Later Medieval culture flourished because people followed the vision of the City of God. Modern society flourished because people were energized by the vision of the growth of the Earthly City of Progress. In our century, however, this vision deteriorated to that of the Tower of Babel, which is now beginning to collapse and will ultimately bury everybody in its ruins. If the City of God and the Earthly City were thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis is the only alternative to chaos: the synthesis between the spiritual core of the Late Medieval World and the development of rational thought and science since the Renaissance. This synthesis is The City of Being. The reason we do not see truth is not that we have not read enough books, or do not have enough academic degrees, but what we do not have enough courage.  By truth we do not mean scientific facts alone, or even chiefly. The problem with facts is to be accurate. If you recall the last dozen questions which troubled you—on which, that is, you had to ponder and chew to find out what you could believe is true—you will discover that very few if any of them had to do with matters that could be proven by scientific facts. Even in discovering scientific truth before it is reduced to accepted formulae, such as Columbus’ venture to prove the Earth was round or Dr. Freud’s early explorations, the finding of the truth hinges greatly on the investigator’s inner qualities of probity and courage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

We hear the songs of the Angels in the Angelus, we bow a moment to communicate with the infinite, and thank him for our humanity and blessings. The key to Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consist of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality in prayer. Warmth of the heart cannot make up for it. The highest part of the attention only makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned toward God. Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not because they are driven by cruelty of a magnitude commensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no human bond to their subjects. While less vile than the sadists, the bureaucrats are more dangerous, because in them there is not even a conflict between conscience and duty: their conscience is doing their duty; human beings as objects of empathy and compassion do not exist for many of them. The hypnoid methods used in advertising and political propaganda are a serious danger to mental health, specifically to clear and critical thinking and emotional independence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The assault on reason and the sense of reality pursues the individual everywhere and daily at any time: during many hours of watching television, or when driving on a highway, or in the political propaganda of candidates, and so on. The particular effect of these suggestive methods is that they create an atmosphere of being half-awake, of believing and not believing, of losing one’s sense of reality. Caring means caring not only for our fellow beings on Earth but also for our descendants. With the exception of a few great newspapers, even the factual information on political, economic, and social data is extremely limited. The so-called great newspapers inform better, but they also misinform better: by not publishing all the news impartially; by slanting headlines, in addition to writing headlines that often do not conform with their accompanying text; by being partisan in their editorials, written under the cover of seemingly reasonable and moralizing language. In fact, the newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not. At the very best, information is ready-made, concerns only the surface of events, and barely gives the citizens an opportunity to penetrate through the surface and recognize the deeper cause of the events. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

As long as the sale of news is a business, newspapers and magazines can hardly be prevented from printing what sells (in various degrees of unscrupulousness) their publications and does not antagonize the advertisers. If the informed opinion and decision are to be possible, the information problem must be solved in a different way. Life is neither a game of chance nor a business deal, and we must seek elsewhere for an appreciation of the real possibilities for salvation: in the healing art of medicine, for example. If a sick person has even the barest chance for survival, no responsible physician will say, “Let us give up the effort,” or will use only palliatives. On the contrary, everything conceivable is done to save the sick person’s life. Certainly, a sick society cannot expect anything less. Otherwise, dehumanized mortals will become so mad that they will not be able to sustain a viable society in the long run, and in the short run will not be able to refrain from being dangerous. A growing number of people feel la malaise du siècle: they sense their depression; they are conscious of it, in spite of all kinds of efforts to repress it. They feel the unhappiness of their isolation and the emptiness of their togetherness; they feel all this very clearly and consciously; others feel it less clearly, but are fully aware of it when someone else puts it into words. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

So far in World history a life of empty pleasure was possible for only a small elite, and they remained essentially sane because they knew they had power and that they had to think and to act in order not to lose their power. Today, the empty life of consumption is that of the whole middle class, which economically and politically has no power and little personal responsibility. The major part of the Western World knows the benefits of the consumer type of happiness, and growing numbers of those who benefit from it are finding it wanting. They are beginning to discover that having much does not create well-being; traditional ethical teaching has been put to the test—and is being confirmed by experience. The greed to have and to hoard has been modified by the tendency to merely function well, to exchange oneself as a commodity who is—nothing. It is easier for the alienated, marketing character to change than it is for the hoarding character, which is frantically holding onto possession, and particularly narcissism. However, people today are yearning for human beings who have wisdom and convictions and the courage to act according to their own convictions. Given even these hopeful factors, however, the chances for necessary human and social changes are still a challenge. Our only hope is possessed in the energizing attraction of a new vision. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The utopian goal is more realistic than the realism of today’s leaders. Only if the old motivations of profit, power, and intellect are replaced by new ones: being, sharing, understanding, the realization of the new society and new mortal is possible. If the marketing character is replaced by the productive, loving character, we will succeed in making humanity more Godly. As I reflect, I call to mind the sensitive persons, especially writers, who have turned to God as modern-day pilgrims to awaken their hearts, to find answers to fundamental questions, to re-kindle some inner spiritual reality. During the whole of this pilgrimage our hearts have been tormented by many intricate questions. There is such a stark contrast there among medievalism, natural beauty and modernity, that every visitor’s life is brought up against the stark reality of beauty’s closeness to death. And is beauty an answer, a way of making that choice to live and create without cringing, without hiding one’s self from the soul? For beauty confronts and absorbs the soul into the whole, absorbs the shadow into the light, brings holiness into what would otherwise be a meaningless, destructive void. I am certain that it was the beauty of nature along the pathways which led from spiritual path to divine journey which gave me my own glimpse into eternity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

I felt some replenishment, some re-kindling of my own spirit. The serenity of deed ready for the experience of the divine. The serenity of those moments was worth my preserving forever. Therefore, I am still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains. And I too am still a lover of the orange blossoms and the pine groves and the bubbling streams. I knew that the flowers and the spring verdure were not in themselves Gd. However, are we not given a glimpse of the beauty of God by these happy trumpetings of brilliant pink if the flowering Judas trees, and by the lemon blossoms with their magical odor and by the heavily scented lavender of the wisteria hanging from every branch? Beauty is not God, but it is the resplendent gown of God and of our spiritual life. Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. Yes. However, there are still thing I yearned to know. Is beauty at least our pathway to the spirit? Is beauty the gateway to spiritual enhancement and to the serenity of eternity? Is beauty related to the eternity of death? Then I stand before my own soul, like an inexorable judge before a prisoner lying on the rack, and make it answer until there is nothing left to ask. Almost all the errors and unutterable follies of which doctrines and philosophies are so full seem to me to spring from a lack of this probity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The truth was not found, not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again instead some preconceived opinion or other, or at least not to wound some favorite idea, and with this aim in view subterfuges had to be employed against both other people and the thinker oneself. It is the courage of making a clean heart of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. The philosopher [must] interrogate oneself without mercy. This philosophical courage, however, does not arise from reflection, cannot be wrung from resolutions, but is an inborn trend of the mind. If one is to see truth, and it does not come from the intellect as such but is a part of the inborn capacity for self-awareness, such probity is necessary. Probity is an ethical attitude, involving courage and other aspects of one’s relation to one’s self; if a person is to fulfill oneself as a human being, it not only can be developed to an extent but must be developed. When people have profound inner conflict, they self-blind themselves to the truth. They blind themselves so that they are closed off in greater or less degree from the reality around them. After learning how they have been living a delusion, we may take it as an act symbolizing the tragic difficulty, the finiteness and blindness of mortals in seeing the truth about themselves and their origin. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Drama gives some people an age-old but ever new picture of the inner pain and conflict in finding out the truth about themselves. For to seek truth is always to run the risk of discovering what one would hate to see. It requires that kind of relationship to one’s self, and that confidence in ultimate values, that one can dare to risk the possibility of being uprooted from the beliefs and day-to-day values by which one has lived. It is not surprising, then, that a genuine love of wisdom is a relatively rare thing in human life. To see truth, like the other unique characteristics of mortals, depends on mortal’s ability to be conscious of oneself. One thus can transcend the immediate situation, and in imagination one can try to see life steadily and see it whole. By one’s self-consciousness one can also search within oneself, and there find the wisdom which speaks in greater or lesser degree to every mortal who has ears to hear. The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth reminiscence, that is by remembering, by intuitively searching into our own experience. In the famous demonstration of this, Socrates gets an uneducated enslaved-boy, Meno, to prove the whole Pythagorean theorem simply by asking him questions. We do not need to accept Plato’s mythological explanation—that each of us carries Haven, and knowledge is a recollecting of these ideas—to agree that the phenomenon itself is a very common experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Each of us has been observing, experiencing, learning a great deal more throughout our lives—probably especially in the early years—than we are aware, and we have had to lock it away in the closet of so-called unconsciousness because of the necessity of getting along with parents, teachers, and social conventions. “Children and crazy people tell the truth” goes the adage—and unfortunately children soon learn not to. This forgotten store of wisdom is available to us as we become sufficiently clarified, sensitive, courageous and vigilant to tap it. The popular idea that people cannot see truth because their selves get in the way is therefore false. It is not the self which makes us see through a glass darkly and distort what we see: it is rather the neurotic needs, repressions and conflicts. These lead us to transfer some prejudice or expectation of our own to other people and the World around us. Thus, it is precisely the lack of self-awareness which leads us to call error truth. The more a person lacks self-awareness, the more one is prey to the anxiety and irrational anger and resentment: and while anger generally blocks us from using our more subtle intuitive means of sensing truth, anxiety always blocks us. Also, if a person tries to rule out the self in seeing truth, if, that is, one pretends that one comes to one’s conclusions like a disembodied judge surveying everything from Mount Olympus, one is victim of greater delusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Since one assumes one’s truth is absolute and uninfluenced by one’s personal interests rather than simply one’s most honest approximation to truth, one may become a dangerous person who adheres to rigid doctrines. Only technical issues can be true in abstraction from the immediate needs, desires and struggles of the human beings involved. In fact, one of the most common ways of avoiding seeing truth—the particular form of resistance generally used by intellectuals in psychotherapy—is to make an abstract or logical principle out of the problem, and generally by enough cleaver intellectualizing one can arrive at a fine-looking solution which is so fascinating. However, lo and behold, we later discover that all the brilliant intellectualizing did not solve the problem in reality at all, and in fact was precisely a way of avoiding the problem. Seeing truth is a function not of the separate intellect, but of the whole mortal: one experiences truth in moving ahead as a thinking-feeling-acting unity. We love not intellect the less, but the person more in this approach to truth. I have been a learner all my life, but I make truth, which is universal, my own from within, through the exercise of my freedom, and my knowledge of truth is my own relation to truth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

As one becomes free from unhealthy ties, one also become freer from the prejudices of life, freer from the tendency of each mortal to see one’s own image in others’ eyes in the World around him or her. To be able to see truth thus goes along with emotional and ethical maturity. When one is able to see truth in this way, one gains confidence in what one days. One has become convinced of one’s beliefs on one’s own pulse and in one’s own experience, rather than through abstract principles or through being told. And one also gains humility, for one knows that since previous things one saw were partially distorted, what one now sees will also have its element of imperfection. This kind of humility does not weaken the strength of one’s stand for one’s own beliefs, but keeps the door open for new learning and the discover of new truth on the morrow. A man does not need to be a bully either physically or psychologically. He does not have to dominate those around him or have his way all the time. Those who exhibit such needs are basically insecure about their masculinity, constantly trying to convince themselves and others that they are “real men.” A man is self-affirming and independent. He can express his feelings directly and fight for himself when need be. His independence also makes it possible for him to see others’ viewpoints and change his mind when it seems appropriate to do so. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

 A man can afford to be gentle, for his self-confidence is deeply based and not dependent on maintaining some manly pose. The advertising slogan “tough, but oh, so gentle” may describe him well. He is not too frightened to share his feelings of love, hurt, discouragement, and desire for love. A woman has opinions of her own and is an individual in her own right, not a pale shadow of her husband. She can express her ideas and fight for them when need be. A woman does not need to be a driving competitor to her husband. She does what she does because she enjoys it and find fulfillment, not because she had to prove her worth; for she already has confidence in that. A woman can be loving, cuddly, and soft without being a whimpering, spineless, dependent creature who uses her helplessness to control people around her and get what she wants from them. Like a man, she is not too frightened to share her feelings of love, hurt, discouragement, and need for love. Perhaps more than ever before in history our society has opened the door to the kind of relationship between men and women that is envisioned here. We have the opportunity of genuine intimacy between those who have been educationally prepared to talk the same language and share many of the same concerns. To become the kind of men and women who can achieve this is a difficult task that we will never perfectly achieve. However, the adventure of moving in that direction is an exciting one! #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

After many years of being all but ignored, the importance of body-functioning to emotional states is becoming recognized more widely and applied to growth-producing situations. A particularly fascinating discovery is the fruitfulness of certain language which, in describing emotional and behavioral states, translates almost literally into terms used to describe bodily states and functions. This translation has a profound impact on methods of dealing effectively with emotional states. A method for helping a person act out and deal with the sense of being immobilized by others, for example, is to put one in a tight circle of people and ask one to try to break out, physically. The method is based on the transformation of one’s emotional feeling of immobilization into the experience of being physically immobilized, to allow one the opportunity to break what one feels are unbreakable bonds…however, this is getting ahead of our story. Implicit general recognition of the close connection between the emotional and the physical is evident in the verbal idioms that have developed in social interaction. Feelings and behavior are expressed in terms of all parts of the body, of body-movement, and of bodily functions. We have heard terms like: lost your head, save face, no guts, cheeky, and you have never just to name a few. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Supporting the recognition in everyday life of the close connection between bodily and emotional and mental states, there is a growing volume of theoretical work describing these connections and the way they develop and manifest themselves. Psychosomatic medicine has made a strong case for the fact that emotional states affect the body. More recently, the opposite view has also been developed—that body-organization and physiology affect the feelings—a view called somatopsychic. Psychological attitudes affect body-posture and functioning, and this body-formation then has a strong influence on subsequent feelings. An individual experiencing temporary fear, grief, or anger, all too often carries one’s body in an attitude which the World recognizes as the outward manifestation of that particular emotion. If one persists in this dramatization or consistently re-established it, thus forming what is ordinary referred to as a habit pattern, the muscular arrangement becomes set. Materially speaking some muscles shorten and thicken, others are invaded by connective tissues, still others become immobilized by consolidation of the tissue involved. Once this has happened the physical attitude is invariable; it is involuntary; it can no longer be changed basically by taking thought or even by mental suggestions. Such setting of a physical response also establishes an emotional pattern. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Since it is not possible to establish a free flow through the physical flesh, the subjective emotional tone becomes progressively more limited and tends to remain in a restricted closely defined area. Now what the individual feels is no longer an emotion, a response to an immediate situation, henceforth one lives, moves and has one’s being in an attitude. Life is not good or bad; it is just hard. Interpersonal obstacles occur so often because so much of our day-to-day activity involves interaction (real, potential, or imagined) with other people. As long as there are other people, we are going to experience some interpersonal obstacles and, thus, frustration. People have biases, prejudices, and pet likes and dislikes. Some people are just mean and ornery; others are ignorant, and their ignorance causes them to act mean and ornery, though they would be shocked to know we think of them as such. Each of us, then, having a conscious self, an ego, which we try to cultivate and nurture, also has unconscious selves, aspects of ourselves of which we do not even know about. Whenever a conflict among any of the various portions of the psyche occurs, there may be a tendency to dissociate our conscious identity from those unwanted, ugly, or immoral parts of ourselves. “For behold, again I say unto you that if ye will enter in by the way, and receive the Holy Ghost, it will show unto you all things what ye should do,” 2 Nephi 32.5. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16