Very well. I am going to lay down the law to you. If I am to remain with you, I am the Master here. And I refuse to prove myself to you. I will not spend my tenure with you being constantly questioned as to the virtue of my authority! For most people giving affection and receiving affection are very difficult matters. Many people feel that they are unlovable and that any gestures of affection or admiration are extremely hard for them to accept. If a person knows one is unlovable, how can one believe it when someone professes love? Well, many people have deep within themselves a special significant sense of deprivation of affection and the consequent feelings make them feel unlovable. When they are able to go inside of themselves and reflect on this strong need for affection, it will help the individual readjust. One will begin to turn away from the inability to feel affection—there will actually be a massive escape from one’s longing—and one will gradually look toward the problem itself. Most of the times, the issue is an unresolved problem with one’s parental situation and once that is identified, an individual can work toward a resolution of those feelings with a possible increase in self-esteem. Sometimes it is important to figure out what each person wants and what you want to give. This will allow one to understand better some difficulties one has to on one’s life where people tend not to treat one as a sufficiently significant individual. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Other people are here to teach us lessons, and sometimes people have pseudo personalities, which become unmasked later in life, especially after changes in the family dynamics. However, as you are maturing, you can see where people are coming from, so it is no big surprise when they show you who they really are. Some people are so busy trying to gratify others regardless of one’s own wishes. The important thing to remember is no matter how good you are or how much you try to please and impress others, in many cases it is a failed effort because they do not care. The central issues of affection is trusting the feelings of others. The other side of this trust is the ability to gratify and give pleasure to someone who trusts. As the brain matures, the feelings of trust of distrust are usually felt very clearly in any situation. Successful experiences can greatly restructure a person’s self-concept in the direction of helping one feel more loving and loveable. Even in your family or people you grew up with, you may find later in life that you have different values than them and that is why they do not totally accept you, and that is find. Unfortunately, cultural and organizational forces are often powerful deterrents to joyful feelings. It is always good to see where people are coming from and you do not have to express any feelings of hurt or anger toward them, just be civil, but understand they may not have your best interests at heart. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

We have already seen how the tendencies to condemn, so prevalent in the church, are frequently incorporated into the life of religious families. To the child of such a family, religion often becomes a strong additional force in one’s feeling of rejection and one’s increasing hatred of oneself. One is taught that one is inherently evil and that it is only through God’s gracious mercy that one can be saved from oneself. And although it made clear to one that god behavior will not be of sufficient merit to win God’s acceptance of a naturally sinful person like oneself, one is nevertheless subjected to strong emphasis on various rules of conduct. It is no surprise that one feels that one is under constant surveillance by one’s family, one’s religious group, and God, and that they are all judging one’s worth by one’s actions. Feeling condemned on all sides, one attempts some form of escape from one’s growing self-hate. However, as we have seen, such efforts lead only to further feelings of rejection. Many people whose lives are deeply intertwined with a religious group find it difficult to experience and express love because they have a tendency to suppress or repress many of their feelings. It is within many of these groups that people are most forcefully confronted with the idea that they are committing a sin if they feel angry, covetous, jealous, or are involved in pleasures of the flesh with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Many churches are so condemning toward these feelings that their members are likely to avoid expressing them and may deny even to themselves that they exist. And as we have seen in the discussions of anger and pleasures of the flesh, when we are full of unexpressed and unrecognized feelings that create barriers between ourselves and others, it is difficult to experience our love. In this context of life, as in others where we are so adept at creating barriers to love, it begins to look as though we are so frightened of love that we need the hindrances we create. No doubt it would be an oversimplification to see fear of love as the only factor in churches’ apparent need to codify behavior and judge people accordingly, but it is at least one very important underlying factor. Religious groups, like people in general, have not understood their fear of intimacy. Without realizing it, they have encouraged emotional distance between people rather than the experience of love they professed to promote. For example, churches often substitute apparent expressions of love for the experience of intimacy. A good illustration of this exists in those thousands of congregations (not al by any means) in our society who willingly give money to missionary enterprises throughout the World, including Africa, proclaiming their love of all humankind but who would be very upset and uncomfortable if someone from a culture different from theirs braved the evident fear, suspicion, and hostility and attempted to worship wit them and become active in their congregation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

In an effort to promote fellowship many congregations have coffee hours after church services. The typical remoteness and lack of self-revelation that usually marks these functions makes them even less productive of the experience of love than the average cocktail party, where people sometimes feel relatively free to be themselves and express some of their genuine feelings. Churches from study groups, women’s groups, men’s clubs, and couples’ organizations. Although these groups talk about love and fellowship, they usually speak in very rational and impersonal ways. If anyone begins to express deeply personal feelings about the subject of discussion, such groups tend to become very uncomfortable and quickly change subject. If intimate relationships between members of these groups, as they undoubtedly sometimes do, it is accomplished outside of the group and almost in spite of it, for there is little or nothing within it to encourage the experience of love. During church services the minister often talks about the feeling of love and communion, which he presumes the worshipers feel with God and with each other as they worship. If he were sufficiently self-aware, it might be more helpful if the minister could tell his people that he, like the, is aware of an awful loneliness and longing for love that is almost too frightening to act upon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Another way in which the church often promotes emotional distance is that it discourages honesty within its community. This happens because if they are themselves, the church’s preoccupation with behavior fosters the impression among its adherents that they will be condemned rather than accepted and loved. So the church becomes a place where people do not say things many of them often say in other life situations. It becomes a place where people pretend they do not do things which they sometimes do: drink, smoke, act primarily in terms of the profit motive in their business, fornicate, get angry with their children—whatever their particular congregation would disapprove of. And it becomes a place where people pretend they do not feel things that they really do feel: anger, lust, prejudice, fear of love. We all wear masks, of course, to protect us from the self-revelation that would make us feel exposed and vulnerable to those around us, and we will never discard them entirely, but the atmosphere that most churches create, in which members feel they will be condemned if they say or do the wrong thing, makes the possibility of genuineness and the experience of love within the religious community even more difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We live in a World of unreality and dreams. Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of my thesis is that our age is witnessing the diminishing of the teaching of humanities in our high schools and our colleges. After an intensive study of the humanities over the last six years, the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington reported that these subjects are progressively being erased from college curricula. The humanities were originally the soul of educational institutions of human life through the great work of history, literate, philosophy and art. However now, students can graduate from seventy-two percent of the colleges in the country without even taking modern or ancient history, that is, without any understanding of Greece and Rome, where our civilization came from, or our struggles since the Renaissance, or the wars that have put us in the present predicament of having our very existence threatened by nuclear war. When we entered college, it used to be pointed out that to learn a foreign language was to go into the heart of another people’s culture, and understand its art and psyche. Now a student in the majority of colleges can go through without understanding any other people’s culture, or any profession except one’s own. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way: To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the World in imagination, to discern that all points in the World are equally centers and that the true center if outside the World, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the World, or love of the beauty of the World which is the same thing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

I recall that I stumbled into a class in the ancient Greek language in Oberlin College and, in spite of being a country boy who scarcely knew Greece had ever existed, I remained in class. It turned out to be the richest, most valuable class I ever took. Nowadays there are very few such classes that one can eve stumble into. Literature, which is the language which crosses all borders—the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the French Proust, the German Goethe, the English Shakespeare, the Americans Emerson and Whitman—all these are now scantily studied, or not at all in the hurry to get on to the study of computers, economics and business. And as far as the classic go—these great ancient Greek dramas and myths which are buried in our souls, along with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus—these classics are not read at all by the majority of the graduates. The understanding of the psyche of modern Americans requires knowing the self-interpretation of human beings in symbols and myths down through the ages; yet I rarely meet in my teaching graduate students who are planning to become psychotherapists, any who has even read the great classics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The purpose of the humanities is to make us more human, to enrich our lives, to develop our imaginations, and to make life worth living. And it is a saddening thing that these subjects are being dismissed. We need have no prejudice against engineering, business studies, accounting, techniques of all sorts including the use of computers, when we point out that these are studies of the how of life, to the neglect of what life is about. This is reflected in the fact that a professor of literature, so I am told by a professor-friend at one of our most distinguished universities, receives about $70,643.60 and a professor of business receives about $188,382.93. Philosophy, which used to be concerned with understanding the meaning of life, is now defunct on most campuses or, where it still exists, it has capitulated to the technical trends by becoming analytical philosophy. These studies of techniques are concerned with quantities, with exchange of goods, money, and even auctioning off of great pictures. However, the humanities are concerned with the quality, the what of life, the painting of the pictures or the composing and playing of music. The humanities are concerned, as I have said, with the questions of meaning. When, during the last century, they put on a great celebration in Boston at the completion of the stringing of telephone wires from Maine to Texas, Thoreau said, “Nobody asks the real question, Do the people of Maine have anything to say to the people in Texas?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Our age is replete with techniques for mass communication, but what is the content of what we communicate beyond business and money matters? Barbara Tuchman wrote a penetrating article in the New York Times two years ago entitled, “The Decline of Quality.” When I had it xeroxed and passed around, a number of people were offended: how dare she criticize our great age of mass communication, our new techniques for everything from TV to dish-washing? This, of course, was exactly what she meant: the quality of life diminishes as the concern with quantity burgeons. This of course has a great deal to do with modern art and the future. Art—in which we include along with painting and sculpture, the dance, architecture, literate, poetry, music—is devoted to the quality of human life. Hence the great confusion in art in our time: it is as though art is lost, it has no central soul or direction in which to go. However, we note at the same time the poignant hunger of people for great art as shown in the crowds that line up to see the exhibitions of the artifacts of King Tut, or the works of Picasso or Van Gogh. Of course one can argue that this is conformism; people crowd in because that is the thing to do. However, I do not believe such arguments exhaust the motives. Even if cake with a hundred flavors is added, Men and women do not live by bread alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

It is a genuine hunger, a starvation for what people’s own intuition tell them is great. It is the artists, the musicians, the poets, the dramatists that remind us that life is worth living. Especially is we are talking about life abundant, some of us can say with truth that beauty has saved our lives. In ancient times the love of the beauty of the World had a very important place in mortal’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with marvelous poetry. This was the case in every nation—in China, in India and in Greece. The Stoicism of the Greeks, which was very wonderful and to which primitive Christianity was infinitely close, especially in the writings of Saint John, was almost exclusively the love of the beauty of the World. As for Israel, certain parts of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Book of Job, Isaiah, and the Book of Wisdom, contain an incomparable expression of the beauty of the World. The example of Saint Francis shows how great a place the beauty of the World can have in Christian thought. Not only is his actual poem perfect poetry, but all his life was perfect poetry in action. His very choice of places for solitary retreats or the foundations of his convents was in itself the most beautiful poetry in action. Vagabondage and poverty were poetry within him; he stripped himself to his birthday suit in order to have immediate contact with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Saint John of the Cross also has some beautiful lines about the beauty of the World. However, in general, making suitable reservations for the treasures that are unknown, little known, or perhaps buried among the forgotten remains of the Middles Ages, we might say that the beauty of the World is almost absent from the Christian tradition. This is strange. It is difficult to understand. It leaves a terrible gap. If the Universe itself is left out, how can Christianity call itself Catholic? In transitional ages there is bound to be some kind of cultural breakdown. The whole society becomes disoriented and negates itself. When we fail to see this from a historical viewpoint, then we do get hopeless, pessimistic, and lose our sense of balance—for we know only the present that will be destroyed in the cultural change. This illustrates again the dangers we face in dropping history—along with the other humanities—from college curricula. We can, however, experience ourselves as part of a culture that is dying in order that a new society may be born. This dying period is certainly no picnic for any sensitive person. Psychological breakdowns are almost the normal thing in our day; we have psychotherapists of all kinds trying to meet this need. However, for the most part therapists are equipped only to patch people up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The breakdowns of morals and family life—all these are part of the radical change. If we can see it that way, then we can move ahead with courage. We can realize that we are building a future, trying to produce some context, some art, some drama, some music that will communicate something to future ages. That I would like to be a part of. And I am sure all of us would. Therefore, find the ground form. Get below the surface, below all your superficial whims and find the reality, the foundation. Find the structure on which your life is built. One Summer on the coast of Maine, John Marin made several of his watercolors. These paintings were done with Marin’s character style—a dash across the sky for clouds, a jagged blue and brown expressing the ocean, strong vertical lines of green for spruce tress and the curves of brownish-red showing the unpredictable might of this rugged, rock-bound coast. Each stroke of Marin’s brush is made with profound emotion. When he had completed these particular paintings, he took them to the drug store in the little town and stood them against the wall. He then asked the pharmacist, whom we all knew as a typical “Down Easterner,” how he liked them. The druggist answered, “They will be fine when they are finished.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

What the druggist called unfinished was really the genius of Marin; he looked on beauty bare. In ever transitional age one must let go the finishing, and look on beauty care. The incompleteness, the groping, fits our age. Our beauty is not at all pretty or charming—it may be the bare rock, the skeleton watercolors of Marin, the silence of John Cage sitting at his piano without a note, the discord and sounds of cultures grinding together. If you are not prepared, it is dangerous to look. Hence Plato, as Greece began its deterioration, write of the terror of beauty, and Rilke wrote these enigmatic lines: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” We have in music, especially in the giants like Beethoven and Schonberg, Aaliyah Haughton and The Beatles, the same sense of terror. And even Dostoyevsky, who certainly knew what beauty was, has Dmitri, one of his characters in the Brothers Karamazov, cry out, “The awful thing that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of mortals.” Yes, this is what modern art is all about. It has little or nothing to do with prettiness or niceness or sweetness. It its beauty there is the terror of the ground forms, and the contemporary artists are our distant early warning. They tell us of the fundamentals of love and the terror of life and death. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

In the Middle Ages we have art for God’s sake, in the Renaissance we have art for mortal’s sake, in the nineteenth century we have art for art’s sake, in the twentieth century we have no art for God’s sake, and in the twenty-first century we have art to remind us we have a soul. The good way must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is clear, it is too easy to reject. What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. However, if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate mortals. Since it clearly should be chosen, nothing would remain but to proceed on it. There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about. The World extracts a price of calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few mortals follow them. The wise give mortals endless opportunities to discuss what is good. Mortal’s attitude are manifold. Some live in a strange World bounded by a path from which countless ways lead inside. If there were roads signs, all of them might bear the same inscription: I-I. Those who dwell inside have no consuming interest. They are not devoted to possession, even if they prize some; not to people, even if they like some; not to any project, even if they have some. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Things are something that they speak of; persons have the great advantage that one cannot only talk of them but also to, or rather at them; but the Lord of every sentence is no man but I. Projects can be entertained without complete devotion, spoken of, and put on like a suit or a dress before a mirror. When you speak to mortals of this type, they quite often do not heart you, and they never hear you as another I. You are not an object for mortals like this, not a thing to be used or experienced, nor an object of interest or fascination. The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than as a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the Lord of every story will be I. Some come to the truth in a roundabout way. The Quest is direct. The quest is governed by its own inherent laws, some easily ascertainable but others darkly obscure. It is a search for meaning in the meaningless flow of events. It is response to the impulsion to look beyond the ever-passing show of Earthly life for some sign, value, or state of mind that shall confer hope, supply justification, gain insight. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17