You do right by me, now. Or I will shout you down. Truth is I cannot recollect what happened. One can understand such a reaction only if one appreciates the degree to which words can assume a magical function, and if one takes into account the decrease in reasonable thought, that is to say, in objectivity, which is so characteristic of our age. While mortals are born with certain character traits, their character is definitely determined only by the circumstances under why they live.  If the social conditions of life are satisfactory, mortal’s character will develop its inherent virtues. Many people were trained in all previous history only to defend themselves or to destroy others. A new social order must be created, in which mortals are trained in principles that would permit them to act in union, and to create real and genuine bonds between individuals. Nothing living can prosper without freedom. It is out task to loosen the hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so that what truly lives yet now seems dead may emerge and grow light.  We must go to the root, and the root—is mortals themselves. The history of the World is nothing but the creation of human, is the history of the birth of mortals. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, all history is also the history of mortal’s alienation from oneself, from one’s own human powers; the consolidation of our own product to an objective force above us, outgrowing our control, defeating our expectations, annihilating our calculations is one of the main factors in al previous historical development. Mortals have been the object of circumstances, they must become the subject, so that mortals become the highest being for mortals. Freedom is not only freedom from political oppressors, but the freedom from the domination of mortals by things and circumstances. The free person is the rich person, but not the person rich in an economic sense, but rich in human sense. The wealthy mortal is the mortal who is much, and not the one who has much. The analysis of society and of the historical process must begin with mortals, not with an abstraction, but with the real, concrete mortal, in one’s physiological and psychological qualities. It must begin with a concept of the essence of mortals, and the study of economics and of society serves only the purpose of understanding how circumstances have crippled mortals, how one has become alienated from oneself and one’s powers. The nature of humans cannot be deduced from the specific manifestation of human nature as it is engendered by the capitalist system. Our aim must be to know what is good for humans. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The aim of development of mortals is a new harmony between people and people, and between people and nature, a development in which mortal’s relatedness to one’s fellow mortals will correspond to one’s most important human need. How can this emancipation of mortals be attained? Mortal’s physical energy has become a commodity, hence mortals have become a thing. We are the nice people and, like the cultivated citizens of Athens in Socrates’ time, we do not like to be publicly reminded, whether we secretly admit it to ourselves or not, that we are motivated even in our love by lust for power, anger, and revenge. What is necessary for the cure is that we confront and come to terms with our souls. The principle this implies is identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you. The community gives a humanly trustworthy, interpersonal World in which one can struggle against the negative forces. Sometimes we can be the source of hostility and aggression, but when we can, through consciousness, integrate it into our self-system, it becomes the course of energy and spirit which enlivens us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

It is important that we learn to possess the fragments of our soul. By frankly confronting these fragments, coming to terms with them, integrating them into the self-system—this process yields several benefits. It strengthens the self because it integrates what had been left out. It overcomes the split, the paralyzing ambivalence in the self. And it renders the person more human by breaking down the self-righteousness and aloof detachment which are the usual defenses of the human being who denies the soul. In such therapy we notice that there is a freeing of the patient from morbid bonds to the past. Love and will are reciprocally related: to help one is to strengthen the other. Anger and love and the feeling of both do not operate in separate compartments or in separate people. We cannot reject one and hope to experience the other. Our aim is to discover ways in which we can stand against the insecurity of our time, to find a center of strength within ourselves, and as far as we can, to point the way toward achieving values and goals which can be depended upon in a day when very little is secure. Many people do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

When people talk about lack of autonomy, or lament their inability to make decisions—difficulties which are present in all decades—it soon becomes evident that their underlying problem is that they have no definite experience of their wants or desires. Thus they feel swayed this way and that, with painful feelings of powerlessness, because they feel vacuous, empty. The complaint which leads them to come for help may be, for example, that their love relationships always break up or that they cannot go through with marriage plans or are dissatisfied with the marriage partner. However, they do not talk long before they make it clear that they expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she does not talk. They generally can talk fluently about what they should want—to complete their college degrees successfully, to get a job, to fall in love and marry and raise a family—but it is soon evident, even to them, that they are describing what others, parents, professors, employers, expect of them rather than what they themselves want. Soon people realize that they are just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone expects of me. We have to help people clear up the repressions, bring the desire into consciousness, and eventually help them become able to gratify their desire in accord with reality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Very often people are more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the well-adjusted citizen who is able for the time being to over up one’s underlying conflicts. This is why we need to have faith. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of mortal’s ultimate concern. Mortals, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition one’s very existence, such as food and shelter. However, mortals, in contrast to other living beings, as spiritual concerns—cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. It is claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of one who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name. If a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The extreme nationalisms of our century are laboratories for the study of what ultimate concern means in all aspects of human existence including the smallest concerns of one’s daily life. Everything is centered in the only god, the nation—a god who certainly proves to be a demon, but who shows clearly the unconditional character of an ultimate concern. However, it is not only the unconditional demand made that which is one’s ultimate concern, it is also the promise of ultimate fulfillment which is accepted in the act of faith. The content of this promise is not necessarily defined. It can be expressed in indefinite symbols or in concrete symbols which cannot be taken literally, like the greatness of one’s nation in which one participates even if one has died for it, or the conquest of humankind by the saving race, and so forth. In each of these cases it is ultimate fulfillment that is promised, and it is exclusion from such fulfillment which is threatened if the unconditional demand is not obeyed. An example—and more than an example—is the faith manifest in the religion of the Old Testament. It also has the character of ultimate concern in demand, threat and promise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The content of this concern is not the nation—although some nationalist groups have sometimes tried to distort that—but the content is the God of justice, who, because he represents justice for everybody and every nation, is called the Universal God, the God of the Universe. He is the ultimate concern of every pious being, and therefore in his name the great commandment is given: “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with al your might,” reports Deuteronomy 6.5. This is what ultimate concern means and from these words the term ultimate concern is derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern. The Old Testament is full of commands which make the nature of this surrender concrete, and it is full of promises and threats in relation to it. Here is also the promises of symbolic indefiniteness, although they center around fulfillment of the national and individual life, and the threat is the exclusion from such fulfillment through national extinction and individual catastrophe. Faith, for the people of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately and unconditionally concerned about God and about what he represents in demands, threat, and promise. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Another example—almost a counter-example, yet nevertheless equally revealing—is the ultimate concern with success and wit social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise—indefinite as all such promises—the fulfillment of one’s being. It is the breakdown of this kind of faith which characterizes and makes religiously important most contemporary literature. Not false calculations but a misplaced faith is revealed in novels like Point of No Return. When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith. And this is the step we have to make in order to understand the dynamics of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Only the adversary, the enemy of us all, would try to convince us that the ideals outlined in the general conference are depressing and unrealistic, that people do not really improve, that no one really progresses. And why does Lucifer give that speech? Because he knows he cannot improve, he cannot progress, that Worlds without end he will never have a bright tomorrow. He is a miserable man bound by eternal limitations, and he wants you to be miserable too. Well, do not fall for that. With the gift of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the strength of Heaven to help us, we can improve, and the great thing about the gospel is we get credit for trying, even if we do not always succeed. When there was a controversy in the early Church regarding who was entitled to Heaven’s blessings and who was not, the Lord declared to the Prophet Joseph Smith, “Verily I say unto you, [the gifts of God] are given for the benefit of those who love me and keep my commandments, and [for them] that seeketh so to do.” Are we not all thankful for that added provision? That has to be a lifesaver because sometimes that is all we can offer! We take some solace in the fact that if God were to reward only the perfectly faithful, he would not have much of a distribution list. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Please remember tomorrow, and all the days after that, that the Lord blesses those who want to improve, who accept the need for commandments and try to keep them, who cherish Christlike virtues and strive to the best of their ability to acquire them. If you stumble in that pursuit, so does everyone; the Savior is there to help you keep going. If you fall, summon his strength. Call out, “Oh, Jesus, have mercy on me.” He will help you get back up. He will help you repent, repair, fix whatever you have to fix, and keep going. Soon enough you will have the success you seek. We are going to be blessed for our desire to do good, even as we actually strive to be so. And to qualify for those blessings, we must make certain we do not deny them to others; we are to deal justly, never unjustly, never unfairly; we are to walk humbly never arrogantly, never pridefully; we are to judge righteously, never self-righteously, never unrighteously. The first great commandment of all eternity is to love God with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength—that is the first great commandment. However, the first great truth of all eternity is that God loves us with all of his heart, might, mind, and strength. That love is the foundation stone of all eternity, and it should be the foundation stone of our daily life. Indeed, it is only with that reassurance burning in our soul that we can have the confidence to keep trying to improve, keep seeking forgiveness for our sins, and keep extending that grace to our neighbor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of mortal’s total being. They all are untied in the act of faith. However, faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them. Since faith is an act of the personality as a whole, it participates in the dynamics of personal life. These dynamics have been described in many ways, especially in the recent developments of analytic psychology. Thinking in polarities, their tensions and their possible conflicts, is a common characteristic of most of them. This makes the psychology of personality highly dynamic and requires a dynamic theory of faith as the most personal acts. The first and decisive polarity in analytic psychology is that between the so-called unconscious and the conscious. Faith as an act of the total personality is not imaginable without the participation of the unconscious elements in the personality structure. They are always present and decide largely about the content of faith. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

However, on the other hand, faith is a conscious act and the unconscious elements participate in the creation of faith only if they are taken into the personal center which transcends each of them. If this does not happen, if unconscious forces determine the mental status without a centered act, faith does not occur, and compulsions take its place. For faith is a matter of freedom. Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of centered personal acts. The frequent discussion in which faith and freedom are contrasted could be helped by the insight that faith is a free, namely, centered act of the personality. In this respect freedom and faith are identical. Also important to understand is that real faith, even if it uses the father image for its expression, transforms this image into a principle of truth and justice to be defended even against the father. Faith and culture can be affirmed only if we stay grounded in reality, but keep a focus on our eternal lives. This leads to the question of how faith as a personal, centered act is related to the rational structure of mortal’s personality which is manifest in one’s meaningful language, in one’s ability to know the true and to do the good, in one’s sense of beauty and justice. All this, and not only one’s possibility to analyze, to calculate and to argue, makes one a rational being. However, in spite of this larger concept of reason we must deny that mortal’s essential nature is identical with the rational character of one’s mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Mortals are able to decide for or against reason. This power is the power of one’s self, the center of self-relatedness in which all elements of one’s being are untied. Faith is not an act of any of one’s rational functions, as it is not an act of the unconscious, but it is an act in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of one’s being are transcended. Faith as the embracing and centered act of the personality is ecstatic. It transcends both the drives of the nonrational unconscious and the structures of the rational conscious. It transcends them, but it does not destroy them. The ecstatic character of faith does not exclude its rational character although it is not identical with it, and it includes nonrational strivings without being identical with them. In the ecstasy of faith there is an awareness of truth and of ethical value; there are also past loves and hates, conflicts and reunions, individual and collective influences. Ecstasy means standing outside of oneself—without ceasing to be oneself—with all the elements which are united in the personal center. “And as many as had devils cast out from them, and were healed of their sicknesses and their infirmities, did truly manifest unto the people that they had been wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and has been healed; and they did show forth signs also and did do some miracles among the people,” 3 Nephi 7.22. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

A further polarity in these elements, relevant for the understanding of faith, is the tension between the cognitive function of mortal’s personal life, on the one hand, and emotion and will, on the other hand. We must sharply and insistently understand that every act of faith is cognitive affirmation, not as the result of an independent process of inquiry but as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender. This also excludes the idea that faith is the result of an independent act of will to believe. There is certainly affirmation by the will of what concerns one ultimately, but faith is not a creation of will. In the ecstasy of faith the will to accept and to surrender is an element, but not the cause. And this is true also of feeling. Faith is not an emotional outburst: tis is not the meaning of ecstasy. Certainly, emotion is in it, as in every act of man’s spiritual life. However, emotion does not produce faith. Faith has a cognitive content and is an act of the will. It is the unity of every element in the centered self. Of course, the unity of all elements in the act of fait does not prevent one or the other element from dominating in a special faith. It dominates the character of faith but it does not create the act of faith. “When you shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that you should read them, that you would remember how merciful the Lord has been unto the children of mortals, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that you shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts,” reports Moroni 10.3. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

This also answers the question of a possible psychological of faith. Everything that happens in a mortal’s personal being can become an object of psychology. And it is rather important for bot the philosopher of religion and the practical minister to know how the act of faith is embedded in the totality of psychological processes. However, in contrast to this justified and desirable form of a psychology of faith there is another one which tries to derive faith from something that is not faith but is most frequently fear. The presupposition of this method is that fear or something else from which faith is derived is more original and basic than faith. However, this presupposition cannot be proved. One the contrary, one can prove that in the scientific method which leads to such consequences faith is already effective. Faith precedes all attempt to derive it from something else, because these attempts are themselves based on faith. No matter how serious the trial, how deep the distress, how great the affliction, God will never desert us. He never has, and he never will. He cannot do it. It is not God’s character to quit us. God will always stand by us. God, our Heavenly Father, wants us to be. He wants to bless us. A rewarding, abundant, and eternal life is the very object of God’s merciful plan for his children. It is a plan predicated on the truth that all things work together for good to them that love God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16