I was under some sort of spell myself, looking into her eyes. Her conception of eternity was to feel whole for one blessed hour, to breathe for one blessed hour without pain. How could she make this choice? Unless mortals exploit others, they have to work to in order to live. However primitive and simple one’s method of work may be, by the very fact of production, one has risen above the animal kingdom; rightly has one been defined as the being that produces. However, work is not only an inescapable necessity for mortals. Work is also our liberator from nature, our creator as a social and independent being. In the process of work, this is, the molding and changing of nature outside of oneself, mortals mold and changes oneself. One emerges from nature by mastering her; one develops one’s powers of co-operation, of reason, one’s sense of beauty. One separates oneself from nature, from the original unity with her, but at the same times unites oneself with her again as her master and builder. The more one’s work develops, the more one’s individuality develops. In molding nature and re-creating her, one learns to make use of one’s powers, increasing one’s skill and creativeness. “There were many, exceedingly great many, who were made pure and entered into the rest of the Lord their God,” reports Alma 19.12. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Whether we think of the beautiful paintings in the caves of Southern France, the ornaments on weapons among primitive people, the statues and temples of Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the chairs and tables made by skilled crafts people, delicious Dutch Waffles, or the cultivation of flowers, trees or corn by farmers—all are expressions of the creative transformation of nature by mortal’s reason and skill. In Western history, expertise, especially as it developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, constitutes one of the peaks in the evolution of creative work. Work was not only a useful activity, but one which carried with it a profound satisfaction. The main features of artistry is very lucidly expressed by acknowledging there is no ulterior motive in work other than the product being made and the process of its creation. The details of daily work are meaningful because they are not detached in the worker’s mind from the product of the work. The worker is free to control his own working action. The crafter is thus able to learn from one’s work; and to use and develop one’s capacities and skills in its prosecution. There is no split of work and play, or work and culture. The craft person’s way of livelihood determines and infuses one’s entire mode of living. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

With the collapse of the medieval structure, and the beginning of the modern mode of production, the meaning and function of work changed fundamentally, especially in the Protestant countries. Mortals, being afraid of their newly won freedom, were obsessed by the need to subdue one’s doubts and fears by developing a feverish activity. The outcome of this activity, success or failure, decided one’s salvation, indicating whether one was among the saved or the lost souls. Work, instead of being an activity satisfying in itself and pleasurable, became a duty and an obsession. The more it was possible to gain riches by work, the more it became a pure means to the aim of wealth and success. Work became the chief factor in a system of inner-Worldly asceticism, and answer to mortal’s sense of aloneness and isolation. However, work in this sense existed only for the upper and middle classes, those who could amass some capital and employ the work of others. For the vast majority of those who has only their physical energy to sell, work became nothing but forced labor. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The worker in the eighteenth or nineteenth century who had to work sixteen hours if one did not want to starve was not doing it because one served the Lord in this way, nor because one’s success would show that one was among the chosen ones, but because one was forced to sell one’s energy to those who had the means of exploiting it. The first centuries of the modern era find the meaning of work divided into that of duty among the middle classes, and that of forced labor among those without property. The religious attitude toward work as a duty, which was still so prevalent in the nineteenth century, has been changing considerably in the last decades. Modern mortals do not know what to do with themselves, how to spend their lifetime meaningfully, and some are driven to work in order to avoid an unbearable boredom. However, work has ceased to be a moral and religious obligation in the sense of the middle-class attitude of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Something new has emerged. Ever-increasing production, the drive to make bigger and better things, have become aims in themselves, new ideas. Work has become alienated from the working person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

What happens to the industrial worker? One spends one’s best energy for seven to sixteen hours a day producing something. One needs one’s work in order to make a living, but one’s role is essentially a passive one. One fulfills a small isolated function in a complicated and highly organized process of production, and is never confronted with one’s product as a whole, at least not as a producer, but only as a consumer, provided one has the money to buy one’s product in a store. One is put in a certain place, has to carry out certain task, but does not participate in the organization or management of the work. One is not interested, nor does one know why one produces this, instead of another commodity—what relation it has to the needs of society as a whole. The shoes, the BMW and Buicks and Corvettes, the electric bulbs, are produced by the enterprise, using the machines. One is a part of the machine, rather than its master as an active agent. The machines, instead of being in one’s service to do work for one which once had to be performed by sheer physical energy, has become one’s master. Instead of the machine being the substitute for human energy, mortals have become a substitute for the machine. One’s work can be defined as the performance of acts which cannot yet be performed by machines. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Work is a means of getting money and is in itself a meaningful human activity. For the great majority of automobile workers, the meaning of the job is in the pride of the object they are producing, it is not just about the pay check. Manufactures want you to feel proud of the vehicle you are driving and feel safe in it. Work appears as something natural to people who love what they are doing, it is meaningful and a wonderful condition for a person with an abled body and mind to get a pay check, which allows them to purchase the things they need and want. Work provides a sense of dignity, as well as importance. No wonder there is a premium on work. Americans have always been known as a hardworking bunch and women seem to love a “working man.” No wonder this results in a happy and connected worker—because a pay check allows one to feel fully human. This relationship of the worker to one’s work is an outcome of the whole social organization of which one is a part. Being employed, one is an active agent, has responsibility, and proper performance insures that one will bring home enough money to support oneself and family. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Of course more is expected and wanted of a person who is employed than just money, people expect love, care, trust, devotion and happiness. We must experience responsibility with each other. The ability and the readiness to respond to the other person. It means to be ready, and able to meet another’s needs—not to lead one’s life for the other person, or to promise to take care of all wants and needs, but to meet most of the important emotional needs. Obviously, love as so defined is not a simple or even simply a complex emotion. It is a qualitative relationship, involving stimuli and responses, giving and taking. It also involves mutuality and reciprocity: there has to be some sort of two-way street involved. The tales told of the lovesick young man wo loves a girl from afar are very good literature sometimes. They are very poor self-actualizing experiencing! We are not just part of the equipment hired by capital, our role and function are determined by more than just our quality of being a piece of equipment.  He must know her, respect her, be concerned for her, and respond to her. Then, she must go through the same things with him. If she does not know he exists, has never even seen him, how can she love him? How can he love her if whatever he is feeling is all going nowhere? More properly, he should call it fantasy, admiration, or something else. Love must be shared and returned. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to the psychology of the worker, and to one’s attitude toward one’s work, to the human problem of industry; but this very formulation is indicative of the underlying attitude: there is a human being spending most of one’s lifetime at work, and what should be discussed is the industrial problem of human beings, rather than the human problem of industry. Most investigations in the field of industrial psychology are concerned with the question of how the productivity of the individual worker can be increased, and how one can be made to work with less friction; psychology has lent its services to human engineering, an attempt to treat the worker and employee like a machine which runs better when it is well oiled. While *Taylor was primarily concerned with a better organization of the technical use of the worker’s physical powers, most industrial psychologists are mainly concerned with the manipulation of the worker’s psyche. The underlying idea can be formulated like this: if one works better when he or she is happy, then let us make the individual happy, secure, satisfied, or anything else, provided it raises one’s output and diminishes friction. In the name of human relations, the worker is treated with all devices which suit a completely alienated person; even happiness and human values are recommended in the interest of better relations with the public. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Thus, for instance, according to Time magazine, one of the best-known American psychiatrists said to a group of fifteen hundred supermarket executives: “It is going to be an increased satisfaction to our customers if we are happy….It is going to pay off in cold dollars and cents to management, if we would put some of these general principles of values, human relationships, really into practice.” One speaks of human relations and one means the most in-human relations, those between alienated automations; one speaks of happiness and means the perfect routinization which has driven out the last doubt and all spontaneity. The alienated and profoundly unsatisfactory character of work results in two reactions: one, the ideal of complete laziness; the other a deep-seated, though often unconscious hostility toward work and everything and everybody connected with it. It is not difficult to recognize the widespread longing for the state of complete laziness and passivity. Our advertising appeals to it even more than to close human intimacy. There are, of course, many useful and labor saving gadgets. However, this usefulness often serves only as a rationalization for the appeal to complete passivity and receptivity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

A package of breakfast cereal is being advertised as “new—easier to eat.” An electric toaster is advertised with these words “the most distinctly different toaster in the World! Everything is done for you with this new toaster. You need not even bother to lower the bread. Power-action, though a unique electric motor, gently takes the bread right out of your fingers!” How many courses in languages, or other subjects, are announced with the slogan “effortless learning, no more of the old drudgery.” Everybody knows the picture of the senior couple in the advertisement of a life-insurance company, who have retired in their golden years, and spend their life in the complete bliss of having nothing to do expect just travel. Radio and television exhibit another element of this yearning for laziness: the idea of push-button power; by pushing a button, or turning a knob of my machine, I have the power to produce music, speeches, ball games, and command the World to appear right before my eyes. The pleasure of driving cars certainly rests partly upon this same satisfaction of the wish for push-button power. By the effortless pushing of a button, a powerful ultimate driving machine is set in motion; little skill and effort is needed to make the driver feel that he or she is the rulers of space. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

However, there is far more serious and deep-seated reaction to the meaninglessness and boredom of work. It is a hostility toward work which is much less conscious than our craving for laziness and inactivity. Many a business person feels oneself the prisoner of one’s business and the commodities one sells; he or she has a feeling of fraudulency about one’s product and a secret contempt for it. One hates their customers, who forces one to put up a show in order to sell. One hates one’s competitors because they are a treat; one’s employees as well as one’s superiors, because one is in a constant competitive fight with them. Most of all, one hates oneself, because one sees one’s life passing by, without making any sense beyond the momentary intoxication of success. Of course, this hate and contempt for others and for oneself, and for the very things one produces, is mainly unconscious, and only occasionally comes up to awareness in a fleeting thought, which is sufficiently disturbing to be set aside as quickly as possible. And it generally means, it is time to move on so not to hurt yourself or others and find something you love to do. The World is a land of opportunities and no one is forcing you to stay in one place at one job for the rest of your live. You can move to another city, state, country or tribal land and do something that suits your fancy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The courage to take meaninglessness into itself presupposes a relation to the ground of being which we have called absolute faith. It is without a special content, yet it is not without content. The content of absolute faith is not without content. The content of absolute faith is the God above God. Absolute faith and its consequence, the courage that takes the radical doubt, the doubt about God, into itself, transcends the theistic idea of Go. Theism can mean the unspecified affirmation of God. Theism in this sense does not say what it means if it uses the name of God. Because of the traditional and psychological connotations of the word God such an empty theism can produce a reverent mood if it speaks of God. Politicians, dictators, and other people who wish to use rhetoric to make an impression on their audience like to use the word God in this sense. It produces the feeling in their listeners that the speaker is serious and morally trustworthy. This is especially successful if they can brand their foes as atheistic. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

On a higher level people without a definite religious commitment like to call themselves theistic, not for special purposes but because they cannot stand a World without God, whatever this God may be. They need some connotations of the word God and they are afraid of what they call atheism. On the highest level of this kind of theism the name of God is used as a poetic or practical symbol, expressing a profound emotional state or highest ethical idea. It is a theism which stand on the boundary line between the second type of theism and what we call theism transcended. However, it is still too indefinite to cross this boundary line. The atheistic negation of this whole type of theism is as vague as the theism itself. It may produce an irreverent mood and angry reaction of those who take their theistic affirmation seriously. It may even be felt as justified against the rhetorical-political abuse of the name God, but it is ultimately as irrelevant as the theism which it negates. It cannot reach the state of despair any more than the theism against which it fights can reach the state of faith. Theism can have another meaning, quite contrary to the first one: it can be the name of what we have called divine-human encounter. In this case it point to those elements in the Jewish-Christian tradition which emphasize the person-to-person relationship with God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Theism in this sense emphasizes the personalistic passages in the Bible and the Protestant creeds, the personalistic image of God, the word as the tool of creation and revelation, the ethical and social character of the kingdom of God, the personal nature of human faith and divine forgiveness, the historical vision of the Universe, the idea of a divine purpose, the infinite distance between creator and creature, the absolute separation between God and the World, the conflict between holy God and sinful mortals, the person-to-person character of prayer and practical devotion. Theism in this sense is the nonmystical side of biblical religion and historical Christianity. Atheism from the point of view of this theism is the human attempt to escape the divine-human encounter. It is an existential—not a theoretical—problem. Theism has a third meaning, a strictly theological one. Theological theism is, like every theology, dependent on the religious substance which it conceptualizes. It is dependent on theism in the first sense insofar as it tries to prove the necessity of affirming God in some way; it usually develops the so-called arguments for the existence of God. However, it is more dependent on theism in the second sense insofar as it tries to establish a doctrine of God which transforms the person-to-person encounter with God into a doctrine about two person who many or may not meet but who have a reality independent of each other. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Now theism in the first sense must be transcended because it is irrelevant, and theism in the second sense must be transcended because it is one-sided. However, theism in the third sense must be transcended because it is wrong. It is bad theology. This can be shown by a more penetrating analysis. The God of theological theism is being beside others as such a part of the whole of reality. He certainly is considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole. He is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality. However, every statement subjects him to them. He is seen as a self which has a World, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being, not being-itself. As such he is bound to the subject-object structure of reality, he is an object for us subjects. At the same time we are objects for him as a subject. And this is decisive for the necessity of transcending theological theism. For God as a subject makes me into an object which is nothing more than an object. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

God deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and try to make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with the recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in the machines they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said to had to be eliminated because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications. It is also the deepest root of the Existentialist despair and the widespread anxiety of meaninglessness in our period. Theism in all its forms is transcended in the experience we have called absolute faith. It is the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts it. It is the power of being-itself that accepts and gives the courage to be. This is the highest point to which our analysis as brought us. It cannot be described in the way God of all forms of theism can be descried. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

 Absolute faith cannot be described in mystical terms either. It transcends both mysticism and personal encounter, as it transcends both the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. One of the most important things about authentic love is that it feels good. It is a form of absolute faith. Love is something for you, not to you. When you love and are loved, you are added to, not taken away from; you are made better, you feel more whole, you are more complete. This is what God wants us to experience. If love is real, deep and mature, both people in a relationship experience all these good things. So often people tell us that loving someone takes everything out of them. This may not be authentic loving. When you love, you give without giving up. You give without losing. You gain from the giving. It is a shared experience, and it does not take anything away from you. Self-actualizing people report loving others makes them always feel rejuvenated, strengthened, replenished, and it is a beneficial experience. A loving person enjoys loving. One like it, and it pleasures him or her, it makes one feel good, it enlarges and broadens an individual, it creates something, and makes a person want to repeat those feelings. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Hair, flesh, bones, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pain, fears, never remain the same in anyone of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so in that respect we are never the same. Now in all this change, what binds the diversity together? It is eros, the power in us yearning for wholeness, the drive to give meaning and pattern to our variegation, form to our otherwise impoverishing formlessness, integration to counter our disintegrative trends. Here we must have a dimension of experience which is psychological and emotional as well as biological. This is eros. It is eros which impels people toward health in psychotherapy. In contrast to our contemporary doctrines of adjustment or homeostasis or release of tension, there is in eros an eternal reaching out, a stretching of the self, a continuously replenished urge which impels the individual to dedicate oneself to seek forever higher forms of truth, beauty, and goodness. The Greeks believed that this continuous regeneration of the self is inherent in eros. Those who are with a pearl in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children—this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

However, souls which are full—for there certainly are women and men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions?—wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artist who are deserving of the name inventor. Eros allow us to open our energies and participate, via imagination and emotional and spiritual sensitivity, in forms and meanings beyond ourselves in the interpersonal World and the World of nature around us. “Down, the water holds me down. It is like I have no weight and now, I am floating with the tide. The Sun is on my face. And I hear you talking, I hear you speak. Someone is talking, saying something, but I am on my own. There is nothing left to say, it carries me away. And you call out, I cannot hear you. No, I cannot hear nothing. And you all look the same now. You all look the same now. Now, there is nothing that I want to take me from this place. I am drifting further with the tide that carries me away. And I call out. I cannot hear you, I cannot feel you. No, I cannot feel nothing. And you call out, I cannot hear you. I know you are trying hard to reach me. You will always feel cold without me. I know you are trying hard,” reports Emma Hewitt (Carry Me Away). RandolphHarris 19 of 19