We stood on the front porch, like dwarves underneath the columns. The blue light was suddenly soothing and the moment lost its proportions. It was like eternal dusk here in the country. I could hear the birds of the night, the distant unquiet waters of the lake. Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of nonbeing upon itself by affirming itself either as part of an embracing whole or in its individual selfhood. Courage always includes a risk, it is always threatened by nonbeing, whether the risk of losing oneself and becoming a thing within the whole of things or of the losing one’s World in an empty self-relatedness. Courage needs the power of being, a power transcending the nonbeing which is experienced in the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which is effective in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. The courage which takes this threefold anxiety into itself must be rooted in a power of being that is greater than the power of oneself and the power of one’s World. Neither self-affirmation as a part nor self-affirmation as oneself is beyond the manifold threat of nonbeing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Those who are mentioned as representatives of these forms of courage try to transcend themselves and the World in which they participate in order to find the power of being-itself and a courage to be which is beyond the threat of nonbeing. There are no exceptions to this rule; and this means that every courage to be has an open or hidden religious root. For religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself.  In some cases the religious root is carefully covered, in others it is passionately denied; in some it is deeply hidden and in others superficially. However, it is never completely absent. For everything that is participates in being-itself, and everybody has some awareness of this participation, especially in the moments in which one experiences the threat of nonbeing. This leads us to a final consideration, the double question of: How is the courage to be rooted in being-itself, and how much we understand being-itself in the light of courage to be? The first question deals with the ground of being as source of the courage to be, the second with the courage to be as key to the ground of being. Self-awareness makes human experience resonant, it imparts that simultaneous echo to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

One of modern psychology’s major goals is to better understand what controls human behavior and so to be better able to predict behavior accurately. We are all constantly predicting human behavior. For instance, if you could not predict the instructor would be there you, would come to class. One a date, you observe the behavior of your companion and predict the moment to express your affection. If you want to borrow money from a friend, you observe your friend’s behavior and predict the moment when your appeal will get you the results you want.  If you forget an assignment, you predict what story will sound best to the instructor, so you can get a time extension. Each of us engages in prediction every day, based on past experience and present observation. In the same way, psychologist try to study behavior systematically to make predictions based on the best empirical evidence. Empirical data or evidence is that which is obtained by experiment or observation. Psychologists’ predictions are always probability statements, and they tend to be more accurate for groups than for individuals. Probability is the relative possibility or likelihood that an event will occur, the chance that it will happen. The average age of a college freshman class can be predicted with a high degree of success, even though one average-looking freshman might actually be only fifteen years old. A college instructor can predict with a fair degree of accuracy the probable grade distribution for a class, but it would be more difficult to predict which student will what grade. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

 The idea of predicting behavior is a frightening one to many people. You might be afraid that if you can predict your own behavior you will have no choice as to how you will act. However, this is not necessarily so. There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate causes. Suppose you know that having your mother nag you about studying bothers you so much that you are likely to refuse to study. You can ask her not to nag you about studying. Or you can try somehow to change your own reaction to her nagging. All of these choices grow out of your own awareness of the pattern: Mother nags = I refuse to study. If you are aware of patterns of behavior, you can predict what your future reactions will be if they follow past patters. Only then can you decide somehow to change the pattern. Therapy where the central position of the therapist is a forerunner is not acceptable. Therapy is for the benefit of the client, not for the therapist, and therefore the client should be the standard by which all things were judged; the client should set the tone and the pace of the therapy; one’s needs have to take priority. An object of vast importance in the phenomenal World of each individual is one’s self. Many years ago the significance of this in psychotherapy was driven home to many, in spite of an initial prejudice against anything so vague, so unobservable, so tainted with introspectionism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Clients persist in expressing themselves in terms such as these: “I feel I am not being my real self,” “I would not want anyone to know the real me,” “It feels good to let go and just be myself here,” “I think if I chip off all the plaster façade I have got a pretty solid self underneath.” Gradually, a therapist becomes aware that change in therapy is very vitally concerned with the self-yet how could this every become a part of psychological science? Psychotherapy is a relation of trust and respect, mutually felt and shown, which is something that one should experience in all relationship, regardless of if they are personal or professional. It is important for people to be able to trust someone who is evaluating them, just as it is important for one to be able to trust the person one is in a relationship with. Never idolize someone and be a puff piece for them. However, sometimes when you are nice and trying to inflate someone’s self-esteem, they may also take it as a sign that they can take advantage of you when there are actually no real feelings there. So, people reap what they sew. In psychotherapy, there is a constant attempt to foster growth. The growth, well-being, fullest functioning, and self-actualization of the client is the major goal. We state this idealistically, for it is not always so. In some psychotherapies the goal is group or social conformity, or getting the client to become normal, according to some socially determined definition of that word. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

A normal person may get along very well in society, since he or she follows all the rules and meets all the expectations, but one is not necessarily happy or healthy or full of oneself. Our prejudice in this matter leans us toward the assumption that a person, to be treated and helped by psychotherapy, has to be enabled to become more of the potential full human being one is inside. Again, becoming authentic and honest with oneself and with others is not a guarantee of happiness and tranquility. Recall that significant selfhood is a mixed blessing. Along with increased awareness and better functioning comes the disadvantages of being sensitive and involved with life. Patients need to find meaning even in the most meaningless of experiences. Try, for example, to find some sort of meaning in being in a prison (even if it is a mental one), awaiting death for a crime you cannot imagine committing. God put us on this Earth for many reasons, and one of them is to help the lost find meaning in their lostness, to help the dying find meaning in their death, to help the conflicted to find some sort of meaning in their conflict. Our attempts will add a new dimension to those of us who try to enable others to simply be real, to be more authentic, to experience their own significance as human beings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Not all psychotherapies dwell in the past. Some form of Reality Therapy attempts to help the conflicted or hidden self to emerge by confronting it with reality and by helping the person to take on responsibility for being the person who lives one’s own life. Coming even further away from emphasis on the past and on determinism is the growing field of Behavior or Reinforcement Therapy. In operant conditioning, principles are applied to teach people learning theory to change behavior. It is found to be successful in developing competence and new skills among those with cognitive disabilities, schizophrenics, and in changing of habits. There has also been much success in treating autistic children. Though the behavioristic therapists believe in social or cultural determinism—and reject any notion of freedom—they may have much to say to us concerning how people can maximize their potentials. We should try to regulate human conduct by offering rewards for good behavior whenever possible instead of threatening punishment for breaches of the law. We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. We have the techniques now to do it. Only by using them can we hope to maximize human potentiality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

If we are living in what some call the “age of disordered will,” wat underlies this disordered will? I believe it is a state of feelinglessness, the despairing possibility that nothing matters, a condition very close to apathy. Pamela H. Johnson, after reporting the murders on the moors of England, found herself unable to shake loose her conviction that “We may be approaching the state which the psychologists call affectlessness.” If apathy or affectlessness is a dominant mood emerging in our day, we can understand on a deeper level why love and will have become so difficult. While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair which holds promise of dangers. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if one is not growing toward something, one does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities. The feeling of emptiness or vacuity generally comes from people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the World they live in. Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person’s particular conviction about oneself, namely one’s conviction that one cannot act as an entity in directing one’s own life, or change other people’s attitudes toward one, or effectually influence the World around one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Thus, one gets the deep sense of despair and futility which so many people in our day have. And soon, since what one wants and what one feels can make no real difference, one gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers one is powerless to overcome, one’s final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers. Our emptiness has been turning into despair and destructiveness, violence and assassination; it is now undeniable that these go hand in hand with apathy. “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens,” reported The New York Times in March, 1964, “watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. In April of the same yea, the Times said, in an impassioned editorial about another event in which a crowd urged a deranged youth who was clinging to a hotel ledge to jump, calling him “chicken” and “yellow”: “Are they any different from the wild-eyed Romans watching and cheering as men and beasts tore each other apart in the Colosseum? Does the attitude of that Albany mob bespeak a way of life for many Americans? If so, the bell tolls for us. In May of the same year, a Times article was headed “Rape Victim’s Screams Draw 40 But No One Acts.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

A number of similar events occurred during the next months which awakened us from our apathy long enough to realize how apathetic we had become, and how much modern city existence had developed in us the habit of uninvolvement and unfeeling detachment. I am aware how easy it is to exaggerate specific events, and I have no wish to overstate my case. Nevertheless, I do believe that there is in our society a definite trend toward a state of affectlessness as an attitude toward life, a character state. The anomie about which intellectuals had speculated earlier seemed now to emerge with a hideous reality on our very streets and in our very subways. What shall we call this state reported by so many of our contemporaries—estrangement, playing it cool, alienation, withdrawal of feeling, indifference, anomie, depersonalization? Each one of these terms expresses a part of the condition to which I refer—a condition in which men and women find themselves experiencing a distance between themselves and the objects which used to excite their affection and their will. I wish to leave this open for the moment what the sources of this are. When I use the term apathy, despite its limiting connotations, it is because its literal meaning is the closest to what I am describing: “want of feeling; lack of passion, emotion or excitement, indifference.” Apathy and the schizoid World go hand and had as cause and effect of each other. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Apathy is particularly important because of its close relation to love and will. It is so seductive. And behind its delicate probing frown is this conflict, this unadmitted and sinful power. What is it? Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. The opposite of will is not indecision—which actually may represent the struggle of the effort to decide, but being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to the significant events. Then the issue of will never can arise. The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the World, seeking to affect others or the inanimate World, and opening oneself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the World or requiring that it relate to one. This is why love and will are so difficult in an age of transition, when all the familiar mooring places are gone. The blocking of the ways in which we affect others and are affected by them is the essential disorder of both love and will. Apathy, or a-pathos, is a withdrawal of feeling; it may begin as playing it cool, a studied practice of being unconcerned and unaffected. “I did not want to get involved,” was the consistent response of the thirty-eight citizens of Kew Gardens when they were questioned as to why they had to acted. Apathy, operating like Dr. Freud’s “death instinct,” is a gradual letting go of involvement until one finds that life itself has gone by. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The division between the community and the political state has led to the projection of all social feelings into the state, which thus becomes an idol, a power standing over and above mortals. Mortals submits to the state as to the embodiment of one’s own social feelings, which one worships as powers alienated from oneself; in one’s private life as an individual one suffers from the isolation and loneness which are the necessary result of this separation. The worship of the state can only disappears if one takes back the social powers into oneself, and builds a community in which one’s social feelings are not something added to one’s private existence, but in which one’s private and social existence are one and the same. What is the relationship of mortals toward oneself? I have descried elsewhere this relationship as marketing orientation. In this orientation, mortals experience themselves as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. One does not experience oneself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. One is alienated from these powers. One’s aim is to sell oneself successfully on the market. One’s sense of self does not stem from one’s activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from one’s socioeconomic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question “Who are you?” by saying “I m a typewriter,” and an automobile, by saying “I am an automobile,” or more specifically by saying, “I am a Ford,” or “a Buick,” or “a Cadillac.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

If you ask a mortal “Who are you?”, one answers “I am a manufacturer,” “I am a clerk,” “I am a doctor”—or “I am a married man,” “I am the father of two kids,” and one’s answer has pretty the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way one experiences oneself, not as a mortal, with love, fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from one’s real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. One’s sense of value depends on one’s success: on whether one can sell oneself favorably, whether one can make more of oneself than one started out with, whether one is a success. One’s body, mind and soul are one’s capital, and one’s task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of oneself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the personality package conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable investment of oneself, one feels that one is a failure; if one succeeds, one is a success. Clearly, one’s sense of one’s own value always depends on factors extraneous to oneself, on the fickle judgment of the market, which decides about one’s value as it decides about the value of commodities. One, like all commodities that can be sold profitably on the market, is worthless as far as one’s exchange value is concerned, even though one’s value may be considerable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of these sense of dignity which is so characteristic of mortals even in most primitive cultures. One must lose almost all sense of self, of oneself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling, my decision, my judgment, my action. It presupposes that my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and people who have become things can have no self. This selflessness of modern mortals has appeared to one of the most gifted and original contemporary psychiatrists, the late H.S. Sullivan, as being a natural phenomenon. He spoke of those psychologists who, like myself, assume that the lack of the sense of self is a pathological phenomenon, as of people who suffer from a delusion. The self for him is nothing but the many roles we play in relations to others, roles which have the function of eliciting approval and avoiding the anxiety which is produced by disapproval. Some people who are chasing after material gain realize that they have lost themselves, that they are just like an onion with layer after layer, and without a kernel. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

When people make the discovery that they have lost themselves, the dread of nonbeing seizes them and a panic might make them desire to land in hell, rather than to thrown back into the casting ladle of nonbeing. Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity—and when this happens, mortals could become insane if they do not save themselves by acquiring a secondary sense of self; one does that by experiencing oneself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful—briefly, as a salable commodity which one is because one is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns. Look backward, remembering that you proved your worthiness in your premortal state. You are a valiant child of God, and with his help, you can triumph in the battles of this fallen World. You have done it before, and you can do it again. Look forward. Your troubles and sorrows are very real, but they will not last forever. Your dark night will pass, because the Son did rise with healing in his wings. Disappointments comes to visit on occasions but is never allowed to stay. We are troubled, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed. You may be exhausted, but do not ever give up. “So do not fear, for I am with your; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand,” reports Isaiah 41.10. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Even with your own painful wounds, you will instinctively reach out to others. This is part of life. It is why we are here. We are here to have a body and to be tried and tested. Some of those tests are physical; some of those tests are spiritual, and your trials here have been both physical and spiritual. By keeping God’s commandments, we can find joy even in the midst of our worst circumstances. The Lord Jesus Christ will bring you added strength and greater hope. For you, the righteous, the Healer of our souls, in his time and his way, will heal all your wounds. No injustice, no persecution, no trial, no sadness, no heartache, no suffering, no wound—however deep, however wide, however painful—will be excluded from the comfort, peace, and lasting hope of the Lord whose open arms and whose wounded hands will welcome us back into his presence. “Wherefore, thy soul shall be blessed, ad thou shalt dwell safely,” reports 2 Nephi 2.3. God shall wipe away all tears from your eyes. This day will come. “You crucify yourself. Look at what has happened, baby. Are you still by yourself because I cannot reach you lately? All you said was not enough. I could not wait forever. If I had stayed to hold you up, it would not make you better. I know you could, but you will no leave them. I know you are cool, but you will not listen. Look at what has happened, baby,” reports Emma Hewitt (Crucify). #RandolphHarris 16 of 16