My mind was clouded and it was almost a nice feeling, a delicious blurring of the light and warmth in the room, and I had a swift, profound sense of love. Human beings are vastly more complex than most of us realize. The world in which all of us, including scientists, are born, work, love, hate and return to Heaven, is the primary phenomenal World as it is and always has been presented to us through our senses, a World in which the Sun moves across the Sky from east to west, the stars are hung in the vault of Heaven, the measure of magnitude is the human body, and objects are either in motion or at rest. The stomach is the only part of mortals which can be fully satisfied. The yearning of mortal’s brain for new knowledge and experience and for more pleasant and comfortable surroundings never can be fully met. It is an appetite which cannot be appeased. Our ancestors, sensing their own insignificance when compared to these mighty forces, became convinced that all that happened—including their own behavior—was the result of the will and caprice of the gods and spirits. Every society and almost every individual learns that responding as a total person in one’s encounters with life requires an intensity and disciplined openness of consciousness which is not easy to sustain. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

What is the effect of alienation on mental health? The answer depends of course on what is meant health; if it means that mortals can fulfill one’s social function, carry on with production, and reproduce oneself, alienated mortals can quite obviously be healthy. After all, we have created the most powerful production machine which has existed so far on Earth—even though we have also created the most powerful destruction machine, accessible to the grasp of the mad person. If we look into the current psychiatric definition of mental health, then one should think that too we are healthy. Quite naturally the concepts of health and illness are the products of those people who formulate them—hence of the could in which these mortals live. Alienated psychiatrists will define mental health in terms of alienated personality, and therefore consider healthy what might be considered sick from the standpoint of normative humanism. Country of the veiled also holds true for many psychiatrists in our culture. Our current psychiatric definitions of mental health stress those qualities which are part of the alienated social character of our time: adjustment, cooperativeness, aggressiveness, tolerance, ambition, etc. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Alienated persons lack a feeling of selfhood and experiences oneself in terms of a response to the expectation of others, as part of human nature, just as Dr. Freud had taken the competitiveness characteristic of the beginning of the century as a natural phenomenon. There exists a unique individual self the delusion of unique individuality. Equally clear is the influence of alienated thinking on one’s formulation of the basic needs of mortals. They are the need for personal security—that is for freedom from anxiety; the need for intimacy—that is, for collaboration with at least one other person; and the need for satisfaction. A first glance, nobody will have any quarrel with the idea that love, security, and intimacy are perfectly normal goals for mental health. A critical examination of these concepts, however, shows that they mean something different in an alienated World than what they might have meant in other cultures. Perhaps the most popular modern concept in the arsenal of psychiatric formulae is that of security. There is good basis in mortal’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

 In recent years there is an increasing emphasis on the concept of security as the paramount aim of life, and as the essence of mental health. One reason for this attitude lies, perhaps, in the fact that the threat of war hanging over the World for many years has increased this longing for security. This hold in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted. Another, more important reason for the need for security, lies in the fact that people feel increasingly more insecure as the result of an increasing automatization and over conformity. The problem becomes more complicated by the confusion between psychic and economic security. It is one of the fundamental changes of the last seventy years that all Western countries the principle has been adopted that every citizen must have a minimum material security in case of unexpected unemployment, infirmary, and retirement. Yet, while this principle has been adopted, there is still, among many business people intense hostility against it, and especially its widening application; they speak contemptuously of the welfare state as killing private initiative and the spirit of adventure, and in fight social security measures, they pretend to fight for the freedom and initiative of the worker. That these arguments are sheer rationalizations is evidence by the fact that the same people have no qualms about praising economic security as one of the chief aims of life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

One needs only to read the advertisements of insurance companies, with their promises to free their customers from insecurity which could be caused by accidents, death, infirmary, and senior years, etc., to be aware of the important role which the ideal of economic security plays for the moneyed class, and what else is the idea of saving, but practicing the aim of economic security? This contradiction between the denunciation of the striving for security among the working class, and the praise of the same aim for those in the higher income brackets is another example of mortal’s unlimited capacity for thinking contradictory thoughts, without even making a feeble attempt to become aware of the contradiction. Yet the propaganda against the welfare state and the principle of economic security is more effective than it would otherwise be, because of the widespread confusion between economic and emotional security. Increasingly, people believe that they should have no doubts, no problems, that they should have to take no risks, and that they should always feel secure. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis have lent considerable support to this aim. Many writers in the field postulate security as the main aim of psychic development and consider a sense of security more or less equivalent with mental health. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Thus, parents, especially those who follow this literature, get worried that their little son or daughter may, at an early age, acquire a sense of insecurity. They try to help them avoid conflicts, to make everything east, to do away with as many obstacles as they can, in order to make the child feel secure. Just as they try to inoculate the child against all illnesses, and to prevent it from getting in touch with any germ, they think they can banish insecurity by preventing any contact wit it. The result is often unfortunate as exaggerated hygiene sometimes is: once an infection occurs, the person becomes more vulnerable and helpless before it. How can a sensitive and alive person ever feel secure? Because of the very conditions of our existence, we cannot feel secure about anything. Our thoughts and insights are at best partial truths, mixed with a great deal of error, not to speak of the unnecessary misinformation about life and society to which we are exposed almost from the day of birth. Our life and health are subject to accidents beyond our control. It we make a decision, we can never be certain of the outcome; any decision implies a risk of failure, and if it does not imply it, it as not been a decision in the true sense of the word. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

We can never be certain of the outcome of our best efforts. The result always depends on many factors which transcend our capacity of control. Just as a sensitive and alive person cannot avoid being sad, one cannot avoid feeling insecure. The psychic task which a person can and must set for oneself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fears. Life, in its mental and spiritual aspects, is by necessity insecure and uncertain. There is certainty only about that fact that we are born and that we shall pass into Heaven; there is complete security only in an equally complete submission to powers which are supposed to be strong and enduring, and which relieve mortals from the necessity of making decisions, taking risks, and having responsibilities. Free mortals are by necessity insecure; thinking mortal by necessity uncertain. How, then, can mortals tolerate this insecurity inherent in human existence? One way is to be rooted in the group in such a way that the feeling of identity is guaranteed by the membership to the group, be it family, clan, nation, class. As long as the process of individualism has not reached a stage where the individual emerges from these primary bonds, one is still we, and as long as the group functions one is certain of one’s own identity by one’s membership in it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

The development of modern society has led to the dissolution of these primary bonds. Modern mortals are essentially alone, one is put on one’s own feet, expected to stand all by oneself. One can achieve a sense of identity only by developing the unique and particular entity which is one to a point where one can truly sense I am I. This accomplishment is possible only if one develops one’s active powers to such an extent tat one can be related to the World without having to submerge in it; if one can achieve a productive orientation. The alienated person, however, tries to solve a problem in a different way, namely by conforming. One feels secure in being as similar as possible to one’s fellow mortals. One’s paramount aim is to be approved of by others’ one’s central fear, that one may not be approved of. To be different, to find oneself in a marginalized situation, are the dangers which threaten one’s sense of security; hence a craving for conformity produces in turn a continuously operating, though hidden, sense of insecurity. Any deviation from the pattern, any criticism, arouse fear and insecurity; one is always dependent on the approval of others, just as a person addicted to medication is dependent on one’s medication, and similarly, one’s own sense of self and self-reliance becomes ever increasingly weaker. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The sense of guilt, which some generation ago pervaded the life of mortals with reference to sin, has been replaced by a sense of uneasiness and inadequacy with regard to being different. Another goal of mental health, love, like that of security, has assumed a new meaning in the alienated situation. For some people, according to the spirit of time, love is basically a passion of the flesh. Mortals having found by experience that lust, which is mistaken for love, afforded them the greatest gratification, so that it became in fact a prototype of all happiness to him or her, and they thereby are impelled to seek their happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make lust the central point of their lives. In doing so one becomes to a very dangerous degree dependent on a part of the outer World, namely, on one’s chosen love object, and this exposes an individual to most painful suffering if he or she is rejected by it, or loses it by death or defection. In order to protect oneself from the danger of suffering by love, mortals but only a small minority, can transform the pleasures of the flesh, which they mistake for love, by transferring the main value from the fact of being loved to their own act of loving, and by attaching their love not to individual objects, but all mortal equally. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Thus, by transferring these emotions, they avoid the uncertainties and disappointment of lust, for they realize it is not love, and turn away from the pleasures of the flesh and modify the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim…Love with an inhibited aim is indeed originally full of sensual love, and in mortal’s unconscious minds is so still. The feeling of oneness and fusion with the World (the oceanic feeling) which is the essence of religious experience and specifically of mystical experience, and the experience of oneness and union with the beloved person is interpreted as a regression to a state of an early limitless narcissism. In accordance with one’s basic concepts, mental health is full achievement of the capacity for love, which is attained if one is mature to see beyond pleasures of the flesh. Intimacy is that type of situation involving two people which permits validation of all components of personal worth. Validation of personal worth requires a type of relationship which I call collaboration, by which I mean clearly formulated adjustments to one’s behavior to the expressed needs of the person in the pursuit of increasingly identical—that is, more and more nearly mutual satisfactions, and the maintenance of increasingly similar security operations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

The essence of love as a situation of collaboration, in which two people feel: to preserve our prestige and feeling of superiority and merit, we play according to the rules of the game. The materialism turns the experience of love of the alienated, into a marketing personality. It is an example of an egotisme a deux, of two people pooling their common interest, and standing together against a hostile and alienated World. Actually, intimacy is in principle valid for the feeling of any cooperating team, in which everybody adjusts one’s behavior to the expressed needs of the other person in the pursuit of common aims. (It is remarkable to think about love as expressed needs, when some might say about love that in implies a reaction to unexpressed needs between two people. In more popular terms one can discover the marketing connotation of love in discussions on material love and on the need of children for love and affection. In numerous articles, in counseling, in lectures, material love is described as a state of mutual fairness and mutual manipulation, called understanding each other. The wife is supposed to consider the needs and sensibilities of the husband, and vice versa. If he comes home tired and disgruntled, she should not ask him questions—or should ask him questions—according to what the authors think is best for oiling him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

And the husband should say appreciative words about the wife’s cooking or her new dress—and all this in the name of love. Every day now one can hear that a child must get affection in order to feel secure, or that another child did not get enough love from his or her parents, and that is why he or she became a criminal or schizophrenic. Love and affection have assumed the same meaning as that of the formula for the baby, or the college education one should get, or the latest film one should take in. You feed love, as you feed security, knowledge and everything else—and you have a happy person. Sometimes you might meet a person and things are going exceedingly well, and you have not indulged in the pleasure of the flesh, but there is a very strong chemical bond between the two of you, but the other person is not willing to commit, nor let go and it leaves you wondering why. Well, some people believe that we are only are given a quantity of love and they feel that when they love someone else there is a depletion of the love he or she has for oneself. The state of being in love make the person think he or she is giving up one’s own personality in favor of an objective cathexis (a concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object). This is called the fear of the loss of one’s own being in falling in love. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The threat of the loss of one’s own being in falling in love comes from the dizziness and shock of being hurled into a new continent of experience. The World is suddenly vastly widened and confronts us with new regions we never dreamed existed. Are we capable of giving ourselves to our beloved and still preserving what center of autonomy we have? Understandably, this experience scares us; but anxiety about the vastness and dangers of the new continent—accompanied by delight and anxiety simultaneously—should not be confused with loss of self-esteem. However, some people have just the opposite experience. When some people fall in love, they feel more valuable and treat themselves with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of oneself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” And we cannot subsume this under the rubric of pleasures of the flesh from the loved one; for this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not. We love others to the extent that we are able to love ourselves, and if we cannot esteem ourselves, we cannot esteem or love others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

If we understand that to be open to life, to love, to love another human being, is to trust that whatever else may come to you, mostly you will encounter good, we can cut through the confusion of love. To be open is to remove or discard defenses so that another person can have authentic access to your fullest self. And that means you allow yourself to be vulnerable: you may be hurt, but you also may be loved. You make yourself susceptible to whatever life might offer: joy and pain, love and hatred, acceptance and rejection, pleasure and agony. The reward comes not in finding balance between the agony and the ecstasy, but in knowing yourself to be a courageous, vital, person. Being a significant human being means that there is the plus of being one who dares, one who risks, one who experiments, one who invites life in. One who not only passively says “Yes” to life, but one who goes out—wide open and vulnerable—and challenges life to be interesting, to be worthwhile, to be stimulating. This is the excitement that significant selfhood brings. This is the very active element that loving can mean. We think love and live have more in common than a few similar letters and sounds. Our experience has been that loving people are living people. Thus, love is our capacity to participate in constant dialogue with our environment, the World of nature as well as persons. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Love means entering through a cosmic gate and forming a covenant with God. It means the giving that actually replenishes.  People who live life in this way also live well, for out of basic, comfortable trust in themselves and their ability to handle life they communicate a trusting of others. Their attitude says in effect, “I believe in myself and Myself says that you are a person as worthwhile as I am. Let us exchange the gift of friendship and see what we can add to each other.” Love is fundamental in human experience, love pervades all actions, and is a deep, broad, motivating force. “Behold, I am the law, and the light. Look unto me, and endure to the end, and ye shall live; for unto one that endureth to the end will I give eternal life,” reports 3 Nephi 15.8. Overall love is the joyous, unpremeditated experience of giving and taking that means knowing, caring, respecting, and responding. “Does your life fall away from view? As the time runs away, whatever will you do? Do you want me again, my dear? I will wait for you. If your thoughts turn to prey on you, I will keep them away, so far away. Through the dark night, I will stay with you. I will comfort you. Oh, I will. Calm down your nervous state. I will sing you a lullaby. Calm down. There is no mistake to keep you up all night. Fall down here with me. Baby, we will be alright, reports Emma Hewitt and Cosmic Gate (Calm Down). #RandolphHarris 15 of 15