Running, running happily, laughing breathlessly, down a long road, something under my arm, a small red object without any definite shape, more a shade of a color. Suddenly, a large deserted mansion loomed up in front of me. I hurried quickly inside and climbed, climbed blocky, heavy steps. A long time. However, at the top a closet, open. The red shade had grown to gigantic proportions, almost the size of a trunk. I pushed it in the closet, but not really pushed—despite its size it was very light and almost dropped into the closet. I started gathering things from the red trunk, some strange objects. Suddenly the door slammed hard against its frame, and frightened I rushed down the stairs. As I walked down, I seemed to change clothes, or rather new things seemed to replace the old. I was richly clothed by the time I reached the bottom. However, then a great sense of fright fell about me and I began to run—quickly through a meadow. Someone chased me—a stout figure with long, flowing hair. Soon, more stout figures pursued. Back in the mansion I hurried up the stairs, but there were few this time. The closet door was open and there was nothing there, only space. I could hear rumbling of voices, pounding, pounding, louder and louder. And then a mass of grey or rather haze rushed at me and I started back hurriedly into the closet—back, back. And then space, falling, falling, falling. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Even from this one example it is apparent that the technique is a powerful one for studying the nature of symbol formation. Social conversion and everyday concerns are designed to conceal this variation and to increase the comfortable feeling that we are all more or less alike. That is why the sudden breakdown or the unexpected divorce or the inexplicable crime surprises or startles us. There is a widespread tacit pact not to reveal oneself, not to speak of the extremes of emotion, or terror, anger, pride, death-wish or glory-wish, or even the great joy, also known as the moment of illumination when the vast expanse of life and time, and the arrays of the dead, and passing moments, are suddenly realized and one’s own passing life is self-blessed. If I am sad, it comes primarily from the permanent sadness that destiny has imprinted forever upon my emotions, where the greatest and purest joys can only be superimposed and that at the price of a great effort of attention. It comes also from my miserable and continual sins; and from all the calamities of our time and of all those of all the past centuries. Otherwise a barrier of incomprehension will remain between us, whether the error is on my part or on yours. This would grieve me from the point of view of my friendship for you, because in that case the result of all these efforts and desires, called forth by your charity toward me, would be a disappointment for you. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Moreover, although it is not my fault, I should not be able to help feeling guilty of ingratitude. For, I repeat, my debt to you is beyond all measures, my Lord. The Incarnation of Christianity implies a harmonious solution of the problem of the relations between the individual and the collective. Harmony in the Pythagorean sense; the just balance of contraries. This solution is precisely what mortals are thirsting for today. The position of the intelligence is the key to this harmony, because the intelligence is a specifically and rigorously individual thing. This harmony exists wherever the intelligence, remaining in its place, can be exercised without hindrance and can reach the complete fulfillment of its function. That is what Saint Thomas says admirably of all the parts of the soul of Christ, with reference to his sensitiveness to pain during the crucifixion. The special function of the intelligence requires total liberty, implying the right to deny everything, and allowing of no domination. Wherever it usurps control there is an excess of individualism. Wherever it is hampered or uneasy there is an oppressive collectivism, or several of them. Since he willed them from all eternity, God respects the laws of nature, and there are two languages that are quite distinct although made up of the same words; there is the collective language and there is the individual one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The Comforter whom Christ sends us, the Spirit of truth, speaks one or other of these languages, whichever circumstances demand, and by a necessity of their nature there is not agreement between them. When genuine friends of God repeat words they have heard in secret amidst the silence of the union of love, and these words are in disagreement with the teaching of the Church, it is simply that the language of the marketplace is not that of the nuptial chamber. Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words “Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three. He said precisely that he always forms the third in the intimacy of the tete-a-tete. Christ made promises to the Church, but none of these promises has the force of the expression, “They Father who seeth in secret.” The word of God is the secret word. One who has not heard this word, even if one adheres to all the doctrines and covenants taught by the Church, has no contact with the truth. The function of the Church as the collective keeper of the doctrines and covenants is indispensable. She has the right and the duty to punish those who make a clear attack upon her within the specific range of this function, by depriving them of the sacraments. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

However, when she (the Church) claims to force love and intelligence to model their language upon her own, she is guilty of an abuse of power. This abuse of power is not of God. It comes from the natural tendency of every form of collectivism, without exception, to abuse power. In the first place it should be noted that love is actually a relatively rare phenomenon in our society. As everyone knows, there are a million and one kinds of relationships which are called love: we do not need to list all the confusions of love with sentimental impulses and every kind of oedipal and back to mother’s arms motifs as they appear in the romantic songs like God’s Plan by Drake and the movies. No word is used with more meanings than this term, most of the meanings being dishonest in that they cover up the real underlying motives in the relationship. However, there are many other quite sound and honest relationships called loved—such as parental care for children and vice versa, or pleasures of the flesh, or the sharing of loneliness; and again the startling reality often discovered when one looks underneath the surface of individual’s lives in our lonely and conformist society, is how little the component of love is actually involved even in these relationships. Most human relationships, of course, spring from a mixture of motives and include a combination of different feelings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Pleasures of the flesh are love in a mature form between a man and a woman and are generally a blend of two emotions. One is part of the soul’s desire which is part of the individual’s need to fulfill oneself. It is the drive of each individual to unite with the complement of oneself—the drive to find the other half of the original being. The other element in mature love between man and woman is the affirmation of the value and worth of the other person, which we include in our definition of romantic love. However, granted the blending of motives and emotions, and granted that love is not a simple topic, the most important thing at the outset is to call our emotions by their right names. And the most constructive place to begin learning how to love is to see how we fail to love. We shall have made a start, at least, when we recognize our situation as that of one of anxiety. So, learning to love, at length one is taught to know one does not. The function of the new society is to encourage the emergence of a new mortal, beings whose character structure will exhibit the following qualities: Willingness to give up all forms of having, by placing God first and foremost, in order to fully be. Security, sense of identity, and confidence based on faith in what one is, on one’s need for relatedness, interest, love, solidarity with the Word around one, instead of one one’s desire to have, to possess, to control the World, and thus become a slave to one’s possessions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The human being’s radical disunity can temporarily achieve a unity by virtue of beauty. We have to learn acceptance of the fact that nobody and nothing outside oneself give meaning to life, but that this radical independence and no-thingness can become the condition for the fullest activity devoted to caring and sharing.  Enslaved as we are to our money-minded culture, we suppress our hungry for beauty and lose the chance to experience unity. The genuine if temporary release from this dilemma lies in beauty. It is the Universal language which gives solace and serenity. It provides the sense of unity within ourselves which transcends, however temporarily, the grim paradoxes of life. Being fully present where one is creates a joy that comes from giving and sharing, not from hoarding and exploiting. Only the unity of reality with the form, of the accidental with the necessary, of the passive state with freedom, that completes the conception of humanity will allow love and respect for life in all its manifestations. It grants the knowledge that not things, power, all that has passed away, but life and everything that pertains to its growth are sacred. As soon as reason issues the mandate a humanity shall exist, at the same time the law, and there shall be a beauty. This will compel us to reduce greed, hate, and illusions as much as one is capable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

To those who try to flee from the realization of the dual nature of humankind, nothing is more unwarrantable and contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter form, the passive and the active feeling and thought is eternal and cannot be mediated in anyway. Living without worshipping idols and without illusions is somethings that God actually compels us to do and it is possible because one can reach a state that does not require illusions. Beauty is our way of meeting—not erasing—this dilemma. It brings its great boon precisely by virtue of its dealing with the nature of subjectivity and objectivity. For the beautiful ought to temper while uniformly exciting the two natures, and it ought also to excite while uniformly moderating them. Developing one’s capacity for love, together with one’s capacity for critical, unsentimental thought is an avenue to shedding one’s narcissism and accepting the tragic limitations inherent in human existence.  We try to avoid the paradox by being whole-heartedly the one or the other—the spiritual person who has the delusion that one has escaped from the senses, and the sensual person who has sacrificed the spirit. Making full growth of oneself and of one’s fellow beings is the supreme of goal of life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Many would rebuke our sensuous culture, as we must look to form, to our spirit and become inspired by the richness of our thinking. To reach this goal, discipline and respect for reality is necessary. Spiritual people may want to remember the richness of the World of the senses where it all begins. Knowing, also, that no growth is healthy that does not occur in a structure, but knowing, too, the difference between structure as an attribute of life and order as an attribute of no-life of the dead for beauty is our second creator. Nor is this inconsistent with the fact that she (beauty) only makes it possible for us to attain and realize humanity. For in this she acts in common with our original creator, nature, which has imparted to us nothing further than this capacity for humanity, but leaves the use of it to our own determination of will. Developing one’s imagination, not as an escape from intolerable circumstances but as the anticipation of real possibilities, as a means to do away with intolerable circumstances is a central idea and inspiration. It is that beauty that is born in play. It may seem like a frivolous idea; but recall that we speak of Mozart and Beethoven playing the piano, the very opposite of superficiality. And we refer to Shakespeare’s plays; and it is clear that such playing describes the most profound and humanizing of all human activities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Not deceiving others, but also not being deceived by others; one may be called innocent, but not naïve. Play unite the inner World of our personal reverie with the outer World of people and nature. The object of the play instinct, represented in a general statement, may therefore bear the name of living form, a term that serves to describe all aesthetic qualities of phenomena, and what people style, in the widest sense, beauty. Knowing oneself, not only the self one knows, but also the self one does not know—even though one has a slumbering knowledge of what does not know is a way that we sense one’s oneness with life; hence giving up the aim of conquering nature, subduing it, exploiting it, exploring it, dissecting it, but trying, rather to understand and cooperate with nature. A marble block, though it is and remains lifeless, can nevertheless become a living form by the architect and sculptor; a mortal, though one lives and has a form is far from being a living form on that account. For this to be the case, it is necessary that one’s form should be life, and that one’s life should be a form. As long as we only thing of one’s form, it is lifeless, a mere abstraction. It is only when one’s form lives in our feelings, and one’s life in our understanding, that one is the living form, and this will everywhere be the case where we judge one to be beautiful. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Freedom that is not arbitrariness but the possibility to be oneself, not as a bundle of greedy desires, but as a delicately balanced structure that at any moment is confronted with the alternative of grown or decay, life or death allows us to understand how the idea play is an accurate description of the psychologically healthy person. The goal of psychotherapy is to help the patient learn to create and teaches us that evil and destructiveness are necessary consequences of failure to grow. The neurotic type of person is the artist who cannot create any art. All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life. Thus creativity brings together two purposes in life: to love and to work. Both of these, love and work, are aspects of creativity. We Know that only few have reached perfection in all these qualities, but being without the ambition to reach the goal, in the knowledge that such ambition is only another form of greed, of having. The idea that beauty is the product of play, brings together the objective and subjective aspects of life. The outward and inward mortal are at one. Happiness in the process of ever-growing aliveness, whatever the further point is that fate permits one to reach is the description of the goal of psychotherapy for living as fully as one can is so satisfactory that the concern for what one might or might not attain has little chance to develop. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

What we seek to do is to help each patient become unified in him or herself, so that they can live out their lives with some integrity, some wholeness, some beauty. Through the description of beauty, the goal is to help one explore and understand and manifest the picture of the psychologically integrated human being. The neurotic is the one who cannot achieve this; healthy persons are the ones who can do it in their work and their love, whether they are painters or teachers or whatever they may be. The person who is integrated is thus one who has learned to play in the proper sense. After all, if you love what you do it is like playing and can be very productive. The psychologically healthy person is the one who overcomes the dilemma of life by creating, by doing—whether the doing involves sketching Greek poppies on a hillside, cooking your favorite cuisines, being an architect, or a designer, or working at your favorite store. This is what people mean when they say that beauty has kept them alive. We have seen that modern society has tended to abandon the pattern of living in which men dominated women in their various relationships. One probably reason this movement has taken place is that there has been an increasing awareness that the former was not only unfair but also tended to deprive both men and women of the experience of emotional intimacy, one of our most basic desires and needs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

We have also seen, however, that the changes have often resulted in a competitive relationship between the genders that has been no more successful in satisfying the need for love. This is not to say, of course, that marriages based on either the dominance-submission or the competitive pattern are doomed to failure. In fact they are often very successful when judged in terms of permanence or even in terms of the relative satisfaction for the individuals involved in them, and it would not be desirable to suggest that such relationships should be terminated.  What is being said here is that many persons will feel that neither of these alternatives is sufficiently satisfying for them. They long for some more creative approach to man-woman relationships. For these men and women it would seem desirable to look further. The key to this search is to be found in self-affirmation. When a person is able to be himself and express one’s feelings directly and clearly to another one has opened the door to the possibility of a creative encounter with that individual. And if that person is not too frightened by this direct approach and can respond with similar candor and self-affirmation both are likely to feel that their confrontation has been a fulfilling experience. And this feeling of fulfillment does not necessarily depend on the two people reaching an agreement. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Often when different viewpoints are involved, such an encounter can take place without changing the minds of either party. And yet, each person can have the satisfied feeling that one has been turn to oneself and that one has a deepened respect and caring for the other, who has been equally true to oneself. A certain couple, Sarah and Neal, had been having difficulties in their marriage and sought the help of a marriage counselor. Conferences were set up so that each of them saw the counselor once a week without the other present. Each one had many complaints about the other. Sarah’s main point of contention was the Neal always seemed half-hearted in this attitude toward her. When he wanted to enjoy pleasures of the flesh with her, Neal would approach her very tentatively as though he feared or even expected that she would reject his advances. And often Sarah did repulse him, probably in part because his efforts did little to convince her that he really cared for her and desired her intimately. Neal and Sarah’s emotional impasse had various effects on their relationship. When pleasures of the flesh was agreed upon Neal could not always become sufficiently interested to engage. This temporary impotency was probably related to his fear of intimacy, his doubts of his adequacy, and to Sarah’s failure to respond more enthusiastically to his hesitant advances. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Sarah, on the other hand, experiences times when she felt acute desires for pleasures of the flesh and frustration that she seemed unable to communicate directly to Neal. If she had been able to interconnect her wishes, this might have helped Neal to feel more comfortable and better able to relate to her. Sometimes couples are just out of sync because of life matters, career goals, or something could be troubling them, it is not necessarily a sign of rejection between two married people. As a result of her frustration she often felt very depressed and became sarcastic and nagging toward him. One morning when Sarah came to see the counselor it was quickly apparent that she was filled with anger about life in general and toward her husband in particular and she spent most of the hour describing her complaints about him. When she was not speaking of Neal, Sarah talked about how sad and blue she was, how empty life seemed, and how she sometimes wished she could die. As she left the office, still in a state of distress, she vowed she was not going to let that guy near her that night. For one thing, it was a Saturday, and on Saturdays he usually like to have passionate intimacy with his wife, and she made it absolutely clear that she did not appreciate such scheduling of romance…what next, was he going to leave a tip on the nightstand a creep away in the middle of the night? #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

During Neal’s appointment the next week no information was volunteered about this particular subject, so the counselor waited until Sarah’s appointment the following Saturday to hear the next saga. Sarah reported that when she had left the office the previous week she had gone directly home, marches into the house and through it immediately into the bathroom, glancing neither to the left nor the right! Neal, with that amazing sensitivity that men occasionally display, became aware somehow that all was not well! And he stormed into the bathroom right behind her, slammed the door, and locked it. With his own temper flaring like a coronal mass ejection he said something like this: “I can tell you are extremely upset, and I will be darned if I am going to live in this house all day with you like this. We are going to stay right here until we find out what is going on!” And they did. They stayed there and has a calm discussion for more than an hour. When Sarah had finished telling all of this, the counselor looked at her and asked, “Well, how did you like that kind of treatment from your husband?” Sarah said, “I am happy he finally understood where I was coming from and we got to discuss the issues. It is nice when Neal shows his sensitivity side.” And actually, the question had been unnecessary, for she had a bounce and a sparkle about her that morning, which no one had ever seen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16