They knew. It was like going to Confession for them. They have the solidity and the eternal self-confidence of the Roman Church. If the answers were so easily available, so many busy and important people would not have searched during the last 5,000 years for the answers. Love is a possible answer to some of the questions. It is probably our last, best hope for anything like meaningful, significant living. So, part of the struggle is done. However, only part. The beginning of wisdom is this: The only Absolute is that there are no Absolutes; the only generalization is that one cannot generalize. Generalizing statements apply only to some people though the wording might sound as though they applied to every one of us. Each of us seems to need significance, a feeling of personal worth. Love is not an emotion, commonly defined. It is a deep and dynamic relationship including attitudes and emotions. The soul is involved in the perception of an intimacy between human personality and the World’s communicating body.  The person struggling to actualize one’s own significant self will know love. One should glory in it, whenever it is offered, and should participate in it. The ensouled body is in communion wit the body of the World and finds its health in intimacy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Love involves growth, from smalless and fear into fullness and courage to be what you are. Many early psychiatrists were convinced that a whole host of human behaviors were instinctive. Most of these have since been shown to be learned, though often at such a low level of consciousness that individuals do not realize that they are not inborn. One of these behaviors is called instinctive and it is the need to gather together, to be with one’s fellow creatures—what we call herd instinct. We are not going to reopen the debate on this one. What we what we want to do is show that, whatever it originates, most of us are strongly motivated by the psychosocial need for affiliation. Just as some people are highly motivated to achieve in their own terms, many others are strongly driven to group together with other people. There is, of course, some physiological basis for this, though this does not prove that it is instinctive. Anthropologist feel that our communal practices –paring, grouping, family formation, and so forth—may have some neurophysiological basis. This can be seen, perhaps, in the fact that we humans are the most dependent of all species. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Important in the love-relationship is empathy, the ability to feel into the other person’s life. We cannot survive birth unassisted: there must be at least on other person present to provide the nurturing we need to survive. Our almost total helplessness literally drives us toward another person and brings out—or creates—our social nature. Only as we grow in autonomy does sociability become a matter of choice, and even then we wonder just how much of a choice we really have. Some have higher needs for affiliation than others, though the reasons for such differences are not easily described. What is important here is what we can find many examples of need for affiliation as a strong motive or is only developed through learning experience. Millions of miserable human beings could become un-miserable, even happy and creative, actualizing people if real love could enter their lives. There is more than just clever rhetoric in the phrase “behind every successful man is a woman.” We would like to run the risk of not-very-scientific generalizing by saying that behind every effective human being is some loving person or experience. “Give thanks to the Lord. Keep the commandments of God, that one may rejoice and be filled with love towards God and all mortals,” reports Mosiah 2.4. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

I recall a discussion with a highly-respected psychotherapist colleague and friend on the significance of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. My friend stated that the trouble with Romeo and Juliet was that they had not had adequate counseling. If they had, they would not have experienced death by suicide. Taken aback, I protested that I did not think that was Shakespeare’s point at all, and that Shakespeare, as well as other classical writers who have created and molded the literature which speaks to us age after age, is in this drama picturing how love can grasp a man and a woman and hurl them into heights and depths—the simultaneous presence of which we call tragic. However, my friend insisted that tragedy was a negative state and we, with our scientific enlightenment, had superseded it—or at least ought to at the earliest possible moment. I argued with him, as I do here, that to see the tragic in merely negative terms is a profound misunderstanding. Far from being a negation of life and love, the tragic is ennobling and deepening aspect of the pleasures of the flesh and love. An appreciation of the tragic not only can help us avoid some egregious oversimplification in life, but it can specifically protect us against the danger that pleasures of the flesh and love will be banalized also in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

I am, of course, not using tragedy in its popular sense of catastrophe, but as the self-conscious, personal realization that love brings both joy and destruction. I mean in this context a fact which has been known all through mortal’s history but which our own age has accomplished the remarkable feat of forgetting, namely, that pleasures of the flesh has the power to propel human beings into situations which can destroy not only themselves but many other people at the same time. We have only to call to mind Helen and Paris, or Tristan and Iseult, Akasha and Lestat, which are mythic presentations, whether based on historical personages or not, of the power of pleasures of the flesh to seize man and woman and lift them up into a whirlwind which defies and destroys rational control. It is not by accident that these myths are presented over and over again in Western classic literature and passed down from generation to generation. For the stories come from a mythic depth of human experience in pleasures of the flesh that is to be neglected only at the price of the impoverishment of our talk about writing about passionate intimacy and love. Love has an openness and vulnerability, the willingness to experience, even though riskily, the other person and life together. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The tragic is an expression of a dimension of consciousness which gives richness, value, and dignity to human life. Thus the tragic not only makes possible the most humane emotions—like pity in the ancient Greek sense, sympathy for one’s fellow mortals, and understanding—but without it, love becomes saccharine and insipid and eros sickens into the child who never grows up. However, the reader may raise an objection. Whatever the classical meaning of tragedy may be, are not the so-called tragic presentations in today’s art, on the stage or in the pages of the novel, a portrayal of meaninglessness? It not what we see in O’Neilll’s The Iceman Cometh the lack of the greatness and dignity in mortals, and is not Waiting for Godot a presentation of emptiness? To this, I would like to make a double response. First, in presenting the ostensible lack of the greatness in mortals and their actions, or the lack of meaning, these works are doing infinitely more. They are confronting exactly what is tragic in our day, namely the complete confusion, banality, ambiguity, and vacuum of ethical standards and the consequent inability to act or, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the paralyzing fears of one’s own tenderness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

True, what we see in The Iceman Cometh is that greatness has fled from mortals, but this already presupposes a greatness, a dignity, a meaning. No one would ever think of reminding a Greek audience that it means something when Orestes kills his mother. However, when Willy Loman’s wife in Death of a Salesman pleads, “Attention must be paid,” and she was entirely right. It does mean something if a man is destroyed even if he is only a traveling salesman. (Nowadays, we would perhaps have to explain to an audience why Orestes’ killing his mother is so meaningful: for we are the generation which has learned that such killing is not at all a problem requiring a terrible struggle with the Furies and later a trial concerning guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness, but an acted-out, psychological, counter-Oedipal mechanism which temporarily got out of hand!) In my judgement, the best of the novels and dramas painting in our day are those which present to us the tremendous meaning in the fact of meaninglessness. The most tragic thing of all, in the long run, is the ultimate attitude, “It does not matter.” The ultimately tragic condition in a negative sense is the apathy, the adamant, rigid “cool,” which refuses to admit the genuinely tragic. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

However, I would also ask, in rebuttal: Do not these works we are citing profoundly reveal what is wrong with love and will in our day? Take the contradiction in acting so vividly portrayed in Waiting for Godot. Didi says, “Let us go,” and the stage direction in the play states, “They do not move.” There could be no more telling vignette of modern mortal’s problems with will, one’s inability to make significant acts. They wait for Godot: but in this waiting there is expectations: the waiting itself implies hope and belief. And they wait together. Or take the rabid denial of love in the savage in-fighting of the married couples in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Or the act of betrayal in Queen of the Damned. These presentations of the inability to some to terms with identity crisis and whatever love and tenderness they do have shows more vividly and convincingly than reams of research what modern mortal’s problem in love is. There is another source of the tragic aspect of love. This is the fact that we are created as male and female, which leads to perpetual yearning for each other, a thirst for completion which is doomed to be temporary. This is another source of joy and disappointment, ecstasy and despair. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Love, real and meaningful love, is a form of therapy. We spoke about murder in context to the plays listed above, but I want to make it a point that we are supposed to love others and show them the respect we would like to see. “For behold, if you deny the Holy Ghost when it once has had a place in you, and you know that you deny it, behold, this is a sin which is unpardonable; yea, and whosoever murdereth against the light and knowledge of God, it is not easy for one to obtain forgiveness,” reports Alma 39.6. We have seen violent patients turned into contended and responsive persons by simple acts of lovingkindness. When they know they are loved and respected, we have seen fearful creatures become courageous humans. When a loving person intervenes, we have seen hostile rage reactions turned into quiet, creative dialog. These are not fictions; they are realities. “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and call on his holy name, and watch and pray continually, that ye may be not tempted above that which ye can bear, and thus be led by the Holy Ghost, becoming patient, full of love,” reports Alma 13.28. Love is not by itself a therapy, not in the strictest clinical sense. However, love is therapeutic: it is enabling, releasing, quieting, uncovering, growth-producing, insight-giving, stimulating, enlivening, inspiring. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

People who discover that they are loved, even by one person, even when they themselves do not love anyone, often find new reasons to live. More importantly, they often find new reasons to be, to grow, to struggle to be more significant human beings. The therapeutic aspects of real love are that the person is loved, not the mortal, the object, the member of Homo sapiens. It takes interacting human beings for love to take place. Your feelings about chocolate ice cream, Aaliyah, Britney Spears, Reese Witherspoon, Drake, Orlando Bloom, Mick Jagger, or Raquel Welch are feelings of affection or admiration or pleasure, not love. To love, the other person must be a person whom you know, care for, respect and respond to. If you show a person your love feelings, it communicates to one that one must, after all, be a person: something one may never have know or felt before. Another therapeutic aspect of love is that it gets you out of yourself. Many people are sick because they are lost inside of their own heads or inside of their skin. They have not ever come outside to see whether or not it is rain, pouring, or if the old man is snoring. To love someone is to bid one to live and invite one to grow. If I love you, I invite you to come out and play, to experience me and the rest of what is happening. This ability to experience a larger situation is a vital part of self-actualization. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Still another therapeutic function love performs is to open up communications. You must communicate it; it cannot be experienced and then hidden away like a coconut cream pie. If it is good, it will be demonstrated, shared, given away. The person who is loved sooner or later knows it. One is given clues and if one is still too blind (or troubled or frightened) to pick up on these, then the lover will try another track. Eventually, “love will out.” It is beautiful to see. “Having faith on the Lord; having a hope that ye shall receive eternal life; having the love of God always in your hearts, that ye may be lifted up at the last day and enter into his rest,” reports Alma 13.29. There is a lingering or sticking-with-it aspect of love that is very therapeutic. The loved person takes this warm glow with one wherever one goes, like a hot coal carried in one’s pocket to keep one’s hands warm. One knows, even wen alone, that one is loved. This shores one up, tides one over, carries one through many cold and lonely, frightening and defeating times. No professional advice or counsel ever has quite this potent as ability to hang on. Being in a love relationship gives one the knowledge that one is appreciated, respected. One is, at least to one other human being, a significant and unique human being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

We cannot quantitatively describe that feeling of what it is like to be loved. If you know it, then it does not need description. If you do not, we cannot create it for you by words. Also, there is therapy in the fact that the loving person knows you. You may have shut out the entire World, kept in the dark about you. However, somebody, one lone person, found his or her way inside the central portion of your being and knows you and…lo, and behold! it did not destroy you. You suddenly discover that being known is not quite the totally devastating thing you though it was. This often gives you incentive to expand this circle of awareness, to let others in on the secret, to invite other people into intimate nexus wit you. This can be tremendous. When we respect others and have a feeling of being real and important inside of ourselves, it means we are real important. At that point, other people’s opinions of us do not matter because we do not need them to validate what we already feel deep inside. Love comes from growth, encourages and fosters, and is a growth experience. The person struggling to actualize one’s own significant self will know love. One should glory in it, whatever it is offered, and should participate in it. We truly believe that what the World needs now is love! #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

You have just one life. Live it! Try to cram as much living into your existence as possible. You may not reach the ultimate height in every case, but we guarantee that you will enjoy yourself a lot more. It is true that human beings strive perpetually toward ultimate humanness, which itself may be anyway a different kind of Becoming and growing. It is as if we were doomed forever to try to arrive at a state to which we could never attain. Fortunately we now know this not to be true, or at least it is not the only truth. There is another true which integrates with it. We are again and again rewarded for good Becoming by transient states of absolute Being, by peak-experiences. This is like rejecting the notion that a Heaven lies someplace beyond the end of the path of life. Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary life of striving. And once we have been in it, we can remember it forever, and feed ourselves in this memory and be sustained in time of stress. We have found that hard as life is, there are a multitude of benefits, enjoyment, wonderful people, and fun involved, as well. Peace and Love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13