We need to make life on this World a little better. The gentlemen had risen to see me off. I murmured my superficial farewells, and only then did the secret grip release me. I walked slowly into the formal garden beyond the pool, and would have gone up into the roaring clouds, to be as far away from the Earth as I could be. However, I discovered a new quality of life which had begun with the poppies and spread out to an awareness of the colorful and adventurous aspect of life—the aspect of beauty—which had been there all the time but which I had never noticed. I seemed released from my old compulsions: I felt empowered, freed for all kinds of activities. I brushed up on my French and found, to my initial surprise, that there was a great deal of musical and cultural life in Rocklin, that friends of different nationalities were waiting, so to speak, for me to join them. These experiences were embodied in my life, and I could live out, imprint upon my psyche, the new ways of life learned psychologically; it crystallized my new understanding of beauty. Human beings can be saved from the danger of being transformed into things. The only wat to salvation lay in going forward and creating a new society that will free people from alienation, from submission to the machine, from the fate of being dehumanized. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings gives us joy and afterwards peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Understandings beauty is a way to liberate human beings from selfishness and greed, it is a way to be free to devote ourselves to the law of God and its wisdom, with no one to oppress or disturb it, and this will make us worthy of life in the World to come. In the era of God there will be neither famine nor war, neither jealousy nor strife. Earthly goods will be abundant, comforts within the reach of all. The one preoccupation of the whole World will be to know the Lord. Hence, it is beautiful that we will be very wise, we will know the things that are now concealed and will attain an understanding of our creator to the utmost capacity of the human mind. “For the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the water cover the sea,” reports Isaiah 11.9.  The goal of history is to enable human beings to devote themselves entirely to the study of wisdom and the knowledge of God; not solely power and luxury. The Messianic Time is one of Universal peace, absence of envy, and material abundance. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one’s sense of being alive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

The realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as people of the past had to wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy one’s wants, in order to maintain one’s life and reproduce it, so civilized mortals have to do it, and one must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With one’s development the realm of natural necessity expands, because one’s wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized mortals, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. However, it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The increase of beauty is its fundamental premise. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment a timelessness, a repose—which is why we speak of beauty as being eternal. Salvation does not postulate a final eschatological solution; the discrepancy between mortals and nature remains, but the realm of necessity is brought under human control as much as possible, but always remains a realm of necessity. The goal is that development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom. When the whole World is preoccupied with knowing the Lord, this is the development of human power as its own end, as it will allow us to give birth to our inner wealth. Beauty is the mystery which enchants us. Like all higher experiences of being human, beauty is dynamic; its sense of repose, paradoxically, is never dead, and if it seems to be dead, it is no longer beauty. When cannot allow everything the economist takes away from us in the way of life and humanity to be restored to us in the form of money and material wealth. The goal is not luxury and wealth, nor is it poverty; in fact, both luxury and poverty can be looked upon as a vice. However, absolute poverty, as well as being wealthy, can be conditions that give birth to or have given birth to one’s inner wealth. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

What is this act of giving birth? Well, you do not need a uterus, it is not a physical birth and something both men and women can experience. It is the active, unalienated expression of our faculty toward the corresponding objects. All human relations to the World—seeing, feeling, desiring, acting loving—in short all the organs of one’s individuality…are in their objective action [their action in relation to the object] the appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human reality. This is not the form of appropriation in the mode of being, not in the mode of having. Let us assume that mortals to be mortals, and their relation to the World to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, and so forth. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person: if you wish to influence other people, you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to mortals and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, for instance, if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Most people in our culture suppress their reactions to beauty; it is too soul-baring. A session with a patient in therapy may illustrate our general cultural shyness in talking on this topic. I had been seeing tis particular client, a woman, once a week for a year; always she talked about some practical problem, generally about the difficulties of getting along with her husband. Though I liked her and she was a highly intelligent person who was also mild, optimistic, pleasant, quiet, and unselfish, but she was a bit too bland and unwarlike, all things considered, and her quarrels with her husband had become boring to me. It appears that her intelligence represented the operation of the reality in principle in behavior, and was responsible for characteristics as the appropriate delay of impulse-expression and the effective organization of instinctual energy necessary for the attainment of goals in the World as it is. Easy accessibility of both primary process and secondary process indicated that she is a person who is both original and intelligent. This how she began by saying she was very weary, they had had visitors for a week, she was “punch drunk” and did not have much to say. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

So I suggested, since she was so fatigued, that she try free association, simply letting whatever popped into her mind come forth. I explained Dr. Freud’s idea of free association: it is like looking out the window of a speeding train. Each view seems separated from the one before, but when you look down on the whole, as though from above, one can see it makes a meaningful landscape. She somewhat reluctantly agreed though she did not believe it would do any good. Following in a summary of the hour: The first thing that comes to me, I stopped my car on the way here to look at the twilight. It was just beautiful, the purple hues with the green hills behind them…it is the most beautiful time of the day…I believe in God, and when I see such beauty, I know there is a Divine Creator. The poets in the country I come from speak of this time of day when they are writing the most important things—when they write of love and so on. In the twilight I used to go to the beach all alone, it was lovely. This time of day would be a good time to die, a good time to be alone…I should have been a poet [smiling]…This time at twilight does not last long. It seems to say something about true love—it cannot be actualized. [Silence] #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

I would like to die at this time…It is so peaceful here in your office…I keep noticing the beauty outside the window…My mother called from [another country]…called all the way to tell me she has a cold…That ruins the beauty…My mother always wanted me to notice the beauty…to enjoy the World. The bay is so beautiful…I stop each time I drive toward the bridge…San Francisco seems unreal, like a fata morgana…I am part of it…it feels so good, I want to melt into it. People come up to me, want me to take their picture with their camera, they stand right in front so they block out all the picture [she laughs]. Maybe I think other people ruin the scene. When I was in the army [in another country], I would go swimming in the ocean at twilight, alone. It was wonderful. Then the waves drove me out—they seemed like monsters coming after me. The mountains behind the ocean are great in twilight, but they become monsters—big and dark—when night falls. [End of summary] At the conclusion of the hour I asked her how she felt. “Somewhat relaxed…like when I go to a good movie. My friends want to talk about it, but not I…This scene here [looking out my windows] is pure beauty.” She then expressed her fear that she had said nothing today, maybe it was all superficial talk. I assured her that no topics could be more important than beauty, God, death. I added that I thought it was the most profound hour we had ever had. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

This person is like the majority of people in our Western culture: we are shy about them, they are too persona. We talk about the view, anything to avoid the personal statement. And if we do let out such feelings we apologize for them, as this woman did in saying she was afraid it was all superficial talk. It is fascinating how much beauty preoccupied this young woman, and yet she had never mentioned it before. Each of us can give as examples of beauty only those experiences which have impressed us. Beauty is, to me, listening to Aaliyah’s self-titled album or Arimin van Buuren’s A State of Trance, or Murray Perahia play a Mozart concerto. Beauty is standing under the grape arbor among lilacs in May when the air is heavy with their fragrance, faint for a moment and then filling the air suddenly again as though to intoxicate us. My own experience of beauty has generally been of the simple things—a walk through the pine forests beside the lake, snow in Winter weighing down the limbs of spruce trees till they touch the ground. When the limpid sky turns to pink and the pink to orange and then a fiery red as the Sun rises over the mountains like a God to change the whole face of the Earth, that is what I consider beautiful. The greatest block to a person’s development of courage is one’s having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in one’s own powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

Early in the morning in Summers in Rocklin Trails I walk out of my house on the far edge of the meadow as the morning mist hangs in the air. The Sun rises and its yellow rays rest on the mist. There is no human sound, only the song of thrushes in the bushes. On every blade of grass in the meadow there is a pearl-drop of dew, and as I pick a blade and look more closely I see on each pearl-drop its spectrum of color reflecting the Sun, creating a meadow filled with trillions of tiny sparkling rainbows. However, in our culture, in our discursive language, we cannot talk too much of beauty. Thus a person is unable to know what one believes, let alone stand up for it, or what one’s own powers are, if one has had all along to live up to some role of oneself in one’s parents’ eyes—an image one carries on and perpetuates with oneself. One’s courage is a vacuum before one very begins to act, since it has no real basis within the individual. True, in poetry or in painting or in music we can communicate the experience. However, beauty is a subjective vision at the same moment as it is an objective datum, and we need to respect this wholeness, this union of experience. This is why, when we are before an image of beauty, we instinctively remain silent. We look and we listen. When we talk too much about beauty, we are objectifying it, putting it outside ourselves, destroying the inner vision and reducing it to objective chatter. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

We must preserve the capacity for wonder—which is the awareness that we can never fully explain the inner experience of beauty. There is also a cultural reason why we do not talk much about beauty. Our culture worships change. We become bored instead of serene; and how then can we appreciate the sense of eternity, the timelessness of this experience? In our age time is money; we construct great buildings only to tear them down in seventy-five years. We erect the tallest edifice in the World, which destroy the previously lacelike loveliness of the skyline of New York, which was one of the wonders of the World. Our age is not one in which beauty has a firm place at the Board of Directors’ meeting. We must nevertheless, being human, communicate by words as much as we can. Normally when a child can take each step in differentiation from one’s parents, each step in becoming oneself, without unbearable anxiety. Just as one learns to climb the steps despite the pain and frustration of falling back time and again, and eventually succeeds with a laugh of joy, so one normally feels out one’s own psychological independence step by step. Aware of one’s parents’ love, and aware of a security present in proportion to one’s degree of immaturity, one can take the occasional crises with parents and such crises as going to school, and one’s growing courage is not overwhelmed. One is not required to stand alone to a greater degree than one is prepared to do. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

 However, if the parents need, like the mother above, to force the child out of their own anxiety, one’s task is made that much more difficult. Parents who have inner, often unconscious, doubts about their own strength tend to demand that their children be especially courageous, independent and aggressive; they may buy the son boxing gloves, push him into competitive groups at an early age, and in other ways insist that the child be the man they inwardly feel they are not. Generally parents who push the child, like those who overprotect one, are showing in actions which speak louder than words their own lack of confidence in him. However, just as no child will develop courage by being overprotected, so no child will develop it by being pushed. One may develop obstinacy or bullying tendencies. However, one’s courage grows only as an outcome of one’s confidence, generally unverbalized, in one’s own powers and one’s indigenous qualities as a human being. This confidence gets its base from one’s parents’ love for the individual and their belief in one’s potentialities. What one needs is neither overprotection nor pushing, but help to utilize and develop one’s own power, and most of all to feel that one’s parents see one as a person in one’s own right and love one for one’s own particular capacities and values. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12