They can do everything, actually. They can do the cooking and the cleaning, and they can meet and greet the drop-in guests. They can host the Easter Fest and Christmas Supper and every other imaginable event. Fact is, they can all do far more than they believe they can. And they all have plenty of money, money enough to walk away from this place and be comfortable wherever they go. That gives them a feeling of security, and an air of independence. However, they want to be right here. This is their home. However, they want for there to be a presence, a Cresleigh Rocklin Trails presence, and without that, they are insecure. People who have lost the sense of their identity as selves also tend to lose their sense of relatedness to nature. They lose not only their experience of organic connection with inanimate nature, such as trees and mountains, but they also lose some of their capacity to feel empathy for animate nature, that is animals. In psychotherapy, persons who feel empty are often sufficiently aware of what a vital response to nature might be to know what they are missing. They may remark, regretfully, that though others are moved by a sunset, they themselves are left relatively cold; and though others may find the ocean majestic and awesome, they themselves, standing on rocks at the seashore, do not feel much of anything; and while many people find the steeply pitched roofs, turrets and stained glass of a Victorian house charming and charismatic, they see just a building with some fins and glass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The most important things are the hardest to say. How weirdly appropriate. Our relationship to nature tends to be destroyed not only by our emptiness, but also by our anxiety. A little girl coming home from school after a lecture on how to defend one’s self against the fake news media, asked her parents, “Mother, can’t we move someplace where there isn’t any news?” Fortunately this child’s terrifying but revealing question is an allegory more than an illustration, but it well symbolizes how anxiety makes us withdraw from nature. Modern mortals, so afraid of the fake news media they have constructed, must cower from the TV and hide in caves—must cower from the TV which is classically the symbol of vastness, imagination, entertainment. On a more everyday level, our point is simply that when a person feels oneself inwardly empty, as is the case with many modern people, one experiences nature around one also as empty, dried up, dead. The two experiences of empties are two sides of the same state of impoverished relation to life. We can see more clearly what it means to lose one’s feeling for nature if we glance back to note how the sense of relationship to nature flourished in the modern period, and then died down. One of the chief characteristics of the Renaissance in Europe was an upsurging of enthusiasm for nature in all its forms—whether in the form of animals, or of trees, or in the inanimate form of stars and colors in the sky. One can see this new feeling coming beautifully to life in the paintings of Giotto in the early Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

If, after looking at the stylized and stiff forms of medieval art, you suddenly come up the frescoes of Giotto, you will be surprised by the most charming cockatiels, lively dogs and windsome donkeys, all presented as vital parts of human experience. And you will likewise be surprised to see that Giotto, in contrast to the artists of the Middle Ages, painted castles and trees as natural forms delightful for their own beauty, not simply for their symbolic religious message; and that, also in contrast to medieval art, he shows human beings experiencing joy, grief, contentment as individual emotions. His paintings tell us more powerfully than words that wen a human being experiences himself as an identity who actively feels his relation to life as an individual, he also experiences as alive relations to animals and nature. However, by the nineteenth century the interest in nature had become increasingly technical; mortal’s concern now was chiefly to mature and manipulate nature. The World had become disenchanted. To be sure, the disenchantment process ad begun way back in the seventeenth century, when we were taught that the body and mind were to be separated, that the objective World of physical nature and the body (which could be measured and weighed) was radically different from the subjective World of mortal’s mind and inner experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The practical result of this dichotomy was that subjective, inner experience—the mind side of the dichotomy—tended to be put on the shelf, and modern mortals had a heyday pursuing, with great success, the mechanical, measurable aspects of experiences. So by the nineteenth century nature had largely become impersonal, as in science, or an object to be calculated for the purpose of making money, as the architecture charts rights angles for the purposes of commerce. Obviously, when we point out that the overemphasis on things which could be calculated and manipulated went hand and hand with the growth of industrialism and bourgeois commerce, we are implying no criticisms of machines and technical progress as such. We mean simply to point out the historical fact that in this development nature became separated from the individual’s subjective, emotional life. Near the beginning of the nineteenth William Wordsworth, among others, clearly saw this loss of the feeling for nature, and be saw the overemphasis on commercialism which was partly its cause and the emptiness which would be its result. He described what was occurring in his familiar sonnet: The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; we have given hearts away, a sordid boon! #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours, and are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers; for this, for everything, we are out of time; it moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; so might I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; or hear old Triston blow his weathered horn. It is not by poetic accident that Wordsworth yearns for such mythological creatures as Proteus and Triton. These figures are personifications of aspects of nature—Proteus, the god who keeps changing his shape and form, is a symbol for the sea which is eternally transforming its movement and its color. Triton is the god whose horn is the sea shell, and his music is the echoing hum one hears in the large shells on the shore. Proteus and Triton are examples of precisely what we have lost—namely the capacity to see ourselves and our moods in nature, to relate to nature as a broad and rich dimension of our own experience. The dichotomy we have learned has given modern mortals a philosophical basis for getting rid of the belief in witches, and this contributed considerably to the actual overcoming of witchcraft in the eighteenth century. Everyone would agree that this was a great gain. However, we likewise got rid of the fairies, elves, trolls, and all of the demicreatures of the woods and Earth. It is generally assumed that this, too, was a gain since it helped sweep mortal’s mind clean of superstition and magic. However, I believe this is an error. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Actually what we did in getting rid of the fairies and the elves and their ilk was to impoverish our lives; and impoverishment is not the lasting way to clear mortal’s minds of superstition. There is a sound truth in the old parable of the mortal who swept the evil spirits with one; and the second state of the mortal was worse than the first. For it is the empty and vacant people who size on the new and more destructive forms of our latter-day superstitions, such as beliefs in the totalitarian mythologies, engrams, miracles like the day the Sun stood still, and so on. Our World has become disenchanted; and it leaves us not only out of tune with nature but with ourselves as well. As human beings we have our roots in nature, not simply because of the fact that the chemistry of our bodies is of essentially the same elements as the air or dirt on the grass. In a multitude of other ways we participate in nature—the rhythm of the change of seasons or of night and day, for example, is reflected in the rhythm of our bodies, of hunger and fulfillment, of sleep and wakefulness, of pleasures of the flesh and gratification, and in countless other ways. Proteus can be a personification of the changes in the sea because he symbolizes what we and the sea share—changing moods, variety, capriciousness, and adaptability. In this sense, when we relate to nature we are but putting our roots back into their native soil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

However, in other respect mortals are very different from the rest of nature. He possesses consciousness of oneself; one’s senses of personal identity distinguishes one from the rest of the living or nonliving things. And nature cares not fig for a mortal’s personal identity. That crucial point in our relatedness to nature brings into the center of the picture the basic theme of this book, mortal’s need for awareness of oneself. One must be able to affirm one’s person despite the impersonality of nature, and to fill the silences of nature with one’s own inner aliveness. It takes a strong self—that is, a strong sense of personal identity—to relate fully to nature without being swallowed up. For really to feel the silence and the inorganic character of nature carries a considerable threat. If one stands on a rocky promontory, for example, and looks at the sea in its tremendous rising and falling of swells, and if one is fully and realistically aware that the sea never has a tear for others’ woes nor cares what any other things, that one’s life could be swallowed up with scarcely an infinitesimal difference being made to the tremendous, ongoing, chemical movements of creation, one is threatened. Or if one gives oneself to the feeling of the distance of the far mountain peaks, permits oneself to empathize with their heights and depths, and if one is aware at the same moment that the mountain never was the friend of one, nor promised what it could not give, and that one could be dashed to pieces on the stone floor at the foot of the peak without one’s extinction as a person making the slightest differences to the walls of granite, one is afraid. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

This is the profound threat of nothingness or nonbeing, which one experiences when one fully confronts one’s relation with inorganic being. And to remind one’s self, dust thou art, to dust returnest, is hollow comfort indeed. Such experiences in relating to nature have too much anxiety for most people. They flee from the threat by shutting off their imagination, by turning their thoughts to the practical and humdrum details of what to have for lunch. Or they protect themselves from the full terror of the treat of nonbeing by making the sea a person who would not hurt them, or by taking refuge in some belief in individual Providence and telling themselves, one shall give one’s angels charge concerning thee…least at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. However, to feel from one’s anxiety, or to rationalize one’s way out of it, only makes one weaker in the long run. It requires, we have said, a strong sense of self and a good deal of courage to relate to nature creatively. However, to affirm one’s own identity over against the inorganic being of nature in turn produces greater strength of self. At this point, however, we are getting ahead of our story—how such strength is developed belongs to later discussion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

We wish here to emphasize that the loss of the sense of one’s own self is detrimental to our souls and society. Little we see in Nature that is ours, as a description of many modern people, is a mark of the weakened and improvised person. Mortals, in order to feel at home in the World, must grasp it not only with one’s cognitive abilities, but with all of one’s sense, one’s eyes, one’s ears, and with all of one’s body. One must act out with one’s body what one thinks out with one’s brain. Body and mind cannot be separated in this, or in any other aspect. If mortal grasps the World and thus unites oneself with it by thought, one creates philosophy, theology, myth and sciences. If mortal expresses one’s grasp of the World by one’s sense, one creates art and ritual, one creates song, dance, drama, painting, sculpture. Using the word “art,” we are influences by its usage in the modern sense, as a separate area of life. We have, on the one hand, the artist, a specialized profession—and on the other hand, the admirer and consumer of art. However, this separation is a modern phenomenon. Not that there were not “artists” in all great civilizations. The creation of the great Egyptian, Greek, or Italian sculptures was the work of extraordinarily gifted artists who specialized in their art; so were the creators of Greek drama or of music since the seventeenth century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, what about a Gothic cathedral, a Catholic ritual, an Indian rain dance, a Japanese flower arrangement, a folk dance, community singing? Are they art? Popular art? We have no word for it, because art in a wide and general sense, as a part of everybody’s life, has lost its place in our World. What word can we use then? In the discussion of alienation I used the term “ritual.” The difficulty here is, of course, that carries a religious meaning, which puts it again in a special and separate sphere. For lack of a better word, I shall use “collective art,” meaning the same as ritual; it means to respond to the World with our senses in a meaningful, skilled, productive, active, shared way. In this description the shared is important, and differentiates the concept of collective art from that of art in the modern sense. The latter is individualistic, both in its production, and in its consumption. Collective art, is shared; it permits mortals to feel one with others in a meaningful, rich, productive way. It is not an individual leisure time occupation, added to life, it is an integral part of life. It corresponds to a basic human need, and if this need is not fulfilled, mortals remain as insecure and anxious as if the need for a meaningful thought picture of the World were unrealized. In order to grow out of the receptive into the productive orientation, one must relate oneself to the World artistically and not only philosophically or scientifically. If a culture does not offer such a realization, the average person does not develop beyond one’s receptive or marketing orientation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Where are we? Religious rituals have little importance any more, except for the Catholics. Secular rituals hardly exist. Aside from the attempts to imitate rituals in lodges, fraternities, sororities, and so on, we have a few patriotic and sport rituals, appealing only to a most limited extent to the needs of the total personality. We are a culture of consumers. We “drink in” the movies, the crime reports, the cranberry juice, the fun. There is no active productive participation, no common unifying experience, no meaningful acting out of significant answers to life. What do we expect from our young generation? What are they to do when they have no opportunity for meaningful, shared artistic activities? What else are they to do but to escape into drinking, movie-daydreaming, crime, neurosis, and insanity? What help is it to have almost no illiteracy, and the most widespread higher education which has existed at any time—if we have no collective expression of our total personalities, no common art and ritual? Undoubtedly a relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all—is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading, radio-listening, internet-consuming culture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

No sane society can be built upon the mixture of purely intellectual knowledge and almost complete absence of shared artistic experience, college plus football, crime stories, plus Fourth of July celebrations, with Mothers’ and Fathers’ day and Christmas Supper thrown in for good measure. In considering how we can build a sane society, we must recognize that the need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a non-clerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education. The transformation of an atomistic into a communitarian society depends on creating again the opportunity for people to sing together, walk together, dance together, admire together—together, and not be members of a lonely crowd. A number of attempts have been made to revive collective art and ritual. The Religion of Reason with its new feast days and rituals, was the form created by the French Revolution. National feelings created some new rituals, but they never gained the importance which the lost religious ritual once has. Cultural rituals are encouraged in our communities, but the significance is never greater than that of the patriotic ritual. Collective art and rituals are found in the youth movement, which flourished in years before the immigration debacle. However, many community movements remain rather esoteric and are drowned in the rising flood of nationalism and political debates. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill mortal’s need for collective art and ritual, even in the remotest sense, either as to quality or its quantitive significance in life. What are we to do? Can we invent rituals? Can one artificially create collective art? Of course not! However, once one recognizes the need for them, once one begins to cultivate them, probiotics and prebiotics will grow, and gifted people will come forth who will add new forms to old ones, and new talents will appear which would have gone unnoticed without such new orientation. Collective art will begin with children’s games in kindergarten, be continued in school, then in later life. We shall have common dances, choirs, plays, music, bands, not entirely replacing modern sport, but subordinating it to the role of one of the many nonprofit and nonpurpose activities. Here again, as in industrial and political organizations, the decisive factor is decentralization; concrete face-to-face groups, active responsible participation. In the factory, in the school, in the small political discussion groups, in the village, various forms of common artistic activities can be created; they can be stimulated as much as is necessary by the help and suggestion from central artistic bodies, but not fed by them. At the same time, modern radio, television, and internet techniques give marvelous possibilities to bring the best music and literature to large audiences. Needless to say it cannot be left to business to provide for these opportunities, but that they must rank with our educational facilities which do not make a profit for anybody. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

It might be argued that the idea of a large-scale revival of ritual and collective art is romantic; that it suits an age of handicraft, and not an age of machine production. If this objection were true, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that our way of life would destroy itself soon, because of its lack of balance, and sanity. However, actually, the objection is not any more compelling than the objections made to possibility of railroads and heavier-than-air flying machines. There is only one valid point in this objection. The way we are, atomized, alienated, without any genuine sense of community, we shall not be able to create new forms of collective art and ritual. However, this is just what I have been emphasizing all along. One cannot separate the change in our industrial and political organization from that of the structure of our educational and cultural life. No serious attempt for change and reconstruction will succeed if it is not undertaken in all those spheres simultaneously. Can one speak of a spiritual transformation of society without mentioning religion? Undoubtedly, the teachings of the great monotheistic religions stress the humanistic aims which are the same as those which underlie the productive orientation. The aims of Christianity and Judaism are those of the dignity of mortals as an aim and an end in oneself, of humanly love, of reason and of the supremacy of spiritual over material values. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

These ethical aims are related to certain concepts of God in which the believers of the various religions differ among themselves, and which are unacceptable to millions of others. However, it is an error of the nonbelievers to focus on attacking the idea of God; their real aim ought to be to challenge religionist to take their religion, and especially the concept of God, seriously; that would mean to practice the spirit of humanly love, truth and justice, hence to become the most radical critics of present-day society. On the other hand, even from a strictly monotheistic standpoint, the discussions about God mean to use God’s name in vain. However, while we cannot say what God is, we can state what God is not. It is not time to cease to argue about God, and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry? Today it is not Baal and Astarte but the deification of the state and of power in authoritarian countries and the deification of the machines and of success in our own culture; it is the all-pervading alienation which threatens the spiritual qualities of mortals. Whether we are religionists or not, whether we believe in the necessity for a new religion or in the continuation of the Juaeo-Chrisitian tradition, inasmuch as we are concerned with the essence and not with the shell, with the experience and not with the word, with mortals and not with the institution, we can unite in firm negation of idolatry and find perhaps more of a common faith in this negation than in any affirmative statements about God. Certainly we shall find more of humility and of brotherly love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

This statement remains true even if one believes, as I do, that the theistic concepts are bound to disappear in the future development of humanity. In fact, for those who see in the monotheistic religions only one of the stations in the evolution of the human race, it is not too far-fetched to believe that a new religion will develop within the next few hundred years, a religion which corresponds to the development of the human race; the most important feature of such a religion would be its universalistic character, corresponding to the unification of humankind which is taking place in this epoch; it would embrace the humanistic teachings common to all great religions of the East and of the West; its doctrines would not contradict the rational insight of humankind today, and its emphasis would be on the practice of life, rather than on doctrinal beliefs. Such a religious would create new rituals and artistic forms of expression, conducive to the spirit of reverence toward life and the solidarity of mortals. Religion can, of course, not be invented. It will come into existence with the appearance of a new great teacher, just as they have appeared in previous centuries wen the time was ripe. In the meaning, those who believe in God should express their faith by living it; those who do not believe, by living the precepts of love and justice and—waiting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned lives in many forms, subjectively and objectively. Every religious and cultural group and, to a certain degree, every individual is the bearer of a special experience and content of faith. The subjective state of the faithful changes in correlation to the change of the symbols in faith. Faith is a construction of thought. There are no pure types in any realm of life. However, one can distinguish two main elements in every experience of the holy. One element is the presence of the holy ere and now. It consecrates the place and the reality of its appearance. It grasps the mine with terrifying and fascinating power. It breaks into ordinary reality, shakes it and drives it beyond itself in an ecstatic way. It establishes rules according to which it can be approached. The holy must be present and felt as present in order to be experienced at all. At the same time, the holy is the judgment over everything that is. It demands personal and social holiness in the sense of justice and love. Our ultimate concern represents what we essentially are and—therefore—ought to be. It stands as the law of our being, against us and for us. Holiness cannot be experienced without its power to command what we should be. If we call the first element in the experience of the holy the holiness of being, the second element in the experience of the holy could be called the holiness of what ought to be. In an abbreviated way one could call the first form of faith its ontological type, and the second form its moral type. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The dynamics of faith within and between the religions are largely determined by these two types, their interdependence and their conflicts. Their influence reaches into the most intimate cells of personal faith as well as into the movement of the great historical religions. They are omnipresent in ever act of faith. However, one of them is always predominate; for mortals are finite, and one can never unite all elements of truth in complete balance. On the other hand, one cannot rest on the awareness of one’s finitude, because faith is concerned with the ultimate and its adequate expression. Mortal’s faith is inadequate if one’s hole existence is determined by something that is less than ultimate. Therefore, one must always try to break through the limits of one’s mortality and reach what never can be reached, the ultimate itself. Out of this tension the problem of fait and tolerance arises. A tolerance bound to relativism, to an attitude in which noting ultimate is asked for, is negative and without content. It is doomed to swing toward its own opposite, an intolerant absolutism. Faith must unite the tolerance based on its relativity with certainty based on the ultimacy of its concern. In all types of faith this problem is alive, but especially in the Protestant form of Christianity. From the power of self-criticism and from the courage to face one’s own relativity come the greatness and danger of the Protestant faith. Here more than anywhere else the dynamics of faith become manifest and conscious: the infinite tension between the absolute of its claim and the relativity of its life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Heavenly Father guides us and gives us the experiences we need based on our strengths, weaknesses, and choices so that everything we do will be blessed. We can trust and rely upon the Father. I am blessed that I was introduced to religion at a young age, because in times of hardship, I would not know where to turn and do not dread to think what my life would be like if I did not know God. Being taught about God is certainly a blessing and my faith in him has grown over the years. Sometimes because of challenges in life and the intensity and duration of somethings I may have to endure, I wonder if my prayers are working and sometimes stop praying, but I know that God is reading my thoughts and knows what I need. I will get back to my praying when my soul is ready to, and I encourage others never to stop. Because God has an eternal perspective, Heavenly Father can see things we cannot. His joy, work, and glory are to bring pass our immortality and exaltation. Everything God does it for our benefit. God wants our eternal happiness more than we do. And God would not require us to experience a moment more of difficulty than is absolutely needed for our benefit or for that of those w love. As a result, God focuses on helping us to progress, not on judging and condemning us. As spirit children of God, each of us has the potential to become like the Heavenly Father. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19