I am with the Lord in the Light, the Creator, the Divine Source of All Things. The solution to all mysteries is available to me. The image of the Mystical Body of Christ is very attractive. However, I consider the importance given to this image today as one of the most serious signs of our degeneration. For our true dignity is not to be parts of a body, even though it be a mystical one, even thought it be that of Christ. It consists in this, that in the state of perfection, which is the vocation of each one of us, we no longer live in ourselves, but Christ lives in us so that through our perfection Christ, in his integrity and in his indivisible unity, becomes in a sense each one of us, as he is completely in each host. The hosts are not a part of his body. The present-day importance of the image of the Mystical Body shows how wretchedly susceptible Christians are to outside influences. Undoubtedly there is real intoxication in being a member of the Mystical Body of Christ. However, today a great many other mystical bodies, which have not Christ for their head, produce an intoxication in their members that to my way of thinking is the same order. Each person is at a different point in one’s psychological development. For one person one technique might be just what one needs to enter into a new, better phase of life. For another, it might just start a series of events which then need to be followed up by more similar experiences. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Some techniques require cautions. Where these cautions are stated, they should be adhered to, so that maximum value can be obtained from the techniques. The future is exciting. The pursuit of joy is exciting. The time is now. We had better hurry. The culture is already getting to the youth, as if they are beginning to feel frightened and guilty. If there is one statement true of every living person it must be this: no one has achieved their full potential. The latent abilities, hidden talents, and undeveloped capacities for excellence and pleasure are legion. The consequences of this universal fate are many. Observers frequently refer to the human potential as our largest untapped natural resource. Increasing leisure-time underlines the significance of unused potential. And perhaps the most important of all, the unexpressed robs us of pleasure and joy in living—it prevents us from reaching the unreachable star. Writing is probably the most prevalent and most widely understood form of communication of creative interpretations of experience. Then too, the social impact of writers in disseminating information, influences public opinion, forming public taste, and advancing culture, is very great. Language itself is so much an expression of culture that a study of its use in any particular society provides a unique field for observation of creative forces in the culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Social enthusiasm has such power today, they rise people so effectively to the supreme degree of heroism in suffering and death, that I think it is as well that a few sheep should remain outside the fold in order to bear witness that the love of Christ is essentially something different. The Church today defends the cause of the indefeasible rights of the individual against collective oppression, of liberty of thought against tyranny. However, these are causes readily embraced by those who find themselves momentarily to be the least strong. It is their only way of perhaps one day becoming the strongest. That is well known. You may perhaps be offended by this idea. You are not the Church. During the periods of the most atrocious abuse of power committed by the Church, there must have been some priests like you among the others. Your good faith is not a guarantee, even were it shared by all your Order. You cannot foresee what turn things may take. There is a slight, prudent, loss of Full Understanding as one slip into the Earthly atmosphere. No saint can carry the Fullness of Knowledge into the World because the World could not grasp it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

I must give you the impression of a Luciferian pride in speaking thus of a great many matters that are too high for me and about which I have no right to understand anything. It is not my fault. Ideas come and settle into my mind by mistake, then, realizing their mistake, they absolutely insist on coming out. I do not know where they come from, or what they are worth, but, whatever the risk, I do not think I have the right to prevent this operation.  Christ granted to his well-beloved disciple, and probably to all that disciple’s spiritual lineage, to come to him not through degradation, defilement, and distress, but in uninterrupted joy, purity, and sweetness. Joy is the feeling that comes from the fulfillment of one’s potential. Fulfillment brings to an individual the feeling that one can cope with one’s environment; the sense of confidence in oneself as a significant, competent, lovable person who is capable of handling situations as they arise, able to use fully one’s own capacities, and free to express one’s feelings. Joy requires a vital, alive body, self-contentment, productive and satisfying relations with others, and a successful relation to society. Obstacles to realizing this potential come from everywhere. The methods used to organize social institutions frequently squelch creativity and impose mediocrity. Society seems to place a premium on relationships featuring hypocrisy and superficiality—relationships that are tolerated rather than sources of happiness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Child-rearing practices, attitudes toward pleasures of the flesh, many religious doctrines and covenants, attitudes toward material achievement, confusion about maleness and femaleness—all coalesce to make it difficult for an individual to learn to know oneself, to like oneself, to become acquainted with one’s real feelings and desires and to learn to use oneself effectively and joyously. Our bodies, too, can inhibit the development of joy. Poor physical condition, physical trauma, and emotional problems (converted into physical ailments, weakness and malformations) limit a person’s capacity for full realization. A pained, tired, deadened, or unfeeling body cannot experience itself fully and cannot hold the feeling required for optimal fulfillment of the individual. In the past century, many investigators have been working on theories and methods for developing the human potential. As yet, these practitioners are not united behind one coherent approach, but each works at a vitally important element of the problem. From organization to interpersonal relations to physical health to creativity, workers are exploring ways to develop the human potential.  Creative writing was defined for the purpose of the study as the composition of phrases, essays, stories, poems, and plays which communicate a single individual’s interpretation of experience in an original manner. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

 Many writers tend to have a high degree of intellectual capacity, genuinely value intellectual and cognitive matters, values own independence and autonomy. They are also verbally fluent; can express ideas well. Writers tend to also enjoy esthetic impressions and are esthetically reactive. This group of individuals also possess the ability to be highly productive, get things done, is concerned with philosophical problems such as religion, values, the meaning of life and so forth. There is on display a high aspiration level for self, a wide range of interests, and writers think and associates to ideas in unusual ways; has unconventional thought processes. Other characteristics are that they are interesting and arresting people (meaning they have the ability to captive others with their thoughts and essence and make the pause and want to know more). Several also appear straightforward, forthright, candid in dealing with others. Typically their behavior is in an ethically consistent manner; is consistent with own personal standards. However, as we saw in the film, The Fault in Our Stars when Hazel and Gus go to meet their favorite author, some writers are more concerned with their own adequacy as a person, either at a conscious level or unconscious level and can be basically anxious, has fluctuating moods, engages in personal fantasy and daydreams, fictional speculations. One might put this down as life problems and suggest there is something more involved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Many writers write as much more of a form of self-therapy, or attempt to workout their problems through displacement and substitution in a socially acceptable form of fantasy. They fit the status of a true artist. Among artists such as painters, sculptors, and designers, the correlation between rated quality of work shows that there is a commitment to such endeavors selective for intelligence, so that the average I.Q. is already a superior one. They generally have beyond an I.Q. of 120. Creative writers proved significantly more original than any other group of creative individuals we studied. The average score of the general population on the Independence of Judgment Scale is 8.12; the group of representative successful writers scored 11.69, the student writers scored 15.2, and the distinguished creative writers scored 15.69. While the distinguished creative writers and the student writers were not significantly from representative successful writers at the one percent confidence level, and they in turn obtained significantly higher scores for independence of judgment then do people in general. The average population is 50 percent flexible. The average student writer is more flexible than 98 percent of the general population, while their elders in the field of creative writing are more flexible than about 84 percent of the general population. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

However one puts it, the finding is clear: writers as a class are significantly more independent, flexible, and original than most people and the creative writers who have achieved renown do very well for their years by being almost as flexible as their student counterparts, and a bit more independent. Still, findings indicate the writers appear to be both sicker and healthier psychologically than people in general. Or, to put it in another way, they are much more troubled psychologically, but they also have far greater resources with which to deal with their troubles. This jibes rather well with their social behavior as a matter of fact. They are clearly effective people who handle themselves with pride and distinctiveness, but the face they turn to the World is sometimes one of pain, often of protest, sometimes of distance and withdrawal; and certainly they are emotional. All of these are, of course, the intensely normal traits indicated by the peaks on their profile of diagnostic scores. The California Psychological Inventory indicates that the writers are a highly creative group and differs from the general population in making rather low scores on Socialization, a performance which in this context I think is correctly interpreted as resistance to acculturation, for the so-called socialization process is often seen by the creative individual as a demand for the sacrifice of one’s individuality, which indeed it often is. They score low also on Sense of Well-being, Self-control, and Desire to Make a Good Impression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Perhaps they score low on subjective matters because they are judged more harshly than others and because they have to deal with more scrutiny, they are harder to get through to, but people seem to like the writers because they tend to be unique, do not play games with people, are careful about how they use their time and tend to have problems, but are seem to be able to handle them very well. Writers are distinctly more introverted than extraverted, more feeling than thinking, and more intuitive than oriented to sense experience. Overall, 89 percent of the writers studied were intuitive, as compare of about 25 percent of the general population. The really striking differences between writers and other groups, however, is possessed in the general area of fantasy and originality of perception. One of our interviews was devoted especially to the fantasy life, from day dreams and night dreams and hypnagogic experiences to transcendental experiences in full and acute consciousness. An unusually high percentage (40 percent, in fact) of creative writers claimed to have had experiences either of mystic communion with the Universe or of feelings of utter desolation and horror. Other experiences of an unusual sort were also described, such as being barraged by disconnected words as words as though one were caught in a hailstorm, with accompanying acute discomfort, or seeing the World suddenly take on a new brightness while the Sun and Moon remained the same. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

A high frequency of dreaming was also reported, as well as a high frequency of dreaming in color, as compared with student groups we have studied. Most impressive of all, however, was the extent to which motivation played a role, both in the writer’s becoming a writer and in the way in which creative writing served a more general philosophic purpose. Almost without exception the successful creative writer had had to suffer considerable hardship in holding to one’s calling. The hardship included criticism from family and friends, periods of intense self-doubt, financial adversity, sacrifice sometimes of important personal relationships, and even public censure or ridicule. By the time the writer got to us one was past many of these adversities, although poets (even internationally famous ones) were generally living in very modest circumstances, and there were some surprising (to us) very modest instances of distinguished writers of fiction who still had to take other jobs occasionally to stay afloat. One writer who was hailed as the most remarkable body of poetry to come from America in the past decade was earning his living working in a gymnasium and occasionally as dock worker, while still another was typing term papers for undergraduates. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

At the other extreme there were several novelists whose earnings were in the millions of dollars. Yet to all of them the economic question was of secondary importance; this is true of all of our groups of creative individuals. On the Economic values scale of the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Scale of Values, creative individuals consistently earn their very lowest score. It is quite apparent that they are playing for other stakes. What then are the stakes, and if there are stakes, just what is the game? The game, I believe, centers upon the nature of intellect itself and upon the meaning of human life. In reviewing the performance of creative writers on the Symbol Equivalence test I was struck by the rapidity with which they moved from the commonplace stimulus image to the cosmic metaphor. Their concerns, as shown in projective tests like the Thematic Apperception Test and the Rorschach, are with mythical themes—with death, with great inanimate forces, with the symbolic rather than the literal meaning of shapes and colors. The freedom-determinism question arises again and again both in their work and in their fantasies. The nature of mortals in relation to the cosmos is the engaging problem. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The commitment, in brief, is to larger meanings of an esthetic and philosophical sort which can find expression in the life work that the individual has chosen for oneself (or, as some have put it, in the life work that has chosen the individual). As an aside, one may recall here Goethe’s statement: I did not make my songs, my songs made me.” In brief, such individuals are involved constantly in the creation of their private Universes of meaning; they are cosmologists all. I am convinced that without this intense cosmological commitment no amount of mental ability of the sort measured by I.Q. tests will suffice to produce a genuinely creative act. Without wishing to be overly dramatic in this matter, I believe it is literally true that the creative individual is willing to stake one’s life on the meaning of one’s work. We think we have observed this in the personal account given in intensive interviews with subjects in our own studies, and certainly the many biographies and autobiographical writings of the great artists and scientists bear the conclusion out. Indeed, as Crombie concluded from his survey of the scientific revolution, regulative beliefs of an almost metaphysical sort rest behind the most dedicated quests for new theoretical formulations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Creative vision, whether in art or in science, has always involved an act of rejection preceding the act of construction; the structure of the World as mist people see it must be broken or transcended. William Blake, a great artist both in writing and in painting, has spoken of fourfold vision. For him, single vision is simply what ordinary physical eyesight enables us to see: the World that the consensus of opinion based on a limited use of sense would affirm as real. A tree is a tree, an inkblot is an inkblot, the sky is blue, and so on. Two-fold vision is the still-limited act of imagination; a cloud formation looks like two lions dancing, or an elephant pushing a BMW X7; the ink blot might be two dancers, or a bird in flight, or an actress kneeling in prayer. In three-fold vision, we do not see the mean thing-in-itself as in single vision, nor the thing as it might be if it were a little or even a lot of different, as in two-fold vision, but we see the thing as symbol. Recall again the Heavenly chorus at the conclusion o Faust: All things transitory but as symbols are sent; Earth’s insufficiency here grows to event. Clearly, the symbol presents a reality transcended. It is the medium through which a superior vision of reality is sought; it amplifies the poor real World by an act of imagination. The symbol, the play, the dream these are the manifestation of the three-fold vision. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Four-fold vision is still a step beyond. It is the vision of the mystic, the seer, the prophet; it is vision suffused with the most intense feeling: horror, awe, ecstasy, desolation. A passage from Blake himself illustrates it well: I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation to me it is hindrance and not Action. “What,” it will be Questioned, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like Guinea?” Oh, no, no, I see an Innumerable Company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my corporeal of Vegetarian Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look through it and not with it. As we can see, in this research we have attempted through a verity of techniques to understand the vision of the World that these our subjects had. Their work itself, of course, is their primary testament, vision is what it communicates above all. Here again, however, a difference must be noted between the true creative writers, and the students, who, as I have indicated, I consider having been using writing for another purpose. The most intolerable of all forms of banality is cosmic banality, and mooning around about death and the cosmos can be a cheap way of getting out of working. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Sharpness of detail, validity of characterization, discipline of form, tireless re-writing and shaping up, a touch of the old shoemaker in finding pride in the craft and even in keeping trade secrets; these were among the characteristics of these creative writers, and when I say that their concern is with cosmic moral issues I should add that the issues are brought to life in characterization and in language, so that the reader is given an opportunity to experience through one’s own nature the reality that the writer perceives. My own conclusion, then, is that creative writers are persons whose dedication is to nothing less than a quest for ultimate meanings. Or perhaps it is not so much that they are dedicated as that they understand themselves to have been elected and have accepted the office. What is enjoined upon them then is to listen to the voice within and to speak out. What they speak is to be the truth, but it need not be everyone’s truth, or even anyone else’s. In these essentials, omitting writing as the specific form, I believe creative writers are no different from creative individuals in all walks of life, including those whose business it is to be silent. “Finally, I bid you farewell, until I shall meet you before the pleasing bar of God, which bar striketh the wicked with awful dead and fear. Amen,” reports Jacob 6.13. Believe more than ever and forever in my filial and tenderly grateful friendship. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15