel each other. Jesus was called a physician, and it is the physician for whom we ask first when we are looking for health. And this is good. For, as all generations knew, there is healing power in nature. And if this power is wisely used and skillfully assisted, much healing is possible. Those who despise this assist and rely on the power of their will ignore both the destructive might and the constructive friendliness of nature. They do not know that our body contains not only the forces of discord between its elements but also forces of concord. The great physician is one who does not easily cut off parts and does not easily suppress the one function in favor of the other, but one who strengthens the whole so that within the unity of the body the struggling elements can be reconciled. And even if deep traces of former struggles in our body remain, this is possible as long as we are live. You have launched upon a quest from which there is no turning back. You have embarked upon a journey which will demand from you the utmost patience and deepest faith, the strongest determination and cultivation of the keenest intelligence lying latent within you. This Quest is not an undertaking of a few weeks of months. It is, as I have often said, a lifetime’s work: patience is required from us and must be given by us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Yes, one may discover the elusive secret of life—but one must first work for it. The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price. Take a few minutes off each day to find yourself, to question yourself, to awaken yourself—that is part of the price demanded. The physician can help, one can keep us alive, but can one make us whole? Can one give us salvation? If discord, cleavage, restlessness rule our mental life, if there is no unity and therefore no freedom in our soul, if we are possessed by compulsions and fantasies, by disordered anxiety and disordered aggression, if mental disorder or disease are threatening or have conquered us, certainly not. Time and growth are needed before a mortal can sign that absolute commitment of mind and life for which it asks. Spoiled plans or disappointed hopes may turn a mortal toward this quest but only appreciation of peace or love of truth can keep one on it. If we want to be healed, we ask for help of friends or counselors or analysts or psychiatrists. And they, if they know what to do, try to assist the healing powers of our soul. They do not appeal to our will power; they do not ask for removal or suppression of any trend, but they work for reconciliation, reconciliation of the struggle forces of our soul. They accept us as we are and make it possible for us to look at ourselves honestly and with clarity, to realize the strange mechanisms under which we are suffering and to dissolve them, reconciling the genuine forces of our soul with each other and making us free for thought and action. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Only when one’s quest becomes a whole-heartedly single-minded enterprise, working for a solitary end, disregarding all else yet retaining the sense of balance is it likely to succeed. No vow of secrecy will be required of one, no pledge of loyalty demanded from one; one must enter the scattered formless order by a silent act of one’s whole heart, not by a vocal utterance of one’s fleshly lips. It is too presumptuous for an ordinary mortal to attempt to follow the philosophic path? We answer that no mortal who feels the need of truth to support or guide one’s life should be regarded as presumptuous in this matter. One need not be discouraged. One need may dabble or penetrate deeply. The path is for one also. However, it is so only to the extent that one is willing to pay the cost—no more. One is free to pay as little, and get as little, as one wishes. No one has the right to force one to give more. The counselor and psychiatrist can help; one can liberate us, but can one make us whole? Can one give us salvation? If we are not able to use our freedom and if we are conquered by the tragic conflicts of our existence, certainly not. None of us is isolated. We belong to our past, to our families, classes, groups, nations, cultures. And in all of them health and infirmary are fighting with each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
How can we be whole if the culture is split within itself, if every value is denied by another one, if every truth is questioned, if every decision is good and bad at the same time? How can we be whole if the institutions in which we live create temptations, conflicts, catastrophes too heavy for each of us? How can we be whole if we are connected, often intimately connected with people who are in discord with themselves, in hostility against us, or if we have to live with people, individuals, groups, nations who are irreconciled and sick? This is the situation of all of us, and this situation reacts on our personal life, disrupts the concord we may have reached. The reconciliation in our souls and often even in our bodies breaks down in the encounter with reality. Who heals reality? Who brings us a new reality? Who reconciles the conflicting forces of our whole existence? We look at those who are most responsible for our institutions, for our historical reality, the leaders, the political leaders, the wise administration, the educated, the good people, the revolutionary masses. There are healing powers in all of them, otherwise there would be no more history. And it is understandable that in the period of Jesus just rulers were called saviors and healers. They can maintain human life on Earth; but can they make us whole, can they bring us salvation? #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
They cannot because they themselves need wholeness and are longing for salvation. Who heals the healer? There is no answer to this antiquated reality. Everybody and every institution are infected, the healer and the healed. Only a new reality can make us whole, breaking into the old one, reconciling it with itself. It is the humanly incredible, ecstatic, often defeated, but never conquered faith of Christianity that this new reality which was always at work in history, has appeared in fullness and power in Jesus, the Christ, the Healer and Savior. This is said of Christ because Jesus alone does not give another law for thought or action, because Christ does not cut off anything or suppress anything that belongs to life, but because Jesus is the reality of reconciliation, because in Christ a new reality has come upon us in which we and our whole existence are accepted and reunited. We know, even when we confess this faith, that the old reality of conflict and infirmary has not disappeared. Our bodies ail and die, our souls are restless, our World is a battlefield of individuals groups. However, the new reality cannot be thrown out. We live from it, even if we do not know it. For it is the power of reconciliation whose work is wholeness and whose name is love. “And he called him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity,” reports Matthew 10.1. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
People find truth only to the degree that they are entitled to do so. Their aspiration is not enough by itself to determine this degree; their mental, moral, and intuitional equipment also determines it. Whether one is able to follow regular periods of prayer or not, one may still have the basic essential for spiritual advancement. This is the fundamental mood of aspiration, a strong yearning to gain the consciousness of one’s innermost being. The traveler on this quest is a mortal who uses one’s consciousness and one’s will to better one’s character and purify one’s heart. The aspirant who comes to the Quest out of pure disinterested love for it rather out of a hunger for occult powers or a thirst for occult experiences, who seeking to know and do the right thing, will go ahead much more quickly and encounter much fewer dangers than the others who are not. If one has not become convinced of one’s weakness and wickedness, one cannot even set foot on this path, for only then will one be really rather than vocally willing to desert narcissism. There are not many who are ready for such independence of attitude and life. A certain inner strength is necessary for it first of all, and of course a natural or acquired willingness to desert the herds if necessary. When a mortal is ready to confess one’s ignorance, one is ready to begin one’s study of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Very few people want to be lonely. Most try to find love. No one really wishes to live in constant interpersonal chaos or to be the cause of frequent disruptions of human relationships. Loneliness is ultimately an internal, subjective human experience. Therefore, in order to effectively combat its lethal influence, medicine must adopt techniques and approaches that go beyond the current scientific-objective approach of infirmary. Medicine must move beyond science to deal with this problem. We must use scientific objectivity to hep us understand human relationships as a philosophical attitude widely shared in our society that is causing rather than alleviating loneliness. Some people find that they are satisfied by the sheer pleasure of being in the midst of activity. They need to be around people, to absorb that colour and vitality of lives being actively lived. Many people want to feel like they are part of the human race. To feel that their lives are worthwhile, others need to participate in something larger than themselves. And not everything is about finding romance nor romantic love. People need to know that somewhere, at least for a few hours a week, their presence is expected and their efforts make a difference. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
When a mortal is ready to drop the distorting influence of the emotions and passions which actuate one, one is ready to begin the study of philosophy. Life with spiritual beings—here the relation is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We are no You and yet feel addressed; we answer—creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth. However, how can we incorporate into the World of the basic word what is possessed outside language? In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner. I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with Earth and air—and the growing itself in its darkness. I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life. I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law—those laws according to which the elements mix and separate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition. However, it can also happen, I will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. This does not require me to forego any of those modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number include and inseparably fused. Whatever belongs to the tree is included: it form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars—all this in its entirety. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity. Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. However, thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
One who knows that one has been ignorant of truth, and still is, has begun to enter the knowledge of truth. This is not for those who are so satisfied with themselves that they want to preserve their egos just as they are. It is for those who feel the need of self-improvement, and feel it so keenly that they are willing to work hard for this objective and to take time for it. The Quest is for those who have looked at their own faults and turned their head away from the unattractive and disconcerting sight with downcast eyes. However, although their weaknesses have clung in the past to them like limpets, philosophy bids them take hope and take to the Quest which can liberate and strengthen them in the future. Those who had had their fills of society, who have found its gaiety and its friendship to be all on the surface, who have evaluated it as bogus, sham, and unreal, may be prepared to listen more heedfully to the description of a life that is offered as being much more worthwhile. In a mortals higher yearnings, in one’s wishes for a better holier calmer self, one shows evidences of intuition. Our capacity as human beings to imagine, to think, to wonder, to be conscious are all degrees of freedom. In the realm of the mind, there is no limits. In our imaginations we can instantaneously transport ourselves back three thousand years and listen to blind antiquated Homer reciting his tales around a campfire in Macedonia. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Or we can take our place, again instantaneously, on a stone seat in the theater of Dionysus in classical Athens and be enthralled by the drama of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Or we can project ourselves into the future any number of years we wish. The fact that all of these acts can be done instantaneously—that we can conquer space and time simultaneously—is itself indicative of the nature of freedom. Personal freedom can be soon as the range of movement possible for the organism. Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that there are four kinds of existence. First are inert things, like rocks, which simply exist. Second are the things that exist and grow, like plants and trees. Third are things that exist and grow and move about, like animals. Fourth are creatures that exist, grow, move, and think, like human beings. (For us the term consciousness would be more accurate.) Each of these stages represent a radically increased freedom, seen in the range of movement, over the preceding one. As Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann phrased it, we are born with freedom in the sense of the potentiality for movement of the infant. “The free play of the limbs, which gives to the human nursling so much richer possibilities than the new-born monkey or ape reminds us that our own state at birth is not simply helpless but is characterized by a significant freedom.” This freedom of movement, which, contemporary experiments demonstrate, begins even in the uterus, is given a great boost when the umbilical cord is cut, and continues as the new born grows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
One leaps ahead in the infant’s range of movement is when the child can crawl, another leap when it learns to walk, another when he or she does off to school. All of these are quantum increases in the range of movement of the human child—in nautical terms, the cruising range. The movement is increasingly psychological as well as physical, the psychological having its roots in the great leap in the child’s learning to talk. All of these leaps from birth on, these events in which one differentiates oneself from parents, can be seen as psychological rebirth experiences. Hence, they are anxiety-creating as well as challenging. At adolescence there are other quantum leaps that increase the young person’s range of movement, most notably in the realm of pleasures of the flesh. One experiences the alarming possibility of being able. Going off to college, marrying, earning a living, moving to a new city—all can be seen as increases in the person’s range of freedom. Freedom is a moving out while retaining the human bond to the persons, particularly the mother, at home. There is a delicate balance between these two poles. If there is too little wandering out and too much dependence on the home, freedom is being surrendered in favor of security, which turns out then to be an escape from freedom. If there is too much wandering out and too little security at home, the person may get pathologically anxious and may retrench in other ways that cut off his or her freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Each of these new levels of movement consists of the enlarging of one’s cruising range by cutting the biological ties with home and mother and father and establishing psychological and spiritual ties in their place. We saw, in the case of Louis de Pointe du Lac, as he came to terms with past and present in his talk with his mother, that he no loner talked about what she should have done for him, but rather what she did do for him. He admired and valued her. Obviously his mother had not changed: the change in memory really came from a change in Louis’s attitude. At his stage in life, the dynamic question is very rarely “What happened?” but rather “What is your attitude toward what happened?” The achievement of freedom now makes it possible for Louis to change the context for viewing his mother. It is freedom of being. The last and ultimate leap in this growth of movement, in this pilgrim’s progress, occurs one’s death bed, when we go through the last stage of differentiation. In therapy—the central purpose being, as I have said, to help the patient discover, establish, and use one’s freedom—I find it important, when the patient pleads total powerlessness, to remind one that one put one foot in front of the other to get to my office. And one can leave. On that range of freedom, minute as it is, we can begin building. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Each step in the growth in differentiation carries a new sense of responsibility equivalent to the new freedom. The sense of response-ability, as the word may be understood, involves an awareness of others’ needs as we live in the community of the family or the village together with a capacity to respond to the needs also of one’s own self. We choose our way of responding to the other people who make up the context in which our freedom develops. The paradox that one can be free only as one is responsible is central at every point in freedom. However, the converse is just as true: one can be responsible as one is free. This is the reason why the argument that we are totally determined breeds irresponsibility. You have to have some sense that your decisions genuinely matter to take responsibility for them. The sense of responsibility begins in the relation of infant to mothers: as he grows older, the infant learns that mother has her own needs. She does not come every time he cries, and he does not inflict pain on his mother because he sees the eliciting look of pain in her face. Thus growth always has two simultaneous sides: freedom and responsibility, one equivalent to the other, one necessary for the other. We do not let our three-year-old child cross Zhongshan Road in Shanghai to get to the Bund by himself; he has not yet developed sufficient responsibility to be permitted this freedom. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The aim of art, the aim of la life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every person and in the World. Since it limits freedom, responsibility is one aspect of the destiny pole. So long as we are born of woman (in contrast to cloning) we shall have to come to terms with mother not only as a source of food, not in the sense Egyptians did before mummification, but increasingly as a person carrying one’s own destiny. Freedom for oneself increases as one’s awareness of the destiny of others increases. It is significant that the new capacity for freedom related to movement is actualized as a form of art. Human beings dance—ballet and folk and jazz and ballroom and the flamingo—as an expression of aesthetic possibilities. Each art form is developed as a ritual to express one’s exhilaration and freedom. To us, rock music represents freedom…the freedom to feel, to be one with a higher collective force, to move together in one cosmic rhythm. One dances for joy, or to express passion or religious feelings, as in the whirling of Aaliyah in the Are You That Somebody music video, to drum up emotion for battle, like the war dances of the Native Americans. Movement and the expansion of freedom are symbolic expressions of the individual’s career from birth to death. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. Moral strength is needed by the quester. This path requires something more than a search for righteousness or peace. It requires the aspirant to make oneself more sensitive to the sorrows and struggles of humankind, ignorance-born and karmically earned thought they may be, to imbue oneself with a wise, prudent, and balanced compassion. One must advance from an outwardly-compulsively goodness to an inwardly-natural goodness. Such away of life, with if chained desires, holy communion, and sensitive compassion, gives any mortal a higher stature. It is easy to fall into a gloomy pessimism and say that the spiritual life is not for one, that one is unfit to practice its arduous exercises and that one has better abandon what is manifestly only for those blessed with luck or genius. Yet one would be wrong to assume that because the path is not easy one is mistake in aspiring to it. Because it is not just a matter of daydreaming, nor passing from one thrilling inner experience to another, because hard work and unflagging perseverance are demanded from one, there is still no need to despair. An interesting question confronts us here. Are freedom of doing and freedom of being contradictory? Why is it that some people achieve essential freedom only when everything in the existential World becomes unfree? #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
It seems to have been the experience of the survivors of the concentration camps that only once their freedom was taken away that they learned to really be free. Solzhenitsyn testifies that this was true in his years in the Russian work camps—when all freedom of doing was taken away, he felt himself pushed back to the level of essential freedom. It was, moreover, the experience of freedom marchers who were thrown into prison, as shown by the several books that subsequently came out by the marchers. Saint Paul states that in bondage the Christian is freed, a sentence that seems hopelessly paradoxical at first but takes on meaning the more one thinks about it. One will need much courage for the Quest because one will be confronted by two powerful enemies. One is oneself, the other is society. Within oneself an individual will have to do battle against the great desires. Within society one will have to contend against great traditions. If only one possess faith in oneself, one can successfully overcome the magnitude of one’s tasks, courage in one’s vision, and the resolve to shape one’ life for its higher welfare. However, do we get to essential freedom only when our everyday existence is interrupted? For as long as most human beings can settle for bread and comfort, they will do so, the Grans Inquisitor argues. However, when bread and comfort are no longer available, as people then—and only then—pushed to their essential depths of experience? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
If we answer yes to these questions, we deny the popular idea that human beings move up through a hierarchy of needs from the biological to the psychological to the spiritual. It would mean, rather, that people evolve by conflict and struggle, and there is no simple and placid evolution from lower needs to higher ones. When lower needs are not met, they are forced into higher needs. Fasting as a way of reaching religious truth is one example of this. Calamity theory is another example. It says in effect that in calamity, in hardship, many people are forced to look inward and to take the necessary leaps to higher levels, as we have noted above. Is confinement, including the simple fact of having time to think, one aspect of what is necessary for the experience of essential freedom? John Lilly thinks confinement is essential in experiments in isolation tanks: the person floats in complete darkness in a tank in which one is weightless and without any stimuli from the outside World. Then apparently radical and often highly beneficial things happen to some people in their sense of freedom of being. When human beings can no longer escape—when they can no longer run about, go to this movie or that, surrender to their TV addiction, or fill their time with diversions—when these escape avenues are no longer open to them, they must listen to themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
However, here we arrive at a fascinating question: Is not our destiny itself our concentration camp? Is not the destiny that impinges upon us that which forces us to see our bondage? Does not the engaging of our destiny—which is the design of our life—hedge us about with the confinement, the sobriety, indeed, often the cruelty, which forces us to look beyond the limits of day-to-day action? Is not the inescapable fact of death, whether we are young or mature, the concentration camp of us all? Is not the fact that life is a joy and a bondage at the same time enough to drive us to consider the deeper aspect of being? This is the greatness of life and our quiet desperation in the same instant. The struggle of CORE to help African American people turn the wonderful proclamation of freedom put on paper by President Abraham Lincoln into real and actual freedom. Out of the battles he and his followers went through and the violence they had to endure, James Farmer declares: “In the very act of working for the impersonal cause of racial freedom, a mortal experiences, almost like grace, a large measure of private freedom. Or call it a new comprehension of one’s own identity, an intuition of the expanding boundaries of oneself.” This radical source of freedom is the freedom of being. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Whoever comes to this quest is unlikely to stay long with its pursuit unless one comes with considerable devotion and correct evaluation of its spiritual importance. James Farmer describes one incident in which he and his followers endured the brutality of the police, and “the men and women who stood between me and the lynch mob gradually, during the course of those two violent says, made the decision to act instead of being acted upon.” If the impulse to embark on this quest is to be something more than an unstable fancy, a calm perception of its stubborn difficulties and a most especially frank recognition of its self-refusing demands, is needed. That mortal is mistaken who comes to the quest expecting its rewards without its pains, its peace without its emotional crucifixions, its strength without its bodily mortifications. The quest is unattractive to sinners and unnecessary to saints. It is for those who are not wholly indifferent to Worldly desires nor yet too strongly attached to them. The quest is to be neither an emotional fancy nor an intellectual whim; it has to become something steady, deep-rooted, and strong-sapped in a mortal’s life. One will possess an irrefragable faith in the power of truth, holding that even if it were crushed and obliterated today time will cause it to rise again tomorrow and give it a fresh voice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Recently I spent three months in Germany and what I saw was people who were heavy with burdens, too heavy to be carried away by sorrows too deep to be forgotten. And what their faces expressed, their words confirmed: Tales of horror, stories of pain and despair, anxieties dwelling in their blood, confusions and self-contradictions disturbing their minds. And if you look deeper into them you find guilt-feeling, sometimes expressed, mostly repressed for it hides itself under passionate denials of guilt, under self-excuse and accusations of others, under a mixture of hostility and humility, of self-pity and self-hate. However, within this nation, I found people who were healthy, not because the infirmary was not written in their faces also. But something else was in them, a healing power, making them whole in spite of their disruption, making them serene in spite of their sorrow, making them examples for all of us, examples of what could and should happen to us. To us? But are we not a healthy nation? That certainly is what you believe when you return from Germany and Europe to this country! The faces of most people are shaped by smiles and not by tears. There is benevolence towards each other and even towards enemies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
People here are willing to admit their shortcomings such as discrimination, exploitation, destructive competition. They are used to acting spontaneously and not under compulsions imposed on them by tyrants or conquerors, or what is even more difficult, imposed on them by newspapers, radios and public opinion polls, these tyrants of modern democracy. A healthy nation! However, we read that in this nation almost 40 percent of all those young men and women who are rejected by the Armed Services are unacceptable because of mental disturbances and maladjustments. And we hear that of all illnesses mental illness is by far the most widespread in this country. What does this mean? It is a symptom of serious danger for our health. There may be something in the structure of our institutions which produces illnesses in more and more people. It may, for instance, be that the unlimited, ruthless competition which deprives everybody of a feeling of security, makes many in our healthy nation sick; not only those who are unsuccessful in competition, but also those who are most successful. And so something surprising occurs: We have fought victoriously against many forms of bodily sickness. We have discovered drugs with an almost miraculous power. The average length of our lives has been stretched beyond any former expectation. However, many in our nation cannot stand this health. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
Some people in our nation want sickness as a refuge into which they can escape from the harshness of an insecure life. And since the medical care has made it more difficult to escape into bodily illness, they choose mental illness. However, does not everybody dislike sickness, the pain, the discomfort and the danger connected with it? Of course, we dislike our sickness with some parts of our souls; but we like it with some other parts, mostly unconsciously, sometimes even consciously. However, nobody can be healed especially of mental disorders and diseases who does not want it with one’s whole heart. And this is why they have become almost an epidemic in this country. People are fleeing into a situation where others must take care of them, where they exercise power through weakness or where they create an imaginary World in which it is nice to live as long as real life does not touch them. Do not underestimate this temptation. The basic insecurity of human existence and the driving anxiety connected with it are felt everywhere and by everyone. It is human heritage and it is increased immensely by our present World, even in this country full of heal and vigor. As in ours, so in the period of Jesus much talk was going on of sickness and healing. Jewish people and Greeks wrote about it. People felt that they lived in a sick period; they called it “this World-period” and they described it in a way which is very similar to the way in which we describe today. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
People saw not only bodily infirmity of all of us, the innumerable bodily diseases in the masses of the people, they also saw the destructive powers possessing the minds of many. They called the mentally ill the possessed or the demoniacs and they tried to expel the evil spirits. They also knew that nations can be sick and that the diseases of social classes infect every individual in it. They looked even beyond the boundary lines of humankind into the nature and spoke in visionary ecstasy about this Earth becoming old and sick just as we did when we were under the first shock of the atomic power of self-destruction. Out of this knowledge of a sick period the question of a new period, a reality of healthy and wholeness was asked. Salvation and a Savior were expected. However, salvation is healing. And the Savior is the healer. Therefore, Jesus answers the anxious question of the Baptist about whether he is the Savior, by pointing to his healing power. This is what Christ says: “If I am able to heal the hearing impaired and the visually impaired, if I am able to liberate the mentally sick, then a new reality has come upon you!” There are many healing stories in the Gospels, a stumbling block for scholars and preachers and teachers, because they take them as miracle stories of the past instead of taking them as healing stories of the present. For this they are. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
These stories show that the human situation, the relation between bodily and mental disease, between sickness and guilt, between the desire of being healed and the fear of being healed. It is astonishing how many of our profoundest modern insights into human nature are anticipated in these stories: They know that becoming healthy means becoming whole, reunited, in one’s bodily and psychic functions. They know that the mentally sick are afraid of the process of healing, because it throws them out of the limited but safe house of their neurotic self-seclusion, they know that the process of mental healing is a difficult and painful one, accompanied by convulsion of body and soul. They tell of the relation of guilt and disease, of the way in which unsolved conflicts of our conscience drive us to those cleavages of body and soul which we call sickness. We are told how Jesus, knowing this, pronounces to the mobile impaired first the forgiveness of one’s sins and then one’s regained health. The mortal lived in an inner struggle with oneself, with one’s feelings of guilt. Out of this conflict one’s illness had grown; and now when Jesus forgives one, one feels reconciled with oneself and the World; one becomes whole and healthy. There is little in our recent psychology of depth that surpasses these insights in truth and depth. These stories also describe the attitude which makes healing possible. They call it faith. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
Faith here, of course, does not mean the belief in assertion for which there is no evidence. It is never meant that in genuine religion, and it never should be abused in this sense. However, faith means being grasped b a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us. Surrender to this power is faith. The people whom Jesus could heal and can heal are those who did and do this self-surrender to the healing power in him. They surrendered their persons, split, contradicting themselves, disgusted and despairing about themselves, hateful of themselves and therefore hostile towards everybody else; afraid of life, burdened with guilt feelings, accusing and excusing themselves, fleeing from others into loneliness. Feeling from themselves to others, trying finally to escape from the threats of existence into the painful and deceptive safety of mental and bodily disease. As such beings they surrendered to Jesus and this surrender is what we call faith. However, he did not keep them, as a god helper should never do. He gave them back to themselves, as new creatures, healed and whole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
And when Jesus returned to Heaven he left a group of people who, in site of much anxiety and discord and weakness and guilt, had the certitude that they were healed, and that the healing power amongst them was great enough to conquer individuals and nations all over the World. If we are grasped by the new reality which has appeared in Christ, we belong to these people. We have the Savior’s healing power ourselves. Those who are willing to take themselves in hand, ready to trample on their lower natures, are alone fit for this quest. They are few. The others, who come to it for its sensational, dramatic, physical, and occult possibilities, hover around the entrance, but never get on the path itself. The quest is neither for outright saints nor for outright sinners. It is for those who are conscious of having terrestrial passions and human weaknesses, but who are struggling against them and striving for self-mastery. Just as sickness creates appreciation of the vale of good health, so life’s anxieties create appreciation of inner peace. However, this peace cannot be had without a measure of self-control and self-reform, which calls for use of the will. In life with nature, the relation vibrates in the dark and remains below language. The creatures stir across from us, but they are unable to come to us, and our language sticks with them. Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
But all this happened without my knowledge, my vigilance, or my collusion, for I was long gone from such things. If the quest is only an emotional whim or an intellectual fad for a mortal, one will make little headway with it. If on the contrary it is something on which one’s deepest happiness depends and one is ready to give what it demands from every candidate, if one is resolved to go ahead and never desert it, one will possess a fair chance. “Slavery is founded in the selfishness of mortal’s nature—opposition to it is one’s love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension bring them, shocks an throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow,” reports President Abraham Lincoln. Whereas the freedom of doing refers to the act, the freedom of being refers to the context out of which the urge to act emerges. It refers to the deeper level of one’s attitudes and is the fount out of which freedom of doing is born. Hence, I call this second kind of freedom essential freedom. This is illustrated in Bruno Bettelheim’s testimony concerning his two years in a concentration camp during the Second World War. He had no freedom of doing at all; he was powerless to change the actions of the SS. However, he did have what he calls ultimate freedom, the freedom to choose his attitude toward his captors. This freedom of being, or essential freedom, involves the ability to reflect, to ponder, out of which the freedom to ask questions, whether spoken or not, emerges. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
A prisoner in San Quentin gives us our springboard here. This prisoner was a Chicano and a poet. He could not take the pushing around in the prison, and hence for give years he had been held in solitary confinement, which, with a strange irony, is called in San Quentin “Maximum Adjustment Center.” Here are the words from his interview: “They have separated me from my family, deprived me of touching my young boy. They have hidden the Sun, Moon, and Starts from my view, exchanged their concrete and steel for Earth and flowers and everything warm and soft. The wind through my hair is replaced by their rules in my ears. All tears are forbidden on the tier. The strength in my muscles is bound by chains and shackles. They have tried to negate my existence—and almost succeeded. They have left me with nothing, nothing except an inner core, a secret, private place they have not yet found how to get to.” The speaker of these words is obviously not trying to select among stimuli. This is clearly a different kind of freedom, expressed in such phrases as” inner core and a secret, private place where they have not yet found how to get to.” He goes on: “It is where I think of who I am, where I try to understand the what and why of y enemies, and where I keep alive my will to live in a hell where I am made to feel like a nothing, at best an animal, a wild animal in captivity.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
We notice that the does not say, “What shall I do,” but rather “I try to understand.” He is engaged in a succession of leaps in his own thoughts, leaps which imply breaking throughs to a new dimension in his relation to himself. This is clearly not a freedom of doing; it is a freedom of being. He tells us also—and this is of great importance—that this is where he keeps alive his will to live. This is a freedom that invigorates, that inspirits, and he rightly interprets it as that which he owes his survival in agonizing loneliness of solitary confinement. He concludes: Although I sometimes get depressed and feel like giving up, the discovery of my thoughts gives me joy. For until they find a way to take my thoughts away, I am free. Knowledge is freedom, and is the source of hope in this most hopeless of all paces. A man can live without liberty but not without freedom.” In that shocking, surprising, unexpected last sentence, he is using the term liberty to refer to the political state. If we have to live under fascism or in prison, hate it as we may, we could survive. However, freedom is essentially an inner state. This core, this secret place, is absolutely necessary for our survival as humans. It is what gives the person a sense of being; it gives one the experience of autonomy, identity, the capacity to use the pronoun “I” with its full range of meaning. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
I do not wish to have this inner freedom confused with the sentimentally subjective statements of it. In the Civil War play Shenandoah, there is a song and dance performed by an African American boy with the words, “Freedom’s just a state of mind.” Was Freedom just a state of mind for Martin Luther King? Was it just a state of mind for Faust, who exchanged his soul for unlimited knowledge and Worldly pleasures? Was it just a state of mine in the temptation of Amadeo? Was freedom just a state of mind for the freedom marchers? Was it just a state of mind for Washington and the Continental Army at Valley Forge? It is just a state of mind for those in the women’s liberation movement? There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history. This includes Bruno Bettelheim’s ultimate freedom, the affecting of history coming in his insightful books after the concentration camp. It includes the freedom described by the prisoner in San Quentin, its effect on history consisting, for one thing, in our quoting him here. The subjective and objective sides of freedom can never be separated from each other. “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. Ignorance is a cure for noting. Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life,” reports William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
It is an age-old requirement of the higher self that those who seek its favours shall be ready and willing to empty their hearts of all other affections if called upon to do so. Jesus told us this long ago, and there is nothing that modern inventive genius can do to alter the requirement. To search for truth in its full integrity, putting aside all the pitiful substitutes which content little, less honest minds, requires not only an independence that creates intellectual if not personal loneliness, but also a willingness to abandon egoism and surrender its Worldly advantages. I propose that the prisoner in San Quentin we quoted is freer than his guards. In a poem he wrote in prison we find the words, “though we are wrapped in chains/The jailor is not free!” The qualifications required from him are love of the highest, desire for truth, conformity of living to the divine laws, and balance in his own person. No one can deny that Epictetus, as a slave, was freer than this owner and master. Our prisoner also is experiencing freedom as an inner condition of life, the source of his human dignity and the source of his strength to write poems, “Scratched out from the pit of prison with a worn pencil from my cell.” The seeker who has a strong yearning for Truth and who has a sense of correct values already possess some of the indispensable qualification for this path to freedom, and should go far upon it. However, the will to continue despite all obstacles, together with a special kind of patience, is also essential—particularly in the earlier stages. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The prisoner’s statement “the discover of my thoughts gives me joy” is profound comment with far-reaching implications for our lives as well. His freedom is not a freedom of security, but a freedom of discovery. The joy of the discovery of one’s own thoughts is a truth that we rarely hear from anyone who has not hammered it out on the anvil of years of solitude. One must begin one’s quest with an attitude of deep veneration for something, some power, higher than oneself. A mighty longing for liberation from one’s present condition is a prerequisite for the philosophic quest. The ardent desire to establish one’s true identity needs to be present also. We must bring to the Quest not only all these delicate intuitions and subtle Christian concepts, but also a practical common sense and a sturdy, robust reason. This is a teaching for more evolved people, that is, for those who are fine in character, more sensitive and intelligent in mind than the masses. It is for people to whom the mind’s experiences are not less but even more important than the body’s. The prisoner in San Quentin also tells us that his knowledge is freedom and his source of hope. In the freedom of being new possibilities continually surge up, possibilities of new discoveries about oneself, new flights of imagination, new visions of what the World and living might be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
We should not hope for something, but have the freedom to know is itself hope, regardless of whether anything concrete eventuates or not. Essential freedom is the essence out of which other forms of freedom flow. Most students of this teaching are not highly intellectual. If they had been, the pride and arrogance of intellect would, in most cases, have stopped them from entering such a mystical field. However, neither are they unintelligent. They are sensible, mature, and discerning enough to appreciate the value of its balanced ideal. To obtain something they greatly desire, mortals will arouse their will and apply in strongly. Only when sufficient experience of life matures them sufficiently are they likely to arouse and apply this same will to the Quest itself. Many people criticize those who try harder than others to succeed because they do not understand why they are trying so hard and the challenges they are trying to overcome. It is kind of an oxymoron because usually people shame others for being lazy and not trying to hard enough. Samuel B Fuller was born into rural poverty in Monroe, Ouachita Parish, Louisiana in 1905. The family’s poverty was such that he had to drop out of school in sixth grade. However, his life was an illustration of business success and self-help. Mr. Fuller’s career as an entrepreneur started after he borrowed $25 using is car as collateral. He invested in a load of soap from Boyer International Laboratories. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Mr. Fuller started selling soap door-to-door and it inspired him to invest another $1000. In 1929, Samuel Fuller incorporated Fuller Products. In four years, he was promoted to a manager at Commonwealth while continuing to grow his own company to a line of 30 products and hiring additional door-to-door salespeople. This was a time when African Americans were not taken seriously as consumers and businesses and advertisers would not market to their communities. However, Mr. Fuller has tremendous success ad the Fuller Products saw tremendous expansion. The growth was sufficient for the company to open its own factory in 1939. In 1947, Mr. Fuller purchased Boyer, and kept his identity a secret to prevent is bankruptcy. The company began to manufacture and sell a diverse line of commodities from deodorant and hair care to hosiery and men’s suits. Mr. Fuller was probably the richest African American man in the United States of America. His company had $18,000,000.00 ($189,860,414.94 in 2019 dollars) in sales and a sales force of five thousand (33 percent of them European American). However, after people found out that Mr. Fuller was African American, people organized boycotts of Fuller’s product line during the 1950s. Shortly after, Mr. Fuller went bankrupt. So, not all people have had an easy time in life, and that is why they try so hard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Nevertheless, on a macro scale, times have changed and many people have faith, no matter what obstacles are in their path that they can achieve success. To obtain somethings they greatly desire, many will arouse their will and apply it strongly. Only when sufficient experience of life matures them sufficiently are they likely to arouse and apply this same will to the Quest itself. A would-be follower of this path need not be concerned if one lack intellect and has had an imperfect education. One should accept what one can understand of the books one studies and leave the rest for some future time. What is needed much more than intellect is humility, intuition, and intelligence, which many intellectuals do not possess. People are needed with intellectual acumen, with emotional control, with balance reason, with loyalty to ideals and with sincerity and faithfulness in working for them. They are to be undeterred by criticism and unmoved by praise. And lastly, amid the arduous struggles of this quest, its soaring thoughts and serious comprehensions of World-sorrows, a sense of humour is needed also. Those who care enough for advanced ideas to seek them out in spite of social rebuffs, as well as those who have the courage to explore what is waiting beyond already accepted ones, have become marked proportion of questers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
In the concept of freedom we have what Archimedes sought but did not find, a fulcrum on which reason can rest its ladder, without therefore placing it in the present of in a future World but only in the inner sense of freedom, because it unites both Worlds in itself and must also be the principle of the explanation for both. As the prisoner in San Quentin demonstrates in his interview, this essential freedom is the source of his joy and his spirit. The former is down in his words “it gives me joy.” The Spirit is shown in his courage, his hope, the very fact that he survived and preserved his sanity and his sense of possibility in a situation in which many people would long before have given up in despair and probably taken refuge in psychosis. He says in a poem written while he was in prison that insanity was his constant companion, but he managed to avoid it by his absorption in his writing. Survivors of the concentration camps give similar testimony to this essential freedom and to the fact that the inmates who could choose their own attitudes toward the SS were not spiritually enslaved. If it were necessary, this is pragmatic proof of the reality of their essential freedom. Everyone expects to witness scientific advance made in these modern times but only a few have the mental courage to expect spiritual advance let alone seek it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
It is for those who are ready for the phase of intellectual independence and spiritual individualism, who are courageous enough to face the inner solitariness of the human spirit when it turns from doing to being. That mortal is excellently qualified for philosophy who has a strong spirit for service, who is well-balanced emotionally, and who is well-equipped intellectually. Picasso provides us with al illustration of freedom of being in contrast to freedom of doing. In 1904 Cezanne had advised other painters to interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone. Picasso, a young artist prodigy at the time, ad absorbed the rules and discipline of his craft. He could draw beautifully, and he knew the laws of perspective and proportion. All these are givens, which I will refer to as destiny. Picasso had come to terms with this discipline: in his early blue period, especially in those paintings of the less affluent Spanish, every expression is superbly drawn. This, however, is still freedom of doing, or existential freedom. However, Picasso, an artist of courage and zest, struggles against the boundaries. Was there a way of transcending the antiquated rules, a way of pushing on to new dimensions? #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
In 1907 came the breakthrough with is painting Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. This marked the birth of cubism. No longer was it a question of drawing arms and legs accurately in an academic sense; no longer was it a matter of rendering the fingers exactly as they are in reality. The challenge now was to see the human body as embodying the forms of nature, which Picasso did in this painting with a completeness never before achieved. The question now was ow the lines of the arms and legs of the women in this painting relate to the space, how they fit on the canvas and with each other. The cylinder, the sphere, the cone were now visible before us. When we look at mountains, the curved lines of the plains cut by the vertical lines of trees rising up from horizontal lines of the fields, the cones that we see, all these are part of our bodies and ourselves as shown in the amazing balance with which we walk, the rhythm with which we breathe and with which our hearts beat. We are not saying that cubism is the highest form of art or that everyone must like it, but only that it represents an important—and, for our day, crucial—development. This breakthrough of cubism, foreshadowed by Van Gogh and Gaugin, and certainly Be Cezanne and Matisse, demonstrates the freedom of being in contrast with the freedom of doing. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
The leap was to a new context in which paintings were to be seen. It changed the attitudes with which we look at painting, and it changed the questions artists ask about their work. It cast a new light on our relation to nature. Cubism opens up a host of new possibilities and gives a new unity to ourselves and our Universe. The new way these artists related to space in the first decade of the 20th century, for example, predicted the space age, which was to be take up and reexpressed by intellectuals and scientists in the 1960s. It illustrates how one artist speaks for the whole community of one’s colleagues as well as for one’s self and for one’s culture. The Quest calls for people of the World who are not Worldly, aspirants with clear minds, endowed with common sense, students who will strive to lift themselves from inner mediocrity to inner superiority, followers who will strive to make worthwhile contributions to their environment. If the faculties of mind and the qualities of character which the successful mortal of affairs already possesses were to be transferred to the field of understanding and mastering life itself, one could quickly progress in it. It is not futile dreamers nor neurotics seeking some guru’s shoulders to lean on for the remainder of their years. There exist plenty of cults willing or eager to serve them. It is for those who understand there is real work to be done by, on, for, and within themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Is one sincerely desirous of receiving truth (rather than comfort for one’s illusions and confirmation for one’s beliefs) from God? Is one earnestly willing to obey this leading? It is a mark of the quester that one is utterly sincere in seeking truth, and that one has some depth, enough not to be content with shallow presentations of it. Authenticity of being is a necessary requirement in a would-be disciple. The insincere has better stay away from the quest. If one is determined as one is sincere, as unselfish as self-discipled, as sensitive, as intuitive, one may expect to go far on the quest. In humility the quest is to be begun: in even greater humility it is to be fulfilled. Until one has become conscious of one’s shortcomings, one’s ignorance, and one’s sinfulness, mortals will rest in smug complacency and receive no spur to self-improvement, no impetus to enter the quest. Humility is another name for such consciousness. Hence, its importance is such as to be rated the first of a disciple’s qualifications. It is not for the average mortal but only for the exceptional mortal—for the one who is determined to pursue the meaning of life to the uttermost. When these words awaken profound echoes in a mortal’s soul, one shows thereby that the intuitive element is sufficiently alive to enable one to profit by further teaching. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The life of a human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object. I perceive something. I feel something. I imagine something. I want something. I sense something. I think something. The life of a human being does not consist merely of all this and its like. All this and its like is the basis of the realm of It. But the realm of You has another basis. We are told that people experiences their World. What does this mean? People go over the surfaces of things and experiences them. They bring back from them some knowledge of their condition—an experience. They experiences what there is to things. However, it I not experiences alone that bring the World to mortals. In every kind of situation one will remember that one is dedicated to this quest, will remember its ideals and disciplines, yet not forget that one is still a human being. They are welcome who are willing to equip themselves with proper and profounder knowledge, who wish to fit themselves by study of fundamental principles, by regular prayer, personal self-discipline, and public service for a higher life for themselves and a valuable one for society. The mass of people are apathetic toward the quest: the less affluent for one set of reasons, the rich for another. Only the few capable of individual judgement, the defiant and independent thinkers, will be capable of rising up out of the mass. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves. That is the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all great geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another’s designs. And the dreams, the dreams are but part of a great design. Our Father which are in Heaven—he is our Father—there is nothing real in us which does not come from him. We belong to God. He loves us, since he loves himself and we are his. Nevertheless he is our Father who is in Heaven—not elsewhere. If we think to have a Father here below is not he, it is a God. We cannot take a single step toward him. We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward him. We do not have to search for him, we only have to change the direction in which we are looking. It is for him to search for us. We must be happy in the knowledge that he is infinitely beyond our reach. Thus we can be certain that the evil in us, even if it overwhelms our whole being, in no way sullies the divine purity, bliss, and perfection. Hallowed by they Name—God alone have the power to name himself. His name is unpronounceable for human lips. His name is his word. It is the Word of God. The name of any being is an intermediary between the human spirit and that being; it is the only means by which the human spirit can conceive something about a being that is absent. God is absent. He is in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Mortal’s only possibility of gaining access to him is correction of the petition that the kingdom of God should come. We have to cast aside all other desires for the sake of our desire for eternal life, but we should desire eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not even become attached to detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others. If such a thing were conceivable, we have to think of eternal life as one thinks of water when dying of thirst, and yet at the same time we have to desire that we and our loved ones should be eternally deprived of this water rather than receive it in abundance in spite of God’s will. The three foregoing petitions are related to the three Persons of the Trinity, the Son, the Spirit, and the Father, and also to the three divisions of time, the present, the future, and the past. Give us this day our daily bread—the bread which is supernatural. Christ is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our consent. If we agree to his entry, he enters; directly we cease to want him, he is gone. We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow; we cannot make a pact with him that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves. Our consent to his presence is the same as his presence. Consent is an act; it can only be actual, that is to say in the present. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
We have not been given a will that can be applied to the future. Everything not effective in our will is imaginary. The effective part of the will has its effect at once; its effectiveness cannot be separated from itself. The effective part of the will is not effort, which is directed toward the future. It is consent; it is the ”yes” of marriage. A “yes” pronounced within the present moment and for the present moment, but spoken as an eternal word, for it is consent to the union of Christ with the eternal part of our soul. Bread is a necessity for us. We are beings who continually draw our energy from outside, for as we receive if we use it up in effort. If our energy is not daily renewed, we become feeble and incapable of movement. Besides actual food, in the literal sense of the word, all incentives are sources of energy for us. Money, ambition, consideration, decorations, celebrity, power, our loved ones, everything that put into us the capacity for action is like bread. If any one of these attachments penetrates deeply enough into us to reach the vital roots of our carnal existence, its loss may break us and even case our death. That is called dying of love. It is like dying of hunger. All these objects of attachment go together with food, it the ordinary sense of the word, to make up the daily bread of this World. It depends entirely on circumstances whether we have it or not. We should ask noting with regard to circumstances unless it be that they may conform to the will of God. We should not ask for Earthly bread. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
There is a transcendent energy whose source is in Heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and of our bodies. We should ask for this food. At the moment of asking, and by the very fact that we ask for it, we know that God will give it to us. We ought not to be able to bear to go without it for a single day, for when our actions only depend on Earthly energies, subject to the necessity of this World, we are incapable of thinking and doing anything but evil. The World winks at dishonesty. The World does not call it dishonesty. Any protest is regarded as a heresy that shows how those who utter it do not belong: argument are not met on their merits; instead one rehearses a few illustrious names and possibly deigns to contrast them with some horrible examples. God saw that the misdeeds of mortals were multiplied on the Earth and that all the thoughts of their hears were continually bent upon evil. The necessity that drives us toward evil governs everything in us except the energy from on high at the moment when it comes into us. We cannot store it. Tone is crucial and often colors meaning. If we do not know what is said seriously and what in jest, we do not know the meaning. We have to know what is said lightly and what solemnly, where a remark is prompted by a play on words, if something is ironical or a quotation, an allusion, a pastiche, a parody, a diatribe, a daring coinage, a cliché, an epigram, or possibly ambiguous. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted everything that is owing to us. This not only includes reparation for any wrongs we think we have suffered, but also gratitude for the good we think we have done, and it applies in a quite general way to all we expect from people and things, to all we consider as our due and without which we should feel ourselves to have been frustrated. All these are the rights that we think the past has given us over the future. First there is the right to a certain permanence. When we have enjoyed something for a long time, we think that it is ours and that we are entitled to expect fate to let us go on enjoying it. Then there is the right to a compensation for every effort whatever its nature, be it work, suffering, or desire. Every time that we put forth some effort and the equivalent of this effort does not come back to us in the form of some visible fruit, we have a sense of false balance and emptiness which makes us think that we have been cheated. The effort of suffering from some offense causes us to expect the punishment or apologies of the offender, the effort of doing good makes us expect the gratitude of the person we have helped, but these are only particular cases of a universal law of the soul. Every time we give anything out we have an absolute need that at least the equivalents should come into us, and because we need this we think we have a right to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the entire Universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the future. That is the claim we have to renounce. To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. It is to accept that the future should still be a virgin and intact, strictly united to the past by bonds of which we are unaware, but quite free from the bonds of our imagination though to impose upon it. It means that we accept the possibility that this will happen, and that it may happen to us in particular; it means that we are prepared for the future to render all our past life sterile and vain. In renouncing at one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can ask of God that our past sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and error. So long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot stop this horrible fruiting. We cannot hold on to the past without retaining our crimes, for we are unaware of what is most essentially bad in us. Every being I encounter is seen to be essential. Nothing is essential but a being. Doing something with my whole being or my whole essence is the same. The realm of essences and what is essential is not outside this World in some beyond. Essential is whatever is—here and now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
If romanticism is flight from the present, yearning for deliverance from the cross of the here and now, an escape into the past, preferably medieval, or the future, into drugs or other Worlds, either night or twilight—if romanticism can face anything except the facts—then nothing could be less romantic than the central the principal claim we think we have on the Universe. This claim implies all others. The instinct of self-preservation makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a necessity is right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “ I do not see the necessity for that.” Our personality is entirely dependent on external circumstances which have unlimited power to crush it. However, we would rather die than admit this. From our point of view the equilibrium of the World is combination of circumstances so ordered that our personality remains intact and seems to belong to us. All the circumstances of the past that have wounded our personality appear to us to be disturbances of balance which should infallibly be made up for one day or another by phenomena having a contrary effect. We live on the expectation of these compensations. The near approach of death is horrible chiefly because it forces the knowledge upon us that these compensations will never come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so. If we say them with our soul, the words “Thy will be done” imply this acceptance. That is why we can say a few moment later: “We forgive our debtors.” The forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, spiritual nakedness, death. If we accept death completely, we can ask God to make us live again, purified from the evil in us. For to ask him to forgive us our debts is to ask him to wipe out the evil in us. Pardon is purification. God himself has not the power to forgive the evil in us while it remains there. When he has brought us to the state of perfection, God will have forgiven our debts. Until then God forgives our debts partially in the same measures as we forgive our debtors. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thus to delight in the present—this rational insight brings us that reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants those who haven once been confronted by the inner demand to comprehend. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Find in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and refuse to pin your hopes on any beyond. Many people have become wary of promises and hopes and take a stand resolutely in the here and now. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The only temptation for mortals is to be abandoned to one’s own resources in the presence of evil. One’s nothingness is then proved experimentally. Although the soul has received supernatural bread at the moment when it asked for it, its joy is mixed with fear because it could only ask for it for the present. The future is still to be geared. The soul has not the right to ask for bread for the morrow, but it expresses its fear in the form of a supplication. It finishes with that. The prayer began with the word “Father,” it ends with the word “evil.” We must go from confidence to fear. Confidence alone can give us strength enough not to fall as a result of fear. After having contemplated the name, the kingdom, and the will of God, after having received the supernatural bread and having been purified from evil, the soul is ready for that true humility which crowns all virtues. Humility consist of knowing that in this World the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolute acceptance of the possibility that everything natural in us should be destroyed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
However, we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear. It must be accepted as an event that would come about only in conformity with the will of God. It must be repudiated as being something utterly horrible. We must be afraid of it, but our fear must be as it were the completion of confidence. The six petitions correspond with each other in pairs. The bread which is transcendent is the same thing as the divine name. It is what brings about the contact of mortals with God. The kingdom of God is the same thing as his protection stretched over us against temptation; to protect is the function of royalty. Forgiving our debtors their debts is the same thing as the total acceptance of the will of God. The difference is that in the first three petitions the attention is fixed solely on God. In the three last, we turn our attention back to ourselves in order to compel ourselves to make these petitions a real and not an imaginary act. In the first half of the prayer, we begin with acceptance. Then we allow ourselves a desire. Then we correct it by coming back to acceptance. In the second half, the order is changed; we finish by expressing desire. Only desire has now become negative; it is expressed as a fear; therefore it corresponds to the highest degree of humility and that is a fitting way to end. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each work, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul. Modern civilization, with its tensions and comforts, its speed and extroversion, its pleasure and treasures hunts, its complicated activities and economic necessities, has trapped its victims so securely that one who would follow an independent path would have to make excessive efforts. It may seem foolish to suggest a scheme of living which involves the sacrifice of time separated out from a pressing day and given up to purposes seldom bothered with by civilized society, whose ways in fact would impede it. It may seem unlikely that people will follow such a scheme when, even if they theoretically accept those purposes, they deem themselves too busy or know themselves too lazy to operate it. It may seem impractical to offer it, especially to those who are dependent upon their work for a livelihood and who lose so much time getting to and from it. And even if they or others could be persuaded into adopting it, there is little likelihood that its exercises would be kept up—for only a comparative few are likely to have the needed strength and perseverance to keep it up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Where then is the spare time out of the modern mortal’s daily program and the continuously driving will to come from? Where are the exceptional persons wo would make the requisite sacrifices? No mortal will take up such a course of self-improvement and self-development unless one is thoroughly convinced of its necessity. And even then one may lack the willpower to declare war against one’s bad habits, one’s sloth and complacency, one’s pessimism and surface-comfort. One may be unable to change one’s pattern of thought and life, even if one wants to. However, the impulse towards a higher life must in the end come from something other than mere escapism or exotic curiosity. It must come from the thirst for truth for its own sake. Without this ever-burning thirst for spiritual awareness, no seeker is likely to travel far. Those whom life has wounded may turn to spiritual teachings for comfort, but too often this is only a passing reaction to sufferings. It has its temporary value and place, but it is not the same as consciously and clearly engaging in the Quest because the thirst for truth is predominant. A passionate eagerness to find God is a necessary basis for all the other qualifications in its pursuit. One needs to have the willingness and preparedness to withdraw every day from one’s Worldly and intellectual life utterly, and then to have the humility to open one’s heart in fervent supplication and loving adoration of higher power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
