This secret has to be kept by you from anyone else. If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Reese know everyone at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. I have always loved that place. Let us talk in the garden. When one deals with values and with action in the realm of values is a question that has been with us throughout this series, whether one can really separate psychology from philosophy. If we place the philosophic positions of other people in the context of objectively discernible fact and consider philosophy of life as a psychological attribute of the persons whom we study, what we have been trying to say is that scientific inquiry is possible. This skating on thin ice, let us admit again, and the ice gets thinner and thinner as we get closer to the great issues. Towards the end of his life (in 1932), Dr. Freud responded to a letter from Albert Einstein, in a correspondence initiated by the ill-destined League of Nations, in which Einstein asked him to state his views as to the possibility of the mitigation of human aggression to a degree sufficient to allow Homo sapiens to survive the immediate crisis and to evolve towards a World community in which peace on Earth would be secured. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Dr. Freud refers here to the evolution of culture, whose most characteristic features are, in his view, the strengthening of the intellect and the internalization of aggressive impulses. Individuals at the forefront of the cultural evolution exhibit these traits to the highest degree, ergo, we pacifists. Looking at history, it is apparent that the cultural process working within the individual will avail us little unless the culture is able to produce supra-individual institutions that will be decisive in institutionalizing human violence and curbing it by law. The most substantial finding is that sane attitudes are related in the character structure of egalitarian values, interest, and behavior patterns, in males as well as in females. They are also related negatively to Extraversion (traits that indicate how outgoing, energetic, and social people are) and positively to Psychasthenia (psychological disorder characterized by phobias, obsession, compulsions, or excessive anxiety). All three characteristics suggest a lessening of aggression directed outward and more control over its external expression through sublimation and a turning inward. At the same time, sane attitudes go along with curiosity, a higher level of self-development, independence, vitality, originality, creativity, motivation to achieve, and visual ability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Higher scorers on the scale show greater preference for complexity, are more original in the responses to the consequences of life, produce better poetic metaphors, are more esthetically sensitive, and score higher on a scale designed to measure the disposition towards originality. All in all, then, it does seem that pacifistic tendencies are related to personality development and are found most prominently in persons whose inner life and creativity are more highly developed and who reflect the general direction of evolution of culture. To be sure, every individual’s private problems and anxiety play into this concern about the clock running out in our World. As everyone knows it is easy enough to use the insecurity of the age as an excuse for one’s own neurosis. We can sigh, “The times are out of joint,” and then excuse ourselves from inquiring whether something may not well be severely out of joint within ourselves. However, quite apart from the fact that our neurotic tendencies love to masquerade behind the imposing phase, “catastrophic World situation,” there remains a wide margin in which the issue raised by the questioners is entirely realistic and sound. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Our World will continue in its stage of anxiety for some time to come: and everyone who does not choose to play ostrich must confront that fact and learn to live with insecurity. However, it does no good to avoid such questions by some stoical answers like, “We were born in this age and we would better make the most of it.” Let us, rather, inquire into mortal’s relation to time—actually a very curious relation—to see whether we may gain insights which help us to make our time rather than our enemy. We have seen that one of the unique characteristic of mortals is that they can stand outside their present time and imagine themselves ahead in the future or back in the past. This power to look before and after is part of mortal’s ability to be conscious of themselves. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. However, it is a quite different thing for human beings: mortals are the time-surmounting mammal. The key characteristic which distinguishes mortals from all other living things is their time-binding capacity. The capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. The capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom. The capacity in virtue of which mortals are at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Psychologically and spiritually, mortals do not live by the clock alone. Their time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively fascinating job, ten minutes after work talking to a young lady he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an advance placement adult career education class. Today he remembers noting of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him, as it was mostly routine assignments that day; of the evening class he can recall a little more. However, the ten minutes with the young lady occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the young lady. That is to say, ten minutes with the young lady takes up more room space than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year he was five, thousands of events happened to him. However, now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and their grandmother took them to get two scoops each of rainbow sherbet at Lucky, and his ice cream fell as soon as they walked outside the store, or the instant when he saw his new diamond back bicycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father come home with a cheese cake and he thought it was a pie. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine percent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitive significance of our experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Mortals are always part-and-parcel of the natural World, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over one hundred and fifty years, at this point in life, no matter what we think about it. We age, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Mortals die like every other form of life. However, they are the being who knows it and can foresee their death. By being aware of time, we can control and use it in certain ways. The free will-determinism problem has the quality of a paradox because it opposes a poignant and universal human experience (freedom of choice) to a most impelling assumption (that there is a reason for everything), and a choice must be made between them. It appears, of course, that is one admits that all events are absolutely predictable, then one must admit that what one is about to do a moment from now can be stated with certainty; but if this is so, then one cannot do otherwise. And if there is some possible action that one cannot do, then one is not free. One is, in fact, compelled. To deny such compulsion, it appears, one must assert that in principle not all events are predictable. Thus one seems to regain freedom to act differently a moment from now, in spite of all the psychological responses-catalogues that can ever be invented. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

In the absence of predictability, what obtains is not freedom, but chance. Free will versus determinism is a mistake opposition. There is chance versus predictability, and there is freedom versus constraint, but freedom and predictability belong to two different Universes of discourse. In the nature of the case they cannot be brought into any relationship with one another, save the mistake opposition with which classical philosophy has so long concerned itself. There is no solution to the problem of free will versus determinism; there is possible, and proper, only resolution. Freedom is a personal feeling. It is a range of possible adaptive responses available to organisms in all situation in which they may find themselves. Freedom generally increases univocally as the response repertoire increases. In a particular situation, it is a function as well of the constraints imposed by the situation. In effect, the situation together with the organism defines the organism’s freedom at any given moment. Thus one may speak of potential freedom and actual freedom, actual freedom being freedom at the moment in a given situation, and potential freedom being some value expressing the relation of the organism’s response repertoire to the population of possible situations in which the organism might be placed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Freedom in this sense is worth considerable thought. It can be given such thought by the human brain, the freest of all organizations. It is the happy and unique characteristic of the brain that its manifold possibilities of action may all take place inwardly, and that it may act invisibly. This capacity for inward action is a bother to tyrants and defeats the most valiant efforts at imposing constraints. That is why freedom of thought is an indefeasible natural right. One’s brain is inside one’s own skull, and within that limited space it exercises an utterly amazing potential for varied response. The more a person is able to direct one’s life consciously, the more one can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that one is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, one works not by choice but compulsion, the more one is then the object of quantitative time. One is the servant of the time clock or whistle; one teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, one feels good or bad depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; one gauges one’s rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time one puts in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The more conformist and unfree an individual is, the more time is the master. A particular in instance of freedom (for instance, indefeasible freedom of thought, or its intrinsic solitariness), while it seems most important at times wen forces are hostile to civilization are in the ascendancy, it is a relatively minor and unimportant aspect of the freedom that the development of a complicated nervous system has given mortals. It is safe to say that our potential freedom is unimaginable. A small extension of it may be seen in the most complex of our calculating machines, and a prevision of its scope enlivens the pages of science fiction. The essence of our human freedom is this, that matter has acquired the capacity to work radical modifications in itself. Thus, among its available responses is the ability to act in such a manner as to increase its own flexibility, or deliberately to maximize its own response variability. One of the products of this ability in the human case is the invention and cultivation of psychotherapy, which provides a unique meeting ground of the objectivity and subjective meanings of freedom. In any event, in this sense of freedom, as the range of possible adaptive responses, freedom is a characteristic of material organization, and the range of values it takes is infinite. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Some of the anxiety on the time is running out theme in our day comes from something deeper than the potential of what could happen to the World. For the passage of time in any age has the power to frighten the human being. Many people are caught in the short when they feel time slipping by. Some people had life plans that have been interrupted and will take time. For instance, a man who has been delayed in buying his house might be downtrodden because he wanted his trees to be mature by a certain age. Other people, in general, may feel that time is their archenemy. Our conscious time always confronts us with the question of whether we are alive, growing, or merely trying to ward off being finite beings. When people are afraid of maturing, it is usually because they are not really living. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about maturing is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive. However, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening void. If our awareness of the passage of time tells us that only that day comes and goes and Winter follows Autumn and that nothing is happening in our life expect hour succeeding hour, one must desensitize oneself or else suffer the painful boredom and emptiness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly extinct as possible. Every human being experiences some boredom; a great deal of one’s work, for example, must be gone through more or less by routine; but it becomes unendurable only when it has not been freely chosen or affirmed by the individual as necessary for the attainment of some greater foal. On a not so everyday level, the anticipation of empty time can be a horror for people because they feel that if they had nothing to do, no dates and no regular plans, they would suffer from neurosis or psychosis due to the uncertainty. That is why people develop hobbies, read books and plant gardens, human need something to make their time on this Earth feel meaningful. A good time is usually defined as escaping boredom. As we face hard things in the Lord’s way, may we lift up our heads and rejoice. Sometimes the Lord asks us to do a hard thing, and sometimes our challenges are created by our own or others’ use of agency. The generation gap refers to fundamental differences in experience and in philosophy of life between today’s young men and women and their parents, considered as generations separated in time by twenty or thirty years. It is interesting that some fathers are more concerned with their children thinking they are trendy, instead of them being stuffy. A few of them just want to be seen as the type of dad who drives a sports car. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Nonetheless, all parents want to instill hope into their children. What a pleasant thing it is when your children are hopeful about their future. Hope in its creative and healthy sense—whether it is hope for religious fulfillment or for a happy marriage or for achievement in one’s profession—can and should be an energizing attitude, the bringing of part of the joy about some future event into the present so that by anticipation, we are more alive and more able to act in the present. Thinking of the past can, of course, have the same escape function as thinking of the future. Whenever a difficult problem appears in the present, one can say, “At least things were better at such and such a time,” and let one’s mind bask in that memory. Indeed, so strong and universal are the tendencies to find comfort in the distant past or future that there are recurrent myths in almost every culture picturing each pole—the Garden of Eden and its variants of the longing for the happier day in a state of childlike innocence, and the myths of paradise ahead in the form of Heaven or the Earthly utopias of those who believe in perpetual, automatic progress. As living in hopes for the future is said to be the usual escape of unsophisticated people, so living in the past may be the common escape of sophisticated persons. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

In therapy, people who live in the past know that it is not always a good idea to flee into hopes of the future rewards in Heaven, but they have learned that it is entirely respectable to talk about the past: for do not one’s basic problems have their roots in early childhood? This truth can then be used as a neat rationalization. For when a person comes to a session after a quarrel with his wife, he can then leap back into talking about childhood and how it affected him, or how he got along with his last girlfriend. This is often easier for him than to confront the immediate question of what caused the quarrel and what are his motives in his present relation with his wife. Fortunately the therapist can generally tell whether the person is using one’s past as an escape (in which case to talk about it will never make any psychological change in him) or as a source of illumination and a release of dynamic for the present. One can be aware of the passage of time because we are so alive in the present moment, not just because we keep ourselves busy to escape time. Sometimes an hour is like a week because it lumbers so slowly and painfully: in the former—being unaware of time because of the heightened aliveness of the moment—an hour is like a week because it gives so much joy and happiness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Also, many people complain just because some want to watch a television program that the TV is telling them a vision of how to act, dress, and what to think. While they may be true, the TV also has a way of reinforcing norms, like the law, and it shows you what happens to people who break the law. Some people complain about the television because they think it is inhibiting their control over a person. However, many people read books and seek religion for enlightenment. So, the TV is not telling them how to feel. Recently, something happened in our community and for weeks, I was unable to really put into words how I felt because the situation was also tied to something I experienced. Yet, after a few weeks of reflection, I was able to express what I was feeling. No one could tell me what to think or what to feel because for me the situation was very unique. Sometimes when people are trying to control you and they see you growing and their programming slipping, they will try to confuse you. Face it, some people like TV because they like the action packed programs, or designing,  it gives them a level of excitement they are not experiencing in their own lives and probably never will. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and live and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15