Now a miracle had happened. He did not need to know who had worked the miracle. Having knowledge is taking and keeping possession of available knowledge (information); knowing is a functional and serves only as a means in the process of productive thinking. Our understanding of the quality of knowing in the being mode of existence can be enhances by the insights of as the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Mater Eckhart, Dr. Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, John H. Brennecke and Robert G. Amick. In their view, knowing begins with awareness of the deceptiveness of our common-sense perceptions, in the sense that our picture of physical reality does not correspond to what is really real and, mainly in the sense that most people are half-awake, half-dreaming, and are unaware that most of what they hold to be true and self-evident is illusion produced by the suggestive influence of the social World in which they live. Knowing, then, begins wit the shattering of illusions, with disillusionment (Ent-tauschung). Knowing means to penetrate through the surface, in order to arrive at the roots, and hence the causes; knowing means to see reality in its genuine form. Knowing does not mean to be in possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach the truth every more closely. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

However, it is helpful to dream sometimes, and, if nothing else, it can be enjoyable. Who knows what creative processes such dreaming can trigger in you who may be theorists and psychologists tomorrow? One community relations expert we know says that of the thousands of problems he encounters in his work, eighty percent of the problems are in human relations. So we have not wasted your time or ours in laying these problems out and in exploring ways in which you can find your own part in the problems and the solutions. If we want to understand the dark forces within ourselves, we must give up the haughty idea that we are unique in all creation. This creative penetration is expressed in the Hebrew prophets appeal to the people to wake up and know that their idols are nothing but the work of their own hands, are illusions. Jesus declares, “The truth shall make you free!” Master Eckhart expressed his concept of knowing many times; for instance, when speaking of God he says: “Knowledge is not disinterested and runs naked to God, until it touches him and grasps him. (“Nakedness and “naked” are temporary, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.) According to Marx, one needs to destroy illusion in order to create the conditions that make illusions in order to create the conditions that make illusions unnecessary. Dr. Freud’s concept of self-knowledge is based on the idea of destroying illusions (“rationalizations”) in order to become aware of the unconscious reality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

All the Enlightened thinkers, Dr. Freud can be called a revolutionary thinker, were concerned with human salvation; they were all critical of socially accepted thought patterns. To them the aim of knowing is not the certainty of absolute truth, something one can feel secure with, but the self-affirmation process of human reason. Ignorance, for the one who knows, is as good as knowledge, since both are part of the process of knowing, even though ignorance of this kind is different from the ignorance of the unthinking. Optimum knowledge in the being mode is to know more deeply. In the having mode it is to have more knowledge. Our education generally tries to train people to have knowledge as a possession, by and large commensurate with the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to have in later life. The minimum they receive is the amount they will need in order to function proper in their work. In addition they are each given a luxury-knowledge package to enhance their feeling of worth, with the size of each such package being in accord with the person’s probable social prestige. #RandolphHarris 2.1 of 20

The school are the factories in which these overall knowledge packages are produced—although schools usually claim they mean to being the students in touch with the highest achievements of the human mind. Many undergraduate colleges are particularly adroit in nurturing these illusions. Form Indian thought and art to existentialism and surrealism, a vast smorgasbord of knowledge is offered from which students pick a little here, a little there, and in the name of spontaneity and freedom are not urges to concentrate on one subject, not even ever to finish reading an entire book. These facts we mentioned may arise in the reader’s mind in questions like these: “Ought we not to try to forget ourselves? Does not consciousness of one’s self make one self-conscious in the sense of being shy, embarrassed and socially inhibited?” Some questioners would no doubt mention the famous centipede, who came to grief because of too much thinking which leg came after which, and so lay distracted in the ditch. The moral of the centipede, obviously is see what happens to you if you get too conscious of what you are doing. Before answering these objections we must point out how unfortunate it is that self-consciousness is identified in this country with morbid introspection, shyness and embarrassment. Naturally, the last thing in the World anyone would want, then, to be is self-conscious. However, our language plays tricks on us. The German language is more accurate in this regard: the word for self-consciousness also means self-confident, which is as it should be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

An example will make clear that what we are talking about is just the opposite to shyness, embarrassment and morbid introversion. A young man came for psychotherapy because, though he was intellectually very competent and seemed superficially to be very successful, his spontaneity was almost completely blocked. He could not love anyone and he got no real enjoyment from human companionship. These problems were accompanied by a good deal of anxiety and recurrent depressions. It had always been his habit to stand outside himself, looking at himself, never letting himself go, until the self-concern became exceedingly painful. In listening to music, he was so concerned with how well he was listening that he would not hear the music. Even in pleasures of the flesh, it was as though he were standing outside, watching himself and asking, “How am I doing?” As could be imagined, this put quite a crimp in his style. He was afraid, when he entered psychotherapy and discovered that he would have to become more aware of what was going on within himself, that he would become more self-conscious and therefore his problems would become worse. He was the only child of anxious parents who had very much overprotected him, never going out at night, for example, because of their hesitancy to leave him alone. Though the parents were ostensibly liberal and rational in all dealings with the son, he could never remember in all his childhood that he every once talked back to them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The parents would brag about their son’s achievement in school to relatives, cutting clippings about his successes from the papers and taking pride in the fact that he was brighter than his cousins: but they rarely expressed real appreciation directly to him. Thus already as a child he was unable to develop a feeling of his own independent power and worth, and used as a substitute an overconcern for the praise which came, at least indirectly, from winning prizes in school. Add to this that we spent his early teens in Hitler Germany, where he was exposed continuously to propaganda about his supposed worthlessness as a Jewish person. Thus his standing off and continually looking at himself as an adult was like counting to cut clippers from the paper, judging and measuring himself, trying to prove to himself that the Nazis were not right, and trying to get genuine affirmation of himself as a person from his parents. This case is very much oversimplified, to be sure. We wish only to illustrate that this person’s morbid self-consciousness and his inability to be spontaneous and wholehearted were connected precisely with the lack of consciousness of himself, precisely the lack of the experience that he was the acting “I.” To be merely an observer of one’s self. The famous centipede is generally a renationalization used by those who do not wish to go through the difficult process of enlarging consciousness of themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Furthermore, the centipede story is not an accurate fable. The less aware you are of how to drive a car, for example, or of the traffic conditions you are driving through, the more tense you are and the firmer hold you have to keep on yourself. However, on the other hand the more experienced you are as a driver and the more conscious you are of the traffic problems and what to do in emergencies, the more you can relax at the wheel with a sense of power. You have the awareness that it is you who are doing the driving, you are in control. Consciousness of self actually expands our control of our lives, and with that expanded power comes the capacity to let ourselves go. This truth behind the seeming paradox, that the more consciousness of one’s self one has, the more spontaneous and creative one can be at the same time. To be sure, the advice to forget the childish self, the infantile self, is good advice. However, it rarely does any good. It is true, furthermore, that one does in one sense forget one’s self in creative activity. When we consider the terms will power and free will they are dubious, to say the least, and perhaps no longer even helpful if they were available. Will power expressed the arrogant efforts of Victorian mortals to manipulate their surroundings and to rule nature with an iron hand, as well as to manipulate oneself, rule one’s own life in the same way as one would an object. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The kind of will that is used as an element of control was set over against wish and used as a faculty by which wish could be denied. Victorian mortals sought, as Ernest Schachtel has put it, to deny that he ever been a child, to repress his irrational tendencies and so-called infantile wishes as unacceptable to his image of himself as a grown-up and responsible man. Will power, then, was a way of avoiding awareness of bodily and urges of pleasures of the flesh and of hostile impulses which did not fit the picture of the controlled, well-managed self. I have not infrequently observed in patients that the emphasis on will power is a reaction formation against their own repressed passive desires, a way of fighting off their wishes to be taken care of; and the likelihood is that this mechanism had much to do with the form that will took in Victorianism. Will was used to deny wish. Speaking in clinical terms, this process results in a greater and greater emotional void, a progressive emptying of inner contents. This impoverishes imagination and intellectual experience as well; it stultifies and suffocates longings and yearnings as well as wishes. No one needs to remind us of the great stores of resentment, inhibition, hostility, self-rejection, and related clinical symptoms which can develop as a result of this repressive kind of will power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

A woman in her late twenties—since we shall refer back to her, we shall give her a name, Victoria Grayson—informed me at the beginning of her therapeutic treatment that her motto had always been, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” This motto seemed to fit her executive job, which required a lot of routine as well as serious decision, and her respectable New England background in a typically upper middle-class family. She gave the impression at first of being a strong-willed person. The only trouble was that one of her most pronounced symptoms was compulsive, promiscuous pleasures of the flesh; she seemed incapable of saying no. Whatever the cause, this symptom—no doubt assisted by the fact that she was a pretty girl—was directly contradictory to her will power, as she could easily see. She would also wolf down food, occasionally eating everything like it was an eating competition, paying the price of a stomach ache and later struggling to diet to keep her figure. Her job revealed similarly driven patterns—she would work for fourteen hours at a stretch but never seem any farther ahead. It soon came out, with a good deal of painful weeping, that, despite her superficial social success, she was a profoundly lonely and isolated person. She talked of longings for her mother expressed in the half-fantasy, half-memory of sitting with her in the Sun when she was a little girl, and a recurrent dream of wanting to be encircled again by waves of the ocean. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Victoria dreamt that she went home and knocked on the door, but her mother, on opening the door, did not recognize her and closed the door in her face. The historical fact was that her mother had suffered a serious depression and had been hospitalized in mental institutions for a good deal of the several years after the girl’s birth. So what we see in our patient is a lonely, pathetic infant, overcome with longing for what she never had. It seemed clear that the great stress of will power was a frantic reaction formation, a desperate endeavor to compensate for the symptoms of her unfulfilled infantile needs, a strategy of living on despite these painful early longings. It is not surprising—such is the irony and balance of the complex processes of human consciousness—that her symptoms were of the compulsive, driven type. This is precisely will gone awry; will turned self-destructive, directed against the person herself. Life is saying to her—if we may put it figuratively, in terms of her motto—where there are such longings and unfulfilled needs, will is exactly not the way. We note, furthermore, that her problem was not mere defiance of her parents, as we normally see it in adolescent behavior. That would show the will still present and active, though negative, and a situation not too difficult to deal with. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Our patient’s problem was more serious—an emptiness, a vacuity, a longing to fill something which from infancy had always been empty. This kind of pattern can lead to critical problems of apathy if the will breaks down before the dependent longings have been brought to consciousness and to some degree integrated. The early trauma taught Victorian as an infant that she must renounce her wishes, for they carried a degree of despair which would have probably sent her into psychosis. Will power was the means by which she accomplished this. However, the neurosis then takes revenge exactly in the area in which the problem originated. Whatever theory of personality we used to understand or explain who we are, we need some understanding of how important our assumptions are. Each of us does have a personality theory, or our own individual philosophy of life. How we think of ourselves, other people, and life in general are the bases for our own personal or intrinsic (inner means, within, or essential) personality theories or self-concepts. “What do you want out of life?” If you have strong, beneficial feelings about yourself, you may answer that you want (and deserve) a good marriage or love relationship, a satisfying occupation, a feeling of freedom—whatever you think of as the highest good for you. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

On the other hand, if you have a poorly developed, negative, or inferior self-concept, as Victoria had developed, you may expect very little for yourself. You may settle for second- or third-best, for instance, hoping that you can just get some sort of job or find someone who cares about you a little. You would not dare to hope you could choose a job or person you really love. As you already can see, parents have the initial and probably the strongest influence on the development of a child’s self-concept. Most psychologists think the first give years of life—when children are influenced almost exclusively by their families—are the most critical for the development of self-concept. If children are encouraged by their parents and helped to gain a feeling of self-worth, dignity, and respect, children will, generally speaking, grow up to be adults with beneficial self-concepts. Children whose parents call them stupid, no good, or delinquent—or act as if they were those thing (which produces the same effect)—may grow up to feel worthless. This effect can be overcome only through positive feedback from other people. Feedback refers to what other people say to you, how they act toward you (or ignore you)—all kinds of interaction that lets you know how they feel about you. Feedback can be either beneficial or negative. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

When people are expected to behave in specific ways or are told that they are stupid or bright or ugly or lovable, they often begin to act in these ways. This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. These expectations may come from parents and other authority figures, but they can come from peers. In childhood, and especially in adolescence, peer pressure and peer evaluation become very important. It would be better to take words like stupid and dumb or mark and fairy out of the vocabulary you use with any child. In our culture, which places a premium on intelligence, a person who is called stupid often enough is very unlikely to take risks or do anything challenging. (“Why try? I’m cursed. I’m so dumb I can’t do it. I’m nobody.”) Often students who do not speak out in class fear that what they have to say may sound stupid, and the instructor and other students may laugh at or ridicule them. So these students sit, mute, in class and fearing the entire time the teacher will call on them. They are so scared that they are not even absorbing the enrichment material. We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong. Therefore, we our children have passions, we should encourage them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

On an episode of American Housewife, Katie Otto is not supportive of her son, Oliver Otto’s decision to go to dance school. And since Oliver is a minor, Katie will not sign his permission slip to allow him to enroll in his special school. Oliver starts acting our because he feels his mother is repressing his talent. However, when Katie goes to her son’s school to pick him up, she sees him doing ballet and how well he is at it and decided to let him go to the school of his dreams. In the past, parent-modeling was an even stronger influence than it is today—to the extent that a boy whose father was a doctor expected to go to the same medical school and perhaps even take over his father’s practice. Even though this is no longer so true, most people today receive strong parental messages about which jobs are acceptable and which are not. This can work in either of two ways. A young adult may select a job or profession from among those which are at least similar to his or her parents’ (a girl whose mother is a doctor may feel she also should enter some profession rather than be a sale or factory workers). Or, if a strong enough break has occurred between parents and young adult, it may be important to the child to find a job that is opposite in type from his or her parents’. Still many people are just happy that their children are working. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

God does not always take us ahead in normal increments. There are time where God takes us little by little. We have to be faithful day in and day out, but when you experience a miraculous blessing, incredible power is released due to your faith. Obviously, of the meaning of faith is misunderstood, faith and reason exclude each other. If, however, faith is understood as the state of being ultimately concerned, no conflict exists. All spiritual elements of humans, in spite of their distinct character, are within each other. This is true also of faith and reason. Therefore, it is not enough to asset that the state of being ultimately concerned is in no conflict with the rational structure of the human mind. One also must show their actual relationship, namely, the way in which they lie within each other. In which sense, one must ask first, is the word reason used when confronted with faith? It is meant, as in most periods of Western culture, in the sense of the source of meaning, of structure, of norms and principles? In the first case, reason gives the tools for recognizing and controlling reality, and faith gives the direction in which this control may be exercised. One could call this kind of reason technical reason, providing for means but not for ends. Reason in this sense concerns the daily life of everybody and is the power which determines the technical civilization of out time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In the second case, reason is identical with the humanity of mortals in contrast to all other beings. It is the basis of language, of freedom, of creativity. It is involved in the search for knowledge, the experience of art, the actualization of moral commands; it makes a centered personal life and a participation in community possible. If faith were the opposite of reason, it would tend to dehumanize mortals. This consequence has been drawn, theoretically and practically, in religious and political authoritarian systems. A faith which destroys reason abolishes itself and the humanity of mortals. For only a being who has the structure of reason is able to be ultimately concerned, to distinguish ultimate and preliminary concerns, to understand the unconditional commands of the ethical imperative, and to be aware of the presence of the holy. All this is valid only if the second meaning of reason is presupposed: reason as the meaningful structure of mind and reality; and not the first meaning: reason as a technical tool. Reason is the precondition of faith; faith is the act in which reason reaches ecstatically beyond itself. This is the opposite side of their being within each other. Mortal’s reason is finite; it moves within finite relations when dealing with the Universe and with mortals. All cultural activities in which mortals perceives one’s World and those in which one shapes one’s World have this character of finitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Therefore, cultural activities are not necessarily matters of infinite concern. However, reason is not bound to its own finitude. It is aware of it and, in so doing, rises above it. Mortals experiences a belonging to the infinite which, however, is neither a part of one’s self nor something in one’s power. It must grasp one, and if it does, it is a matter of infinite concern. Mortals are finite, and mortal’s reason lives in preliminary concerns; but mortals are also aware of one’s potential infinity, and this awareness appears as one’s ultimate concern, as faith. If reason is grasped by an ultimate concern, it is driven beyond itself; but it does not cease to be reason, finite reason. The ecstatic experience of an ultimate concern does not destroy the structure of reason. Ecstasy is fulfilled, not denied, rationality. Reason can be fulfilled only if it is driven beyond the limits of its finite, and experiences the presence of the ultimate, the holy. Without such an experience reason exhausts itself and its finite contents. Finally, it becomes filled with irrational or demonic contents and is destroyed by them. The road leads from reason fulfilled in faith through reason without faith to reason filled wit demonic-destructive faith. The second stage is only a point of transition, since there is no vacuum in the spiritual life, as there is none in nature. Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Faith as the state of ultimate concern is reason in ecstasy. There is no conflict between the nature of faith and the nature of reason; they are within each other. On this point theology will ask several questions. It will ask whether the nature of faith is not distorted under the conditions of human existence, for example, if demonic-destructive forces get hold of it—as indicated before. And theology will ask whether the nature of reason is distorted with mortal’s estrangement from one’s self. Finally, it will ask whether the unity of faith and reason and the true nature of both of them must not be re-established by what religion calls revelation. And—theology will continue—if this is the case, is reason in its distorted stage not obliged to subject itself to revelation and is not this subjection to the contents of revelation the true sense of the term faith? The answer to these questions, asked by theology, is the matter of a whole theology itself. It must be acknowledged that mortals are in a state of estrangement from their true nature. Thus the use of their reason and the character of their faith are not what they essentially are and, therefore, ought to be. This leads to actual conflicts between a distorted use of reason and an idolatrous faith. The solution we give with respect to the true nature of faith and the true nature of reason cannot be applied without this fundamental qualification to the actual life of faith and reason under the conditions of human existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The consequence of this qualification is that the estrangement of faith and of reason in themselves and in their mutual relationships must be overcome and their mutual relationship must be overcome and their true nature and relation must be established within the actual life. The experience in which this happens is a revelatory experience. The term revelation has been misused so much that it is difficult to use it at all, even more so than the term reason. Revelation is popularly understood as a divine information about divine matters, given to prophets and apostles and dictated by the divine Spirit to the writers of the Bible, or the Koran, or other sacred books. Acceptance of such divine informations, however absurd and irrational they may be, is then called faith. Every word of the present discussion contradicts this distortion of the meaning of revelation. Revelation is first of all the experience in which an ultimate concern grasps the human mind and creates a community in which this concern expresses itself in symbols of action, imagination and thought. Wherever such a revelatory experience occurs, both faith and reason are renewed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Their internal and mutual conflicts are conquered, and estrangement is replaced by reconciliation. This is what revelation means, or should mean. It is an event in which the ultimate becomes manifest in an ultimate concern, shaking and transforming the given situation in religion and culture. In such an experience no conflict between faith and reason is possible; for it is man’s total structure as a relational being which is grasped and changed by the revelatory manifestation of an ultimate concern. However, revelation is revelation to mortals in their state of corrupted faith and corrupted rationality. And the corruption, although broken in its final power, is conquered but not removed. It enters the new revelatory experience as it has entered the old ones. It makes faith idolatrous, confusing the bearer and the manifestations of the ultimate with the ultimate itself. It deprives reason of its ecstatic power, of its tendency to transcend itself in the direction of the ultimate. In consequence of this dual distortion, it distorts the relation of faith and reason, reducing faith to a preliminary concern which interferes with the preliminary concern which interferes with the preliminary concerns of reason, and elevates reason to ultimacy in spite of its essential finitude. Out of this double corruption there arise new conflicts between faith and reason and with them the quest for a new and superior revelation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The history of faith is a permanent fight with the corruption of faith, and the conflict with reason is one of its most conspicuous symptoms. The decisive battles in this fight are the great revelatory events, and the victorious battle would be a final revelation in which the distortion of faith and reason is definitely overcome. Christianity claims to be based on this revelation. Its claim is exposed to the continuous pragmatic test of history. Jesus Christ is the source of all healing, peace, and eternal progress. Many people have accepted the challenge and been blessed. With the gift of Christ’s Atonement, which includes the gifts of redemption and resurrection, we are able to repent, change, and progress eternally. Because of the power Christ gives us as we are obedient, we are able to become more than we ever could on our own. We may not understand faith completely, but each of us who has felt faith in Christ increase has also received a greater understanding of our divine identity and purpose, leading us to make choices that are consistent with that knowledge. “Never regret. If it is good, it is wonderful. If it is bad, it is experience. I wanted to learn more of love—that is built not on the shifting ands of violent passion but on the steady rock of deep and abiding affection. We are born, we suffer, we love, we die, but the waves continue to beat upon the rocks; the seed time and the harvest come and go, but the Earth remains,” reports Victoria Holt. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20As far as scientists know, small babies have no conscious awareness of “I” or self. During infancy, babies spend most of their rime asleep. They wake when their body needs nourishment; after they are fed, they usually go back to sleep (probably remember what it was like in Heaven). Babies seem to be aware only of their own needs and discomforts and what people want from them, like a smile, but not aware of themselves as independent beings.