I was graced by the divine and sacramental! People talk about the gift of faith, well, I am telling you it was more like miracle! It did sheer pleasure to my psyche. One of the first things necessary for a creative relationship to the inherited wisdom in the religious traditions is to remove religious discussion from such deteriorated forms as the debates over the belief in the existence of God. The tendency to make that issues central—as thought God were an object alongside other objects, whose existence can be emphatically proved or disproved as we prove of disprove Quadrilateral and triangle area theorems or if there is enough DNA in the average person’s body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back 17 times—shows our modern tendency to split up reality. It is noteworthy that in some ways the subjects who hold to a personally evolved religious belief are similar to the group of atheists and agnostics, while in other ways they are distinctly different. The ways in which they are similar are in their relatively high valuation of the thinking process and of intellectual achievement, and in the absence of ethnocentrism or authoritarianism in their make-up; the ways in which they are different are in their robust psychological health, their genuine independence, originality, and growth-orientation, and in their relatively high degree of desire for positions of community leadership and status, as contrasted with the degree of social isolation and preference for going-it-alone which marked the radically skeptical group. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

There is a good deal of psychological strength in the subjects we have interviewed, whatever their troubles may be. They are able to take account equally of the inner and the outer experience; while they are highly interoceptive and have much self-insight, they are also socially perceptive and are able to use techniques of manipulation and mastery in relation to the environment in order to achieve security and to attain gratification of the needs which the culture itself defines as gratifiable. They are both self-aware and aware of others. Their life experience is broad as well as deep. While they have had happy childhoods and feel very affectionate towards their parents, they at the same time are capable of experiencing considerable anxiety, for they do not utilize repression to deal with unpleasant memories or affects, but rather face things as they are, including their feelings and impulses. They are complex rather than simple psychodynamically, and they admit new experiences into their perceptual systems even at the cost of insoluble contradictions. The ability to do this is based in part on one’s faith that one can finally achieve a synthesis, that reality ultimately makes sense and that one can oneself discern that sense. Most important, as a result of this pattern of attributes, the person has great capacity for further growth, which involves somehow being able to leave oneself behind, to shed old coast, to molt, to metamorphose, to find a new order of selfhood in obedience to internal demands for change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

This capacity for self-renewal is related to the whole problem of precocity and impedance in the formation of the self; it is of the great importance in the psychology of individual development. It involves the way in which a person places oneself in the time span which is defined by oneself as process. The most distinctive characteristic of the self is its unceasing growth and change within the matrix of sameness given by memory. Memory seems to make the self timeless even while it presents to reflection the evidence for irreversibility of all that has occurred. The extent to which a person acts in the present seems to me an index of whether the self is perceived as continuing to evolve or perceived as static and essentially no longer alive. My guess is that perception of the self in relation to time is most crucial in determining attitude towards biological death, as well as the very experience of dying, which surely must show as much variation among people as does their experience of living. What this means in terms of religious belief is that belief is not a rigid doctrine, not a set of forever-prescribed particularities, not static abstraction at all, but a formative process with faith as its foundation and vision as its goal—faith in the intelligibility and order of the Universe, leading through necessary difficulties of interpretation and changing meanings to moments of spiritual integration which are themselves transient. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

To make God an entity, a being over against other beings, located in space Heaven only knows where, is a carry-over of a primitive view, full of contradictions and easily refutable. The existence of God implies as much atheism as to argue against it. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as to deny it. God is being itself, not a being. We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be one’s ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at the point where one has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for. We obviously do not mean that all religious traditions or attitudes are equally constructive: they may be destructive, as illustrated in the religious fervor of the Nazis, or in the Inquisition. The problem always remains for theology, philosophy and ethics, with the assistance of the sciences and history of mortals, to determine what beliefs are most constructive and most consistent with other truth about human life. Psychologically religion is to be understood as a way of relating to one’s existence. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” There is much less difference between a mystic’s faith in God [the indigenous convictions of the religious person rather than other-Worldly creeds] and an atheist’s rational faith in humankind than between the former and that of a Calvinist whose faith in God is rooted in the conviction of one’s own powerlessness and in one’s fear of God’s power. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

When one is able to relate creatively to the wisdom of one’s fathers in the ethical and religious traditions one finds that one discovers anew one’s capacity for wonder. It is self-evident that the capacity for active, responsive wonder has been largely lacking in modern society. This is one side of the vacuity and emptiness which so many people feel in our period. Wonder may be described in many ways, from two things incline the heart to wonder, the moral law within and the starry sky above, to the wonder which grips us as one aspect of the feelings of pity and terror which purge the soul when we see dramatic tragedy. Though certainly not the exclusive province of religion, wonder is traditionally associated with it: and I would consider wonder, when it appears as is so often the cause in scientists or artists, as the religious aspects of these other vocations. Those who take a rigid view either of religious or scientific truth become more dogmatic and lose the capacity to wonder; those who acquire the wisdom of their fathers without surrendering their own freedom find that wonder adds to their zest and their conviction of meaning in life. The importance of wonder underlies Jesus’s high regard for the attitudes of children: “Except ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” This statement has nothing whatever to do with childishness or infantilism; it refers to the child’s capacity for wonder, a capacity for wonder, a capacity found likewise in the most mature and creative adults, whether they are scientists like Einstein or artists like Matisse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Wonder is the opposite to cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant, responsive. It is essentially an opening attitude—an awareness that there is more to life than one has as yet fathomed, an experience of new vistas in life to be explored as well as new profundities to be plumbed. Nor is it an easy attitude to hold. The faculty of wonder tires easily. Life would seem a great deal fuller than it does if we understood this is the World that we must empathize with. We must give ourselves to it in a Universe of basic forms in which our own life is grounded. This is the challenge to our consciousness. Wonder is a function of what one holds to be of ultimate meaning and value in life. Though it may be cued off by a tragic drama, it is not a negative experience; since it is essentially an enlarging of life, the over-all emotion which accompanies wonder is joy. The highest to which mortal can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes one wonder, let one be content; nothing higher can it give one. Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The less affluent people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easy-going ways. Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

The less affluent are too helpless, to exposed, to behave like us, even thought they are first class citizens. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sickness, and evils of social institutions. They can never see the World in the old way again, never experience life in the old way; once the old consciousness is shattered, there is no chance of building it up again. We have to present strong, solid forms on which life can look secure, we should not be lulled into failing to realize that in life wonder also goes with humility—not the pseudo-humility of submission, which generally is the reverse side of arrogance, but the humility of the generous-minded person who can accept the given just as one, in one’s own creative efforts, is able to give. The historical term grace has a rich meaning at this point, despite the fact that for many people the World has been so much identified with deteriorated forms of the grace of God that it is useless. One speaks of the graceful flight of a bird, the grace of a child’s movements, the graciousness of the generous person. Grace is something given, a new harmony which emerges; and it always inclines the heart to wonder.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

We must emphasize that in every use of these terms—wonder, humility, grace—the connotation is not that of the person being passive and acted upon, as in some traditional religious attitudes. There is a very common misconception in our society that one gives oneself over to creative ecstasy, or to the loved one, or to religious belief. It is as though one falls in love by way of gravitation, or is seized by the hounds of Heaven, or write music or paints in a state of being carried away. It is amazing both how prevalent these passive ways of thinking are in our culture, and how false they are. Any artist or writer or musician—those who are supposedly carried away—will tell you that in the creative experience there is a greatly heightened consciousness and very intense acidity on one’s own part. This is the opposite of the divide-and-conquer fragmentation which has characterized modern mortal’s relation to nature since Francis Bacon and has led us to the brink of catastrophe. We can, and must, will and love the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. There is a new language of myth and symbol which will be more adequate to love and will in the new conditions we must confront. It is the passion of the artist, of whatever type or craft, to communicate what one experiences as the subconscious and unconscious significance of one’s relation to our World. Communicate is related to commune, and, in turn, both are avenues to the experience of communion and community with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

We love and will the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the World, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it means to be fully related to one’s World. I do not imply that the World does not exist before we love or will it; one can answer that question only on the basis of one’s assumptions, and, being a Californian with inborn realism, I would assume that it does exist. However, no reality, no relation to me, as I have no effect upon it; I move as in a dream, vaguely and without viable contact. One can choose to shut it out—as New Yorkers do when riding the subway—or one can choose to see it, create it. In this sense, we give responsiveness which implies aliveness. And certainly the grace, or given quality of any experience is in direct proportion to how much one participates in it. A patient in therapy expressed it simply but beautifully, “The grace of God is the capacity to change.” What does this mean concerning our personal lives, to which, at last, we now return? The approach we are here recommending as the creative use of tradition makes possible a new attitude toward conscience. The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the Universe is known. It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of mortal that one can be conscious of oneself and one’s World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

For consciousness surprises the meaning in our otherwise absurd acts. Love, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the soul—that often nettlelike voice which is at the same time our creative power—leads us into life if we do not terminate these soulful experiences but accept them with a sense of the preciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of oneself, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action. We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History—that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow—has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. If our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground, what does it matter? The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it. For in every act of love and will—and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act—we mold ourselves and our World simultaneously. That is what it means to embrace the future. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

It is important as the creative use of tradition to take a new attitude toward conscience. As everyone know, conscience is generally conceived of as the negative voice of tradition speaking within one—the “thou-shalt-not’s” echoing down from Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of prohibitions which the society has taught its members for centuries. Conscience is then the constrictor of one’s activities. This tendency to think of conscience as that which tells the individual not to do things, is so strong that it seems to operate almost automatically. When I was discussing this point with a class of students in a college, one student volunteered that it is quite possible to use one’s conscience beneficially. When I agreed and asked him for examples, he offered, “When you don’t want to go to class, your conscience tells you to.” I pointed out that this actually was a negative sentence. He then searched his mind and came up with a second example, “When you don’t want to study, your conscience makes you.” He was at first entirely unaware that this example too was negative. Conscience in each case was seen as acting against what one supposedly wants to do; it was the taskmaster, the whip. The significant point is that the young man said nothing about conscience in his examples as a guide to help him get the most value from the class, or conscious as the voice of one’s own deepest purposes and goals in the enterprise of studying and learning. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

Conscience is not a set of handed-down prohibitions to constrict the self, to stifle its vitality and impulses. Nor is conscience to be thought of as divorced from tradition, as, in the liberalistic period when it was implied that one decided every act de novo. Conscience, rather, is one’s capacity to tap one’s own deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity and awareness, in which tradition and immediate experience are not opposed to each other but interrelated. The etymology of the term reveals this point. Composed of the two Latin words meaning “to know” (scire) and “with” (cum), conscience is very close to the term consciousness. In fact in some countries, such as Brazil, the same word (“consciencia”) is used both for “conscience” and “consciousness.” Conscience is our ability to recall ourselves, the recall is not opposed to historical traditions as such, but only to the authoritarian use of the tradition. For there is a level on which the individual participates in the tradition, and on that level tradition assist mortals in finding one’s own most meaningful experience. We wish thus to emphasize the beneficial aspect of conscience—conscience as the individual’s method of tapping wisdom and insight within oneself, conscience as an opening up, a guide to enlarged experience beyond good and evil. This is the transmoral conscience. With this view it will no longer be true that conscience does make cowards of us all. Conscience, rather, will be the taproot of courage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12