Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. We have seen that becoming a person means going through several stages of consciousness of oneself. The first is that of the innocence of the infant before consciousness of self is born. The second is the stage of rebellion, when the person is trying to become free to establish some inner strength in one’s own right. This stage is most clearly seen in the child of two of three or the adolescent, and may involve defiance and hostility. In greater or lesser degree rebellion is a necessary transition as one cuts old ties and seeks to make new ones. However, rebellion is not to be confused with freedom. The third stage we may call the ordinary consciousness of self. In this stage a person can to some extent see one’s errors, make some allowance for one’s prejudices, use one’s guilt feelings and anxiety as experiences to learn from, and make one’s decisions with some responsibility. This is what most people mean when they speak of a healthy state of personality. However, there is a fourth stage of consciousness which is extraordinary in the sense that most individuals experience it only rarely. This stage is most clearly illustrated when one gets a sudden insight into a problem—abruptly, seemingly from nowhere, pops up an answer for which one has struggles in vain for days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Sometimes insights we are struggling for come in dreams, or at moments of reverie when one is thinking about something else: in any case, we know that the answer emerges from what are called subconscious levels in the personality. Such consciousness may occur in scientific, religious or artistic activity alike; it is sometimes popularly called dawning of ideas or inspiration. As all students of creative activity make clear, this level of consciousness is present in all creative work. What shall this level be called? Objective self-consciousness because of the glimpses it affords into objective truth? Or self-surpassing consciousness? Or self-transcending consciousness in the ethical-religious tradition? All of these terms distort as well as clarify. I propose a term which is less dramatic but perhaps, for our day, more satisfactory, creative consciousness of self. The classical psychological term for this awareness is ecstasy. The word literally means to stand outside of oneself, that is, to catch a view of, or experience something, from a perspective outside one’s usual limited viewpoint. Ordinarily what a person sees in the objective World around one is always more or less distorted and clouded by the fact that one sees it subjectively. As human beings, what we see is always through personal eyes, and interpreted by each person through one’s own private World; we see a dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

This fourth level of consciousness cuts below the split between objectivity and subjectivity. Temporarily we can transcend the usual limits of conscious personality. Through what is called insight, or intuition, or the other only vaguely understood processes which are involved in creativity, we may get glimpses of objective truth as it exists in reality, or sense some new ethical possibility in, let us say, an experience of unselfish love. The immediate expression of love is action. Faith implies love and the expression of love is action. The mediating link between faith and works is love. Only God can reunite the estranged with oneself. However, love is an element of faith if faith is understood as ultimate concern. Faith implies love, loves lives in works: in this sense faith is actual in works. Where there is ultimate concern there is the passionate desire to actualize the content of one’s concern. Concern in its very definition includes the desire for action. The kind of action is, of course, dependent on the type of faith. Faith of the ontological type drives toward elevation about the separation of being from being. Faith of the ethical types drives toward transformation of the estranged reality. In both of them love is working. Mystical love united by negation of self. Ethical love is predominantly formative. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

To be, rather, turned outward means to pierce in imagination beyond what one knows at the moment. Mortals in fulfilling themselves goes through a process of transcending oneself. This is simply one side of the basic characteristics of growing, healthy human being, that from moment to moment one is enlarging one’s awareness of oneself and one’s World. Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself, it is the ultimate power behind faith and love. If all life does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation. This creative self-consciousness is a stage that most of us achieve only at rare intervals; and none of us, except the satins, religious or secular, and the great creative figures, live very much of our lives on this level. However, it is the level which gives meaning to our actions and experiences on the lesser levels. Many people may have experienced this consciousness in some special moment, let us say, in listening to music, or in some new experience of love or friendship which temporarily takes them out of the usual walled-in routine of the lives. It is as though for a moment one stood on a mountain peak, and viewed one’s life from that wide and unlimited perspective. One gets one’s sense of direction from one’s view from the peak and sketches a mental map which guides one for weeks of a patient plodding up and down the lesser hills when effort is dull and inspiration is conspicuous by its absence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

For the fact that at some instant we have been able to see truth unclouded by our own prejudices, to love other persons without demand for ourselves, and to create in the ecstasy that occurs when we are totally absorbed in what we are doing—the fact that we have has these glimpses gives a basis of meaning and direction for all of our later actions. This fourth level is what is meant in such statements as those in the Bible about losing one’s life for the sake of the values one believes in. Thus it is true that there is a kind of self-forgetting on this level of consciousness. However, the word self-forgetting is a poor term; this consciousness in another sense is the most fulfilled state of human existence. One cannot demand the awareness we are discussing, and as we have said it often occurs in moments of receptivity and relaxation rather than action. Nonetheless the evidence in studies of creative people is that they get their important insights on those particular problems on which they have wrestled with perseverance and diligence, even though insight itself may come at a moment of lull. One cannot command one’s dreams, for example, but one gets fruitful insights from them to the extent that one is actively concerned with doing so, and can train oneself to be vigilant in one’s sensitivity to one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

The person who has creative self-consciousness are disciplined into wholeness, one has created oneself. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that in the whole all is redeemed and affirmed—one does not negate any more. In the having mode, we have to keep in mind the object is not permanent: it can be destroyed, or it can be lost, or it can lose its value. Speaking of having something permanently rests upon the illusion of a permanent and indestructible substance. If I seem to have everything, I have—in reality—nothing, since my having, possessing, controlling an object is only a transitory moment in the process of living. There is no alive relationship between me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. However, there is also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of identity, for instance, sanity, rests upon my having it (and as many things as possible). The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. The relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

Victorian mortals used this will to push down and suppress what one called lower bodily desires. However, one surely cannot be a mortal of decision without taking bodily desires into considerations. Our discussion of which indicates that bodily wished must be brought into integration with will, or else the one will block the other. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the sexual organs when we are excited by pleasures of the flesh. In therapy, when a patient in a given hour is blocked off from one’s wishes and intentionality in general, a good place to start is for the therapist simply to help the patient become aware of one’s bodily feelings and one’s bodily state at that moment. Many people in the Victorian era were coming to terms with their body from which their culture has alienated them. Each dealt with the body as a tool, an instrument, unaware that this is an expression of the very alienation one sought to overcome. When people are sick, they find their inherited will power may be strangely ineffective. Many find that listening to their body is of critical importance in getting well. When one can be sensitive to their body, heat that is it fatigued and need to rest more, or sense that their body is strong enough to increase exercise, they are more likely to get well. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

 We find awareness of our body blocked off (a state similar to what patients have in analysis when they say they are not with it), several people get worse. This may seem like a poetic and mystical viewpoint for someone seriously ill to be indulged in, but actually it is a hard-rock, empirical issues of whether one will live or die. As far as I can judge, this is true for other patients as well. This bodily awareness sometimes comes spontaneously, but by no means necessarily so. Will is a listening, which brings to mind particularly the listening to the body. In our society, it often requires considerable effort to listen to the body—an effort of sustained openness to whatever cues may come from one’s body. In recent years, the work of the body re-educationalist, the teachers of exercise and of Yoga, have brought out the significant interrelation between the capacity to listen to the body and psychological well-being. The presence of volition is betrayed in the phrases we use, such as I “accept” fatigue, I “agree” to rest, I “consent” to follow my physician’s (or teacher’s) recommendation, I “adopt” a regimen. There is, therefore, a willing which is not merely against bodily desires but with the body, a willing from within; it is willing of participation rather than opposition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

Will moves through desire. The fact that my desires are felt and experiences in my body, with all the glandular changes that go therewith—the fact that they are embodies desires—means that I cannot escape taking some stand in regard to them. That is to say, if I have a wish, I cannot avoid willing about it, even if only to deny that I have the wish. Pure detachment works only if we can disengage our bodies. Hence, the outright denial of awareness of wishes generally involves doing violence to one’s body. My body is an expression par excellence of the fact that I am an individual. Since I am a body, separate from others as an individual entity, I cannot escape putting myself on the line in some way or other—or refusing to put myself on the line, which is the same issue. One may try to conform to someone else psychologically, be an imprint of the other in ideas; but Siamese twins bodily are very rare. The patient who cannot experience oneself as bodily separate from another, say one’s mother, is generally representative of serious pathological illness, often of the schizophrenic kind. The fact that my body is an entity in space, has this motility and this particular relation to space which my movements give it, makes it a living symbol of the fact that I cannot escape in some way or other taking a stand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Will is embodied will. Thus, so many words having to do with will refer to our physical place—taking a position, accepting a viewpoint, choosing an orientation. Or we say, that someone is upright, straight, or the opposite, prone, cringing, ducking, all referring to will and decision as shown through the position of the body. One can never become an individual self so long as one follows the spirit of someone else and goes around, walking crooked; one can achieve some selfhood only when one walks straight through, in the stance of the mortal of single-minded will. Even more interesting is the body as a language of intentionality. It not only expresses intentionality; it communicates it. When a patient comes in the door of my consulting room, intentionality is expressed in one’s way of walking, one’s gestures; does one lean toward me or away? Does one talk with a half-closed mouth; and what does one’s voice say when I stop listening to the words and listen only to the tone? Not only in the therapeutic hour but in real life as well our communication has, much more than we are aware of it, the subtle character of the dance, the meaning communicated by virtue of the forms we continuously create by our bodily movements. You can tell a lot about a person by the flutter of their eyes at moments of fear, in the tremor of their mouth hovering in the verge of crying or smiling, in all these expressions, there is a language which can be more significant, and is surely more eloquent, than most spoken words. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Obviously, body language communicates much more than the bright intellectualized talking of the sophisticated patient who chatters for months in order to avoid awareness of one’s own underlying feelings. There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect. “O Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness! O Lord, wilt thou make my path straight before me! Wilt thou not place a stumbling block in my way—but that thou wouldst clear my way before me, and hedge not up my way, but the ways of mine enemy. O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is one that putteth one’s trust in a mortal or maketh flesh one’s arm. Yea, I know that God will give liberally to one that asketh. Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss; therefore I will lift up my voice unto thee; yea, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold my voice shall forever ascend unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God. Amen,” reports 2 Nephi 4.33-35. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11