Open the celestial doors, guardians of the galaxy, so that we may see the treasure of beauty that she brings.  Let there be Heaven on Earth, a harmonic galaxy. I was bitterly full of desire. It was unspeakable to need someone in this way. I closed my eyes and listened to the night. Ravenous, repulsive creatures singing magnificently. And working the soft fertile Earth, creatures of such loathsomeness I could not dwell on it. And the clatter of the riverfront train unendingly. And then the absurd song of the calliope on the riverboat that took the tourists up and down the waterway as they feasted and laughed and dance and sang. I believe I caused the infirmary myself. In my attempt to penetrate the other World I met its natural guardians, the embodiment of my own weakness and faults. In my case the personal self had grown porous because of my dimmed consciousness. I wanted to enter death without going mad and I stood before the Sphinx: either thou into the abyss or I! If you say they are fair game, then they are fair game, and that is good enough for me, Beloved Boss. I cannot tell my own heart and soul what I am feeling now, how much I crave this little battle. I cannot find the words, it is so raw, so rooted inside me! It goes way back into the human part of me that is not going to die, does it not? Then came illumination. A larger and more comprehensive self emerged and I could abandon the previous personality with its entire entourage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

I saw this earlier personality could never enter transcendental realms. A new life began for me and from now on I felt different from other people. A self that consisted of conventional lies, shams, self-deceptions, memory images, a self like that of other people, grew in me again but behind and above it stood a greater and more comprehensive self which impressed me with something of what is eternal, unchanging, immortal and inviolable and which ever since that time has been my protector and refuge. I lay amongst the flowers, and there were no thorns on the roses. Time had stopped. And the distant commotions of the house did not matter. She was fulfilled. She was the vampire in my dream. She was the Perfect Pearl, caught speechless in the miracle and staring down at me, wondering only what had become of me, as another fledgling of mine had done long ago—but understand dangers are only temporary. When the internal battles are waged, they struggle often takes its toll, as in all battles, on the battlefield itself. The battlefield is the person. Christians will recall St. Paul complaining that he was often at odds with himself. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The conflicts that go on inside each of us are the mixed motives we have, the competing needs, the differing ideas and attitudes. They are not competing or differing selves struggling it out. We are whole persons, but there are many conflicting elements in each of us. Sometimes the rational part of us is in fierce competition with the emotional or the physiological parts. The result often seems to be a disintegration of the self, or behavior that seems to point to disintegration. To settle the conflicts, we often compromise parts of our selfhood. At times we play as if there were no conflict. “I am alright, Jack!” and “Stiff upper lip” are some of the terms our British cousins employ to portray a stolid, unperturbed façade, while inside the battle goes on. The romantic movement has produced a concept of individuality which is equally to be distinguished from the medieval concept and from that of the Enlightenment and contains elements of both. The individual is emphasized in one’s uniqueness, as an incomparable and infinitely significant expression of the substance of being. Not conformity but differentiation is the end of the ways of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Self-affirmation of one’s uniqueness and acceptance of the demands of one’s individual nature are the right courage to be. This does not necessarily mean willfulness and irrationality, because the uniqueness of one’s individual nature are the right courage to be. This does not necessarily mean willfulness and irrationality, because the uniqueness of one’s individuality is possessed by its creative possibilities. However, the danger is obvious. The romantic irony elevated the individual beyond all content and made one empty: one was no longer obliged to participate in anything seriously. In a person like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Friedrich von Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part. Such a turn was prepared by the other side of romantic thought, the emphasis on the collectives and semicollectives of the past, the ideal of the organic society. Organism, as has so often happened in the past, became the symbol of a balance between individualization and participation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

However, its historical function in the early 19^th century was to express not the need for a balance, but the longing for the collectivist pole. It was used by all reactionary groups of this period who, be it for political or for spiritual reasons or both, tried to re-establish a new Middle Ages. In this way the romantic movement produced both a radical form of the courage to be as oneself and the (unfulfilled) desire for a radical form of the courage to be as a part. Romanticism as an attitude has outlived the romantic movement. So-called Bohemianism was a continuation of the romantic courage to be as oneself. Bohemianism continued the romantic attack on the established bourgeoisie and its conformism. Both the romantic movement and its Bohemian continuation have decisively contributed to present-day Existentialism. However, Bohemianism and Existentialism have received elements of another movement in which the courage to be as oneself was pronounced naturalism. The word naturalism is used in many different ways. For our purpose it suffices to deal with that type of naturalism in which the individualistic form of the courage to be as oneself is effective. The phrase romantic naturalist seems to be a contradiction in terms. The self-transcendence of romantic imagination and the naturalistic self-restriction to the empirically given appear to be separated by a deep gap. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, naturalism means the identification of being with nature and the consequent rejection of the supernatural. This definition leaves the question of the nature of the natural wide open. Nature can be described mechanistically. It can be described organologically. It can be described in terms of necessary progressive integration or of creative evolution. It can be described as a system of laws or of structures as a mixture of both. Naturalism can take its pattern from the absolutely concrete, the individual self as we find it in mortals, or from the absolutely abstract, the mathematic equations which determine the character of power fields. All this and much more can be naturalism. However, not all of these types of naturalism are expressions of courage to be as oneself. Only if the individualistic pole in the structure of the natural is decisive can naturalism be romantic and amalgamate with Bohemianism and Existentialism. This is the case in the voluntaristic types of naturalism. (If nature (and for naturalism this means “being”) is seen as the creative expression of an unconscious will or as the objectivation of the will to power or as the product of the elan vital, then the center of will, the individual selves, are decisive for the movement of the whole. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

In individuals’ self-affirmation life affirms itself or negates itself. Even if the selves are subject to an ultimate cosmic destiny they determine their own being in freedom. A large section of American pragmatism belongs to this group. In spite of American conformism and its courage to be as a part, pragmatism shared many concepts with that perspective more widely known in Europe as the philosophy of life. Its ethical principle is growth, its educational method is self-affirmation of the individual self, its preferred concept is creativity. The pragmatist philosophers are not always aware of the fact that courage to create implies the courage to replace the old by the new—the new for which there are no norms and criteria, the new which is a risk and which, measured by the old, is incalculable. Their social conformity hides from them what in Europe was expressed openly and consciously. They do not realize that pragmatism in its logical consequence (if not restricted by Christian or humanistic conformity) leads to that courage to be as oneself which is proclaimed by the radical Existentialist. The pragmatist type of naturalism is in its character, though not in its intention, a follower of romantic individualism and a predecessor of Existentialist independentism. The nature of the undirected growth is not different from the nature of the will to power and of the elan vital. However, the naturalists themselves are different. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The European naturalists are consistent and self-destructive; the American naturalists are saved by happy inconsistency: they still accept the conformist courage to be as a part. One of the goals of significant selfhood is that all the players play together. When a person is living authentically, one of the things that comes through is that all one’s systems are “Go” and that they work in some sort of integrated, total fashion. It all sounds so mysterious, so mystical or magical. Is it? There may be nothing magical at all. It is living your authentic existence, being truly, fully, real-ly all that you are. Authentic being means being oneself, honestly, in one’s relation with one’s fellows. It means taking the first step at dropping pretenses, defenses, and duplicity. It means an end to play it cool, an end to using one’s behavior as a gambit designed to disarm the other fellow, to get one to reveal oneself before you disclose yourself to that individual. This invitation is fraught with risk, indeed, it may inspire terror in some. Yet, while some honesty with others (and thus with oneself) may yield scars, it is likely to be an effective preventative both of mental illness and of certain kinds of physical sickness. Honesty can be literally a health-insurance policy. Mental illness is not something that comes from being dishonest and alienated from your fullest experience of self; mental illness is being dishonest and alienate from self and others. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

When you are split off from who you are and thus from others, this psychopathology (sickness of the psyche or behaving self). If you are playing false with yourself and if this causes you to play false with others, you are not effectively functioning, nor actualizing yourself. “Grow exceedingly in the knowledge of God; yea, do begin to keep his statues and commandments, and walk in truth and uprightness before him,” reports Helaman 6.34. And thus we see that the Spirit of the Lord will begin to withdraw from mortals, because of the wickedness and the hardness of their hearts. The self in conflict often displays behaviors that other people cannot predict, and may be alarmed by. Sometimes, the behavior takes the simple form of forgetfulness. At other times, it may resemble the anxiety-possessed behavior described in the various neurotic classifications. In a number of cases, the person acts out behaviors that resemble the stereotyped “crazy” behavior of those who are labeled psychotic. If the person living falsely, inauthentically, in continual self-alienation is labeled mentally ill, then what do we call the person who is functioning fully, experiencing maximally, living and loving in the most satisfying manner possible? The term authenticity describes the reality-oriented personal and social life of the healthy person. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Closely related to this sense of intellectual and moral conscience is another trait characteristic of the nineteenth century: the sense of pride and mastery. If we look today at the pictures of the nineteenth-century life, the moral with the beard, the tall silk hat and walking cane, we are easily struck by the ridiculous and negative aspect of nineteenth-century male pride—a man’s vanity and naïve belief in oneself as the highest accomplishment of nature and of history; but especially if we consider the absence of this trait in our own time, we can see the beneficial aspects of this pride. Mortals had the feeling of having put oneself into the saddle, so to speak, of having freed oneself from domination by natural forces, and for the first time in history having become their master. One had freed oneself from the shackles of medieval superstition, had even succeeded in the hundred years between 1814 and 1914 in creating one of the most peaceful periods history has ever known. One felt oneself to be an individual, subject only to the laws of reason, following only one’s own decisions. The exploitative and hording attitude caused human suffering and lack of respect for the dignity of mortals; it caused Europe to exploit Africa and Asia and her own working class ruthlessly without regard for human values. The other pathogenic phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the role or irrational authority and the need to submit to it, led to the repression of thoughts and feelings which were tabued by society. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

The most obvious symptom was the repression of physical intimacy and all that was natural in the body, movements, dress, architectural style, and so on. This repression resulted, as Dr. Freud thought, in various forms of neurotic pathology. The courage to be as oneself in all these groups has the character of the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self in spite of the elements of nonbeing threatening it. The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the Universe. One mediates the power of being which are concentrated in one. One has them within oneself in knowledge and one transforms them in action. One directs the courage of one’s life, and one can stand tragedy and death in a heroic affect and a love for the Universe which one mirrors. Even the loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the Universe are in one. If we compare this kind of courage with that of the Stoics we find that the main point of difference is in the emphasis of the uniqueness of the individual self in the line of thought which starts in the Renaissance and is guided by the romantics to the present. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

In Stoicism it is the wisdom of the wise mortal which is essentially equal in everyone of which one’s courage to be arises. In the modern World it is the individual as individual. Behind this change is possessed the Christian valuation of the individual soul as eternally significant. However, it is not this doctrine which gives the courage to be to modern mortals but doctrines of the individual in one’s quality as mirror of the Universe. “His people easy to be entreated, firm to keep the commandments of God, and slow to be led to do iniquity; and they were quick to hearken unto the Word of the Lord—yea, if my days could have been in those day, then would my soul have had joy in the righteousness of my people,” reports Helaman 7.7-8. Enthusiasm for the Universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the Universe and for mortals as its center is alive. The anxiety of guilt is removed: the symbols of death, judgment, and hell are put aside. Everything is done to deprive them of their seriousness. The courage of self-affirmation will not be shaken by the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. In later romanticism another dimension of the anxiety of guilt and its conquest was opened up. The destructive trends in the human soul were discovered. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The second period of the romantic movement, in philosophy as well as in poetry, broke away from the ideas of harmony which were decisive from the Renaissance to the classicists and early romantics. A kind of demonic realism was born, which was tremendously influential on Existentialism and depth of psychology. The courage to affirm oneself must include the courage to affirm one’s own demonic depth. This contradicted radically the moral conformism of the average Protestant and even of the average humanist. However, it was avidly accepted by the Bohemian and the romantic naturalists. The courage to take the anxiety of the demonic upon oneself in spite of its destructive and often despairing character was the form in which the anxiety of guilt was conquered. However, this was possible only because the personal quality of evil had been removed by the preceding development and could not be replaced by the cosmic evil, which is structural and not a matter of personal responsibility. The courage to take the anxiety of guilt upon oneself has become the courage to affirm the demonic trends within oneself. This could happen because the demonic was not considered unambiguously negative but was thought to be part of the creative power of being. The demonic as the ambiguous ground of the creative is a discovery of the later period of romanticism, which over the bridges of Bohemianism and naturalism was brought to the Existentialism of the 20^th century. Its confirmation in scientific terms was depth psychology. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

In some respects all of these forms of individualistic courage to be are forerunners of the radicalism of the 20^th century, in which the courage to be as oneself was brought to most powerful expressions in the Existentialist movement. The survey given shows that the courage to be as oneself is never completely separated from the other pole, the courage to be as a part; and even more, overcoming isolation and facing the danger of losing one’s World in the self-affirmation of oneself as an individual are a way toward something which transcends both self and World. Ideas like the microcosm mirroring the Universe, or the monad representing the World, or the individual will to power expressing the character of will to power in life itself—all these point to a solution which transcends the two types of the courage to be. We need to emphasize the necessity for abolishing exploitation and transforming the working person into an independent, free and respected human being. If economic suffering were abolished, and if the working people were free from the domination of the capitalist, all the beneficial achievement of the nineteenth century would come to their full fruition, while the vices would disappear. Complete freedom from irrational authorities will usher in a new millennium. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

The working class, instead of falling behind in the economic development of the whole society, should have an increasing share in national wealth, and it is a perfectly valid assumption that provided no major catastrophe occurs, there will, in about one or two generations, be no more marked poverty in the United States of America. Closely related to the increasing abolishment of economic suffering is the fact that the human and political situation of the worker has changed drastically. People can no longer be ordered around, fired, abuse, as one was one hundred years ago. Looked upon from the standards of a World Class Leader, we have achieved almost everything which seems to be necessary for a saner society, and indeed, may people who still think in terms of the past century are convinced that we continue to progress. Consequently they also believe that the only threat to further progress lies in authoritarian societies, like California which, with its ruthless economic exploitation of workers and businesses for the sake of quicker accumulation of capital and the ruthless political authority necessary for the continuation of exploitation, resembles in many ways the early form of Capitalism, where workers were forced to work and mistreated and not looked at as human. However, we are not in danger of becoming slaves anymore, but of becoming robots. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

There is no overt authority which intimidates us, but we are governed by the fear of the anonymous authority of conformity. We do not submit to anyone personally; we do not go through conflicts with authority, but we have also no convictions of our own, almost no individuality, almost no sense of self. Quite obviously, the diagnosis of our pathology cannot follow the lines of the nineteenth century. We have to recognize the specific pathological problems of our time in order to arrive at a vision of that which is necessary to save the Western World from increasing insanity. “Excuse me, if I right all my wrongs. Excuse me, if I give up on being strong. I have been running blind, weighed down by denial. Still you were there right beside me. Never thought I would have someone like you. Never thought you would be the one to save me. Now I am ready to believe you always. Say I am worthy and I can finally say I agree. How I try to defy?” reports RAM and Susana (Someone Like you). Obedience means that I have completely placed my trust in the atonement, and my obedience is immediately met by the delight of the supernatural grace of God. “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my finger for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me,” reports Psalm 144.1-2. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

It is painful work to get in step with God and to keep pace with him—it means getting your second wind spiritually. The individual person is merged into a personal oneness with God, and God’s stride and his power alone are exhibited. We have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants. “Dusk till dawn this is where we belong, waiting for the Sun. Night till day, this is what I would say, our light will not fade away. I cannot breathe, I am falling to my feet, you are that I believe. Stay with me. I cannot see the fire next to me because you are all that I believe,” reports John O’Callaghan featuring Deidre McLaughlin (Stay With Me). If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time of great personal growth ahead. We may discover that there are ways to be spiritual that do not counter the soul’s needs for body, individuality, imagination, and exploration. Eventually we might find that all emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy. Still another way to be spiritual and soulful at the same time is to hear the words of formal religion as speaking to and about the soul. It further signals incarnation of the divine within moral life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17