Remember, this is an exposition of souls, a bartering of extraordinary revelations. Oh, let me get it straight. I triumph over death, and we gather here to listen to the personal memories. Many conflicts people see psychotherapists for generally are based upon some aspect of love or will gone wrong. Because of this, every therapist is, or ought to be, engaged in research all the time—research, as the word itself states, as a “search” for the sources. With experimental psychology, the data that is uncovered is impossible to formulate mathematically and it sometimes comes from people who represent psychological misfits of the culture. At the same time, philosophers insist that no model of mortal can be based centrally on data from neuroses or character disorders. And a rational person might agree to these cautions. However, neither these psychologist in their laboratories nor those philosophers in their studies can ignore the fact that we do get tremendously significant and often unique data from persons in therapy—data which are revealed only when the human being can break down the customary pretenses, hypocrisies, and defenses behind which we all hide normal social discourse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

It is only in the critical situation of emotional and spiritual suffering—which is the situation that leads them to see therapeutic help—that people will endure the pain and anxiety of uncovering the profound roots of their problems. There is also the curious situation that unless we are oriented toward helping the person, one will not, indeed in some ways cannot, reveal the significant data. Unless the interviews are designed to help the person, you will get artifacts, not real data. True, the information we get from our patients may be hard or even impossible to codify more than superficially. However, this information speaks so directly out of the human being’s immediate conflicts and one’s living experience that its richness of meaning more than makes up for its difficult in interpretation. It is one thing to discuss the hypothesis of aggression as resulting from frustration, but quite another to see the tenses of a patient, one’s eyes flashing in anger or hatred, one’s posture clenched into paralysis, and to hear one’s half-stifled gaps of pain from reliving the time a score of years ago when one’s father whipped him, because through no fault of his own, his car was stolen—an event giving rise to a strong sense of displeasure which for that moment encompasses every parental figure in one’s whole World, including me in the room with him. Such data are empirical in the deepest meaning of the term. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

With respect to the question of basing a theory of mortals on data form misfits I would, in turn, challenge my colleagues: Does not every human conflict reveal universal characteristics of mortals as well as the idiosyncratic problems of the individual? Sophocles was not writing merely about one individual’s pathology when he showed us, step by step, through the drama of King Oedipus, the agonizing struggle of a mortal to find out “who I am and where I came from.” Psychotherapy seeks the most specific characteristics and events of the given individual’s life—and any therapy will become weakened in vapid, existential, cloudy generalities which forgets this. However, psychotherapy also seeks the elements of the human conflict of this individua which are basic to the perdurable, persistent qualities of every mortal’s experience as a human—and any therapy will tend to shrink the patient’s consciousness and make life more banal for one if it forgets that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Psychotherapy reveals both the immediate situation of the individual’s disturbance and the archetypal qualities and characteristics which constitute the human being as human. It is the latter characteristics which have gone awry in specific ways in a given patient and have resulted in the former, one’s psychological problems. The interpretations of a patient’s problems in psychotherapy is also a partial revelation of mortal’s self-interpretation of oneself through history in the archetypal forms in literature. Aeschylus’ Orestes and Goethe’s Faust, to take two diverse examples, are not simply portrayals of two given characters, one back in Greece in the fifth-century B.C. and the other in eighteenth-century Germany, but presentations of the struggles we all, of whatever century or race, go through in growing up, trying to find identity as individual beings, striving to affirm our being with whatever power we have, trying to love and create, and doing our best to meet all the other events of life up to and including our own death. One of the values of living in a transitional age—an age of therapy—is that it forces upon us this opportunity, even as we try to resolve our individual problems, to uncover new meaning in perennial mortals and to see more deeply into those qualities which constitute that human being as human. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for one—a generally painful situation of which one is more or less aware. The neurotic or the person suffering from character disorders is one whose problems are so severe that one cannot solve them by living them out in the normal agencies of the culture, such as work, education, and religion. Our patient cannot or will not adjust to the society. This, in turn, may be due to one or both of the two following interrelated elements. First, certain traumatic or unfortunate experiences have occurred in one’s life which make one more sensitive than the average person and less able to live with and manage one’s anxiety. Second, one may posses a greater than ordinary amount of originality and potential which push for expression and, when blocked off, make one ill. Life can sometimes be full of images of meaninglessness and despair. In some areas that is all people witness; in other regions the negativity is less unconditional. However, it seldom becomes beneficial: even comparatively optimistic solutions are undermined by doubt and by awareness of the ambiguity of all solutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

It is astonishing that we can have so much widespread dysfunction in a country whose prevailing courage is the courage to be as a part in a system of political conformity. What does this mean for the situation of American and with it of humankind as a whole? One can easily play down the importance of the phenomenon. One can point to the unquestionable fact that even the largest crowds of people are an infinitely small percentage of the American population. One can dismiss the significance of the attraction unity that many have been calling an imported fashion, doomed to disappear very soon. This is possibly, but not necessarily entirely true. It may be that the comparatively few (few even if one adds to them all the cynics and despairing ones in our institutions of higher learning) are a vanguard which precedes a great change in the spiritual and social-psychological situation. It may be that the limits of the courage to be as a part have become visible to more people than the increasing conformity shows. If this is the meaning of appeal that Existentialism has on the stage, one should observe it carefully and prevent it from becoming the forerunner of a collectivist forms of the courage to be as a part—a threat which history has abundantly proved to exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The combination of the experience of meaninglessness and the courage to be as oneself is the key to the development of spiritual life. Reality can be disrupted when the categories which constitute ordinary experience have lost their power. The category of substance is lost: souls are twisted like ropes; the casual interdependence of things is disregarded: things appear in a complete contingency; temporal sequences are without significance, it does not matter whether an event has happened before or after another event; the spatial dimensions are reduced or dissolved into a horrifying infinity. The organic structures of life are cut into pieces which are arbitrarily recomposed: limbs are dispersed, colors are separated from their natural carriers. The psychological process is reversed: one lives from the future to the past, and this without rhythm of any kind of meaningful organization. The World of anxiety is a World in which the categories, the structures of reality, have lost their validity. Everybody would be dizzy if causality suddenly ceased to be valid. Spirituality has been attacked as a forerunner of totalitarian systems. The answer that all totalitarian systems have started their careers by attacking religion is insufficient, for one could say that the totalitarian systems fought spirituality just because they tried to resist meaninglessness they thought it expressed. The real answer lies deeper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Spirituality is not propaganda but revelation. We should welcome feelings of divine discontent that call us to a higher way, while recognizing and avoiding Satan’s counterfeit—paralyzing discouragement. This is a precious space into which Satan is all too eager to jump. We can choose to talk the higher path that leads us to seek for God and his peace and grace, or we can listen to Satan who bombards us with messages that we will never be enough; rich enough, smart enough, beautiful enough anything enough. Our discontent can become divine—or destructive. One way to tell divine discontent from Satan’s counterfeit is that divine discontent is not an invitation to stay in our conform zone, nor will it lead us to despair. I have learned that when I wallow in thoughts of everything I am not, I do not progress and I find it much more difficult to feel and follow the Spirit. It shows that the reality of our existence is as it is. It does not cover up the reality in which we are living. The question therefore is this? Is the revelation of a situation propaganda for it? If this were the case all religion would have to become dishonest beautification. The situation propagated by totalitarianism is dishonest beautification. It is an idealized naturalism which is preferred by some because in their minds, it removes the evil and sins they have committed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

People who are truly loving and have the spirit of God are able to see the meaninglessness of our existence, but at the same time they have the courage to face it and to express it in their souls and hearts. They have the courage to be themselves. “If anyone you lack wisdom, let one ask of God, that gives to all mortals liberally, and upbraided not; and it shall be given to one,” reports James 1.5. Confidence is not just the emotional state of an individual. It is a view of other people’s confidence, and of other people’s perceptions of other people’s confidence. It is also a view of the World—a popular model of current events, a public understanding of the mechanism of economic change as informed by the news media and popular discussions. High confidence tends to be associated with inspirational stories, stories about new business initiatives, tales of how others are getting rich. New era stories have tended to accompany the major booms in stock markets around the World.  The economic confidence of times past cannot be understood without reference to the details of these stories. As years go by we forget these stories of the past, and thus we tend to be mystified by the causes of past stock market moves and macroeconomic fluctuations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The complexity of the different new era stories through time suggests that differences in confidence have had many effects on the economy beyond an impact on consumption and investment. Changes in these stories, like the young people making fortunes are a contemporary reenactment of the nineteenth-century Gold rush, will affect the expectations for personal success in business, for the success of entrepreneurial ventures, and for payoffs to human capital investments. The process of consumption is as alienated as the process of production. In the first place, we acquire things with money; we are accustomed to this and take it for granted. However, actually, this is a most peculiar way of acquiring things. Money represents labor and effort in an abstract form; not necessarily my labor and effort, since I can have acquired it by inheritance, by unknown means, by luck, or any number of ways. However, even if I have acquired it by my effort (forgetting for the moment that my effort might have brought me the money were it not for that fact that I employed mortals), I may have acquired it in a specific way, by a specific way, by a specific kind of effort, corresponding to my skills and capacities, while, in spending, the money is transformed into an abstract form of labor and can be exchanged against anything else. Provided I am in the possession of money, no effort or interest of mine is necessary to acquire something. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

If I have the money, I can acquire an exquisite painting, even though I may not have any appreciation for art; I can buy the best phonograph, even through I have no musical taste; I can buy a library, although I use it only for the purpose of ostentation. I can buy an education, even though I have no use for it except as an additional social asset. I can even give away the painting or the books I bought, and aside from a loss of money, I suffer no damage. Mere possession of money gives me the right to acquire and to do with my acquisition whatever I like. The human way of acquiring would be to make an effort qualitatively commensurate with what I acquire. The acquisition of bread and clothing would depend on no other premise than that of being alive; the acquisition of books and paintings, on my effort to understand them and my ability to use them. How this principle could be applied practically is not the point to be discussed here. What matters is that the way we acquire things is separated from the way in which we use them. The alienating function of money in the process of acquisition and consumption is beautifully described: Money transforms the real human and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and hence imperfections, and on the other hand it transforms the real imperfection and imaginings, the powers which only exist in the imagination of the individual into real powers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Money transforms loyalty into vice, vices into virtue, the slave into the master, the master into the slave, ignorance into reason, and reason into ignorance. One who can buy as a mortal, and one’s relation to the World as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence, etc. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically trained person; if you wish to have influence on other people, you must be a person who had a really stimulating and furthering influence on other people. Every one of your relationships to mortals and to nature must be a definite expression of your real, individual life corresponding to the object of your will. If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. However, beyond the method of acquisition, how do we use things, once we have acquired them? With regard to many things, there is not even a pretense of use. We acquire them to have them. We are satisfied with useless possession. The expensive dining set manufactured by David Michael or the Baccarat Crystal Medicis Bronze Vase which we never use for fear they might break, the mansion with many unused rooms, the fleet of new and rare BMWs and Mercedes-Benz and the servants, like the ugly brick-a-brac of the lower-middle-class family, are so many examples of pleasure in use. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

However, this satisfaction is possessing per se was more prominent in the nineteenth century; today most of the satisfaction is derived from possession of things-to-be-used rather than of things-to-be-kept. This does not alter the fact, however, that even in the pleasure of things-to-be-used the satisfaction of prestige is a paramount factor. The car, the refrigerator, the television set are for real, but also for conspicuous use. They confer status of the owner. How do we use the things we acquire? Let us begin with food and drink. We eat bread made from 23-carat gold and champagne because it appeals to our phantasy of wealth and distinction—being so unique and luxurious. Actually, we eat a phantasy and have lost contact with the real thing we eat. Our palate, our body, are excluded from an act of consumption which primarily concerns them. We drink labels. We drink labels. With a bottle of Royal DeMaria Chardonnay Icewine 2000 we drink the picture of the pretty boy and girl who drink it in the advertisement, we drink the slogan of the pause the refreshes, we drink the great Canadian habit; least of all do we drink with our palate. All this is even worse when it comes to consumption of things whose whole reality is mainly the fiction the advertising campaign has created, like healthy soap or dental past. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The act of consumption should be a concrete human act, in which or sense, bodily needs, out aesthetic taste—that is to say, in which we as concrete, sensing, feeling, judging human beings—are involved; the act of consumption should be meaningful, human, productive experience. In our culture, there is little of that. Consuming is essentially the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies, s phantasy performance alienated from our concrete, real selves. Most people have parents who encourage these kinds of behaviors. More importantly, their parents encouraged self-reliance, strong social conscience, autonomy, and self-respect. The parents, for the most part, liked their children. This appreciation and affection communicated itself to the children, and they grew up feeling secure and confident. The balance between autonomy and social responsibility was achieved in the interaction process of the growing up, of playing, of schooling, and of working. This was not so much a matter of parents causing or determining actualizing behavior; they simply created the kind of climate in which self-fulfillment blossomed. Since many of us have not had such a childhood, is it too late for us? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Too often, those of us who had bad breaks in childhood grow up bitter, cynical, or resentful, or we manipulate with the excuses theses negative experiences provide. We cop an ideological plea, which says: “What do you expect of me? I have had a rough life. I am not capable of honesty, openness, a good feeling about my fellow mortals.” We claim exemption from authentic and responsible living on the grounds that we are crippled or disadvantaged. Do you recall the song in the play and film West Side Story “Gee, Officer Krupke”? In this song members of a New York street gang tell a police officer that they cannot help being bad, because they were raised in slums, in broken homes, “my father was a junkie, my mother was a tramp.” Cute as the song is, it represents what a lot of manipulators do today: disavow any responsibility for being full-functioning, creative, and effective members of the human society with the excuse that they had a rough time of it in their childhood. Truly, a negative traumatic childhood may interfere or slow down the process of self-fulfillment. However, what of the mature, responsible person lying dormant beneath the excuses? The time for extolling and reinforcing excuses is past: the need of the times is for responsible, reality-oriented people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Every now and then, we will recognize that we have been the instruments in the hands of God and we will be grateful to know that the Holy Ghost working through us is a manifestation of God’s approval. Divine discontent leads to humility, not to self-pity or the discouragement that comes from making comparisons in which we always come up short. Covenant-keeping people come in all sizes and shapes; their families, their life experiences, and their circumstances vary. “The Lord will be merciful unto them; yea, he will lengthen out their days and increase their seed,” reports Helaman 7.24. With Christ’s help, we can do all things. The scriptures promise that we will find grace to help in time of need. “And there is something we leave behind to join the ride. I could not wait but did not realize I would never come back. And the calling is taking over and it lasts more than awhile. This is another reason I will not be around to say good night, so do not write me I will call you. For all of my life I have been lost satellite. It is all a waste of time with me before I get it right. And I miss you paradise, although you are over, and I miss you paradise. I know you are over. I lie awake and I count the hours passing by. Too many questions that will not be answered here tonight, and they rise in waves before you and the force opens your eyes,” reports Emma Hewitt (Miss You Paradise). #RandolphHarris 16 of 16