To return to the inescapable question of Salvation, yes, I do remain rooted in a relativistic Universe, no matter how spectacularly defined I have become as to form and function, and I find myself within the same dimension. The German word for resolve is Entschossenheit, and it points to the symbol of unlocking what anxiety, subjection to conformity, and self-seclusion have locked. Once it is unlocked, one can act, but not accord to norms given by anybody or anything. Nobody can give directions for the actions of the resolute individual—no God, no conventions, no laws of reason, no norms or principles. We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go. Our conscience is the call to ourselves. It does not tell anything concrete, it is neither the voice of God nor the awareness of eternal principles. It calls us to ourselves out of the behavior of the average mortal, out of daily talk, the daily routine, out of the adjustment which is the main principle of the conformist courage to be as a part. However, if we follow this call we become inescapably guilty, not through moral weakness but through our existential situation. Having the courage to be as ourselves we become guilty, and we are asked to take this existential guilt upon ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Meaninglessness in all its aspects can be faced only by those who resolutely take the anxiety of finitude and guilt upon themselves. There is no norm, no criterion for what is right and wrong. Resoluteness makes right what shall be right. The essence of mortals is their existence. That idea can be the most despairing and the most courageous idea in all of Existentialism. What it says is that there is no essential nature of mortals, expect in the point that one can make of oneself what one wants. Humans create what they are. Nothing is given to them to determine their creativity. The essence of one’s being—the should-be, the ought-to-be, –is not something which one finds; one makes it. Mortals are what they make of themselves. And the courage to be as oneself is the courage to make of oneself what one wants to be. We are surrounded by things of whose nature and origin we know nothing. The telephone, radio, phonograph, and all other complicated machines are almost as mysterious to us as they would be to a mortal from a primitive culture; we know how to use them, that is, we know which button to turn, but we do not know on what principle they function, expect in the vaguest terms of something we once learned at school. And things which do not rest upon difficult scientific principles are almost equally alien to us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

We do not know how bread is made, how cloth is woven, how a table is manufactured, how a glass is made. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. Our way of consumption necessarily results in the fact that we are never satisfied, since it is not our real concrete person which consumes a real or concrete thing. We this develop an ever-increasing need for more things, for more consumption. It is true that as long as the living standard of the population is below a dignified level of subsistence, there is a natural need for more consumption. It is also true tat here is a legitimate need for more consumption as mortals develop culturally and has more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, books, etc. However, our craving for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of mortals. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give mortals a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. Wit a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslave mortals. Mortals today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially, new things. One’s is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern mortals, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, and oneself having plenty of money with which to buy them. One would wander around open-mouthed with dreamy eyes in this Heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were every more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than he or she. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Significantly enough, one of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property, has undergone a profound change. In the older attitudes, a certain sense of loving a possession existed between a mortal and their property. It grew on the individual. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one has to part from it because one could not use it anymore. There is very little left of this sense of property today. One loves the newness of the things bought, and is ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. There is this receptive orientation, in which the aim is to receive, to drink in, to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were. This receptive orientation is blended with the marketing orientation, while in the nineteenth century the hoarding was blended with the exploitative orientation. The alienated attitude toward consumption not only exists in our acquisition and consumption of commodities, but it determines far beyond this employment of leisure time. What are we to expect? If a mortal works without genuine relatedness to what one is doing, if one buys and consumes commodities in an abstractified and alienated way, how can one make use of one’s leisure time in an active and meaningful way? One always remains the passive an alienated consumer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

People consume ball games, moving pictures, newspapers and magazines, books, lectures, natural scenery, social gatherings, in the same alienated and abstractified way in which one consumes the commodities one has bought. One does not participate actively, one wants to take in all there is to be had, and to have as much as possible of pleasure, culture and what not. Actually, one is not free to enjoy one’s leisure; one’s leisure-time consumption is determined by industry, as are the commodities one buys; one’s taste is manipulated, one wants to see and hear what one is conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is an industry like any other, the customer is made to buy fun as one is made to buy dresses and shoes. The value of the fun is determined by its success on the market, not by anything which could be measured in human terms. In any productivity and spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

In the alienated form of pleasure something happens within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. One of the most striking examples for this kind of pleasure consumption is the taking of snapshots, which has become one of the most significant leisure activities. The Kodak slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” which since 1889 has helped so much to popularize photography all over the World, is symbolic. It is one of the earliest appears to the push-button power-feeling; you do nothing, you do not have to know anything, everything is done for you; all you have to do is press the button. Indeed, the taking of snapshots has become one of the most significant expressions of alienated visual perception, of sheer consumption. The tourist with one’s camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the World. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually one does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for the individual, and the outcome of one’s pleasures trip is a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which one could have had, but did not have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Our actual helplessness before the forces which govern us appears more drastically in those social catastrophes which, even though they have denounced as regrettable accidents each time, so far have never failed to happen: economic depressions and wars. These social phenomena appear as if they were natural catastrophes, rather than what they really are, occurrences made by mortals, but without intention and awareness. The anonymity of the social forces is inherent in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to most other societies in which social laws are explicit and fixed on the basis of political power or tradition—Capitalism does not have such explicit laws. It is based on the principles that is only everybody strives for oneself on the market, the common good will come out of it, order not anarchy will result. There are, of course, economic laws which govern the market, but these laws operate behind the back of the acting individual, who is concerned only with one’s private interests. You can try to guess these laws of the market as a Calvinist in Geneva tried to guess whether God had predestined him for salvation or not. However, the law of the market, like God’s will are beyond the reach of your will and influence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Science cannot explain why the World makes scientific sense. It cannot explain why we are here, or, now that we are here, what we should do about it. For a moment, let us imagine what thinking must have been like for the firs people who were aware that they were aware. They had no words to describe the World they were experiencing. Because we think in symbols, it is difficult for us to imagine what those early people, who had no symbols, thought, but we can try. The first people began to collect information about the World. They saw a large, bright object move across the sky. It had a profound effect upon their bodies. While it was there, they felt warm, and they could see. In its absence, the World became dark and cold. As time passed, those first human beings saw the trees drop their leaves and die. Then, magically, the trees came back to life in brilliant colors and alluring smells. Finally, those trees produced an object that was good to eat. Then the trees appeared to die, only to return to give birth again and again. Try to imagine how awed early people must have been by these simple events. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The first humans were becoming aware. However, they had no word-symbols to express that awareness in thought or speech. Then perhaps one day two human beings both made a similar sound while grabbing for the same fruit. They walked on apart, but perhaps one of these people heard yet another person make the same sound, and, magically, the picture of the fruit appeared in the mind of this early human being. It was probably through random events such as this that people began the process of naming objects and understanding their World. The limits of our language mean the limits of our World. A new World is the beginning of a new language. A new language is the seed of a new World. The relationship the artist and the neurotic, often considered mysterious, is entirely understandable from the viewpoint presented here. Both artist and neurotic speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this absolutely, communicating what one experiences to one’s fellow people. The neurotic does this negatively. Experiencing the same underlying meanings and contradictions of one’s culture, one is unable to form one’s experiences into communicable meaning for oneself and one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Art and neurosis both have a predictive function. Since art is communication springing from unconscious levels, it presents to us an image of a person which is as yet present only in those members of the society who, by virtue of their own sensitized consciousness, live on the frontier of their society—live, as it were, with one foot in the future. The artist anticipates the later scientific and intellectual experience of the race. The water reeds and ibis legs painted in triangular designs on Neolithic vases in ancient Egypt were the prediction of the later development of geometry and mathematics by which the Egyptian read the stars and measured the Nile. In the magnificent Greek sense of proportion of the Parthenon, in the powerful dome of Roman architecture, and in the medieval cathedral, one can trace how, in a given period of history, art expresses the meanings and trends which are as yet unconscious, but which will later be formulated by the philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists of the society. The arts anticipate the future social and technological development by a generation when the change is more superficial, or by centuries when the change, as the discovery of mathematics, is profound. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

By the same token, we find the artists expressing the conflict in the society before these conflicts emerge consciously in the society as a whole. The artist—who is the antennae of the race—is living out, in forms that only one can create, the depths of consciousness which one experiences in one’s own being as one struggles with and molds one’s World. Here we are plunged immediately into the center of the issues for the World presented by our contemporary painters and dramatists and other artists is a schizoid World. They have presented the condition of our World which makes the tasks of living and willing peculiarly difficult. It is a World in which, amid all the vastly developed means of communication that bombard us on all sides, actual personal communication is exceedingly difficult and rare. The most significant dramatists of our time are those who take as their subject matter precisely this loss of communication between persons is all but destroyed. We live out our lives talking to tape recorder; our existence become more lonely as the digital assistants, radios and TV’s and computers and mobile phones and telephone extensions in our house become more numerous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Ionesco has a scene in his play, The Bald Soprano, in which a man and a woman happen to meet and engage in polite, if mannered, conversation. As they talk they discover that they both came down to New York on the ten o’clock train that morning from New Haven, and, surprisingly, the address of both is the same building on Fifth Avenue. Lo and behold, they also live in the same apartment and both have a daughter seven years old. They finally discover to their astonishment that they are man and wife. We find the same situation among the painters. Cezanne, the acknowledged father of the modern art movement, a man who in his own life was as undramatic and bourgeois as only a middle-class Frenchman can be, paints this schizoid World of spaces and stones and trees and faces. He speaks to us out of the Old World of mechanics but forces us to live in the new World of free-floating spaces. Here we are beyond causes and effects, both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cezanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. There is a rapport between Cezanne’s schizoid temperament and his work because the work reveals a metaphysical sense of the infirmary. In this sense to be schizoid and to be Cezanne come to the same thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Only a schizoid man could paint a schizoid World; which is to say, only a man sensitive enough to penetrate to the underlying psychic conflicts could present out World as it is in its deeper forms. However, in the very grasping of our World by art there is also our protection from the dehumanizing effects of technology. The schizoid character lies in both the confronting of the depersonalizing World and the refusing to be depersonalized by it. For the artist finds deeper planes of consciousness where we can participate in human experience and nature below superficial appearances. The case may be clearer in Van Gogh, whose psychosis was not unconnected with his volcanic struggle to paint what he perceived. Or in Picasso, flamboyant as he may seem to be, whose insight into the schizoid character of our modern World is seen in the fragmented bulls and torn villagers in Guernica, or in the distorted portraits with mislocated eyes and ears—paintings not named but numbered. This is the first age in which the artist does not have a community; one must now, like all of us, make one’s own. The artist presents the broken image of mortals but transcends it in the very act of transmuting it into art. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

It is one’s creative act which gives meaning to the nihilism, alienation, and other elements of modern mortal’s condition. Thus the illness ceases to be an absurd fact and a fate, and becomes a general possibility of human existence. The neurotic and the artist—since both lived out the unconscious of the race—reveal to us what is gong to emerge endemically in the society later on. The neurotic feels that same conflicts arising from one’s experience of nihilism, alienation, and so on, but one is unable to give them meaningful form; one is caught between one’s incapacity to mold these conflicts into creative works on one hand and one’s inability to deny them on the other. The neurotic is the artiste manqué, the artist who cannot transmute one’s conflicts into art. To admit this as a reality not only gives us our liberty as creative persons but also the basis of our freedom as human beings. By the same token, confronting at the outset the fact of the schizoid state of our World may give us a basis for discovering love and will for our own age. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Yet, people use different kinds of ploys to avoid intimate confrontation and interaction with other people. Some of these actions are Rituals we all use casually: “Hi; nice weather; right?” “Think it will rain?” “Wonderful party; we sure enjoyed ourselves,” “How are things with you?” These are familiar sayings; we all use them. They are Rituals when we do not much care about the answers or when we use these words to fill in awkward gaps in out time- and space-structuring. After Rituals come the Pastimes, activities used to full up time or space: Homework, TV Viewing, Dating, Fixing the Car, Solitaire, Eating Dinner. In other words, any activity in which we engage for the express purpose, conscious or otherwise, of avoiding intimate encounter is simply a Pastime. When we view TV in order to not talk to our family or spouse, we are indulging in an action that is less than authentic or sincere. Finally, the Games themselves. These are complex maneuvers, usually motivated by unconsciousness, designed to being about some kind of Payoff. The Payoff may be a put-down of someone else, or even of yourself. The Payoff may be a breaking off of a relationship that is too threatening or anxiety-producing. The Payoff may be getting somebody else hurt or wounded. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

It is also time we all recognize that psychotherapists are human beings, nothing more. Sometimes therapists, out of their Child’s need for extra credit, or their Parent’s need to be authoritative, will encourage games in the process of therapy, without realizing that they are playing them. Any therapist who has excessive needs for respect or worship is falling into a manipulative trap and may be exploiting his or her clients for one’s own self-enhancement. This is hardly self-actualizing behavior. Of course, sometimes clients put their therapists in a god-like role, either because they need an authority-father-figure to relate to, or as a way of conning the therapist. Sometimes a client can build the therapist up by flattering him or her (“You are Uncommonly Perceptive, Doctor”) as a way of keeping the focus on him or her, or so the therapist, out of some distorted sense of obligation, will not dig any deeper into one’s life. Therapy is a situation that is liable to the same pitfalls as any other interpersonal relationship. We still should be impressed with the need for human beings to develop the ability to be intimate with each other. Self-Disclosure is important for optimum mental health, or psychological wholeness, comes about when a person is able to disclose important feelings, ideas, fears, wishes, or memories to at least one significant person. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Self-disclosure should be at the level of intimacy, that is, real authentic, un-defensive, and part of the very person being of the individual. This is important in order that we experience the feeling of closeness of being personal with one other human being. The surprising truth is that our weaknesses can be a blessing when they humble us and turn us to Christ. Discontent becomes divine when we humbly approach Jesus Christ with our want, rather than hold back in self-pity. In fact, Jesus’s miracles often begin with a recognition of want, need, failure, or inadequacy. The truth is that each of us is one generation away from Deity—each is a child of God. And just as God has done with both prophets and ordinary men and women through the ages, so Heavenly Father intends to transform us. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. God is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, then you see God is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but God is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. Because of our Savior’s atoning sacrifice, we can be made equal to the tasks that lie ahead. Divine discontent can move us to act in faith, follow the Savior’s invitations to do good, and give our lives humbly to him. “Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth in the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no mortal,” reports Ether 3.21. Modern cynics are not ready to follow anybody. They have no belief in reason, no criterion of truth, no set of values, no answer to the question of meaning. They try to undermine every norm put before them. Their courage is expressed not creatively but in their form of life. They courageously reject any solution which would deprive them of their freedom of rejecting whatever they want to reject. The cynics are lonely although they need company in order to show their loneliness. They are empty of both preliminary meanings and an ultimate meaning, and therefore easy victims of neurotic anxiety. Much compulsive self-affirmation and much fanatical self-surrender are expressions of the noncreative courage to be as oneself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

However, in the crucible of Earthly trials, patiently move forward, and the Savior’s healing power will bring you light, understanding, peace, and hope. “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each person should give what one has decided in one’s heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. A it is written: He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.6-9. We search for happiness. We long for peace. We hope for love. And the Lord showers us with amazing abundance of blessings. However, intermingled with the joy and happiness, one thing is certain: there will be moments, hours, days, sometimes years when our souls will be wounded. “Let you in, into my World. I gave you things you said you deserved, but you took all I had and through it back in my face. Through the hardest time was possible place. I know that I was not to blame. So go ahead and take everything. When it is over, I will still be standing because I was here from the start. You love no one, but still you lost my heart. With all my plans, you followed me. You crossed you heart and said you believed,” reports Gareth Emery and Emma Hewitt – Take Everything. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20