He had others powers as well. Each evening as he awakened, he found himself listening to voices from all over the World. He lay in the darkness bathed in sound. He heard people speaking in Greek, English, Romanian, Hindustani. He heard laughter, cries of pain. And if he lay very still, he could hear thoughts from people—a jumbled undercurrent full of wild exaggeration that only frightened him. He did not know where these voices came from. Or why one voice drowned out another. Why, it was as if he were God and he were listening to prayers. The thing that stirs the Grand Inquisitor, that threatens his sum complacency, is the human spirit of rebellion. He is obsessed with it; he comes back to it again and again. “Mortals are created a rebel,” he states regretfully, “and how can rebels be happy?” and “What though one [mortals] are everywhere rebelling against our power, and proud of their rebellion? It is the pride of a child, and a schoolboy.” “Humankind are slaves of course,” he reassures himself, “though rebellious by nature.” He vows that such oppositional efforts will be useless, “though mortals might be a hundred times a rebel.” There is good reason for one’s concern. Rebellion is the one way human beings can demonstrate that they are not what the Grand Inquisitor called them: “slaves, base, vile, weak, and cowardly.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

This stubborn, oppositional tendency in humankind raises the question, Is the possibility for rebellion necessary and inevitable for human freedom? I answer yes. Only when something opposes it and take it away is freedom seen. Hence the word freedom exists always in the company of such verbs as resist, oppose, rebel. I do not mean rebellion in the sense of fixation on immature patterns of defiance nor in the sense of sheer destructiveness, or rebellion for its own sake or for the sake of diversionary excitement in one sector of one’s life to avoid commitment in another. I mean the capacity for rebellion as the preservation of human dignity and spirit. I mean the act of coming to terms with one’s own autonomy, learning to respect one’s own “no.” Thus, the capacity to rebel is the underpinning of independence and the guardian of the human spirit. Rebellion preserves the life core, the self as conscious of its existence as a self. The capacity to rebel gives one’s cooperation efficacy. Otherwise one is simply inert human weight rather than a cooperating human being. And if one senses these characteristics as important in oneself, one must, if only to preserve one’s own psychological integrity, grant this sense of dignity and the respect that it rightly demands to other persons in the World as well. Without rebellion, humankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremedial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

The mortal who refuses to obey authority has, therefore, in certain circumstances, a legitimate function, provided one’s disobedience has motives which are social rather than personal. The You encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. However, that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed. The You encounters me. However, I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and thus with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions. The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become’ becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter. The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing can ceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purposes intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

Before the immediacy of the relationship everything mediates becomes negligible. It is also trifling whether my You is the It of other I’s (“object of general experience”) or can only become that as a result of my essential deed. For the real boundary, albeit one that floats and fluctuates, runs not between experience and non-experience, nor between the given and the not-given, nor between the World of being and the World of value, but across all the regions between You and It: between presence and object. The present—not that which is like a point and merely designates whatever our thoughts may posit as the end of elapsed time, the fiction of the fixed lapse, but the actual and fulfilled present—exists only insofar as presentness, encounter, and relation exist. Only as the You become present does presence come into being. The I of the basic word I-It, the I that is not bodily confronted by a You but surrounded by a multitude of contents, has only a past and no present. In other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the things that one experiences and uses, one lives in the past, and one’s moment has no presence. One has nothing but objects; but objects consist in having been. Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting and enduring. And the objects is not duration but standing still, ceasing, breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of relation, the lack of presence. What is essential is lived in the present, objects in the past. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

This essential twofoldness cannot be overcome by invoking a World of ideas as a third element that might transcend this opposition. For I speak only of the actual human being, of you and me, of our life and our World, not of any I-in-itself and not of any Being-in-itself. However, for an actual human being the real boundary also runs across the World of ideas. To be sure, some mortals who in the World of things make do with experiencing and using have constructed for themselves an idea annex or superstructure in which they find refuge and reassurance in the face of intimations of nothingness. At the threshold they take off the clothes of the unattractive weekday, shroud themselves in clean garments, and feel restored as they contemplate primal being or what ought to be—something in which their life has no share. It may also make them feel good to proclaim it. However, the It-humanity that some imagine, postulate, and advertise has nothing in common with the bodily humanity to which a human being can truly say You. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the most sublime fictitious sentiment is a vice. The ideas are just as little enthroned above our heads as they reside inside them; they walk among us and step up to us. Pitiful are those who leave the basic word unspoken, but wretched are those who instead of that address the ideas with a concept or a slogan as if that were their name! #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

Our Declaration of Independence puts it politically: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Our nation was born in 1776 by virtue of the spirit of insurgency of our forefathers. This rebellious quality was the turning point in Philip’s therapy. His cry “If Nicole wants to continue her present bedhopping, the hell with her—I will make my life with someone else” was the crucial step in his asserting his freedom from his neurotic bond to her. Even in creativity the rebellion is present in a different sense. Every act of creation is preceded by an act of destruction, as Picasso was so fond of saying. The scientific aspect of creativity is not different here from the artistic; the essential characteristic of a creative contribution is that it transcends prior experience and contains a revolt against it. Concerning inner values, it is significant that this capacity to preserve one’s freedom by insurgency is present in artists. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly see oneself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about one an order which is one’s own, to sow strife and ferement so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

The artist creates the uncreated conscience of the race. Rebellion may be discerned in the rebirth experience we endure at every point of psychological growth. The normal rebellion is, of course, most clearly seen in adolescence, in the fight against what one’s parents stand for in favor of creating a new, free World of one’s own. When the young person oneself has not yet developed enough courage to declare one’s independence and to begin to take responsibility for one’s own life, in psychotherapy, it is often the function of the therapist to support this rebellion of the adolescent against one’s parents. However, they still recommend that you show your parents respect and this is also a commandment in the Bible because as part of our Heavenly Father’s plan, we were born into families. He established families to being us happiness, to help us learn correct principles in a loving atmosphere, and to prepare us for eternal life. Parents have the vital responsibility to help their children prepare to return to Heavenly Father. Parents fulfill this responsibility by teaching their children to follow Jesus Christ and live his gospel. “And they shall also teach their children to pray, and to walk uprightly before the Lord,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 68.28. Independence is the only way which one will learn one’s freedom. Independence is the anvil on which people can hammer out their autonomy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

Freedom to govern oneself is not conferred simply by the erstwhile master signing a decree of independence and moving out. (“Freedom is not a cake that drops into one’s mouth and is there for the swallowing, but a citadel to be stormed with the saber. Whoever receives freedom from foreign hands remains a slave. Everyone must go through this stage in which they commit their all to some ideal, that is more important to them than life itself. By earn—what is mean is the developing of dignity, the sense of interdependence, and the collective legend that one experiences in the trenches—all of these psychological experiences forming the structure on which a free nation composed of free individuals can be established. This independence is most significantly an inner process that changes the character of the people who have become free, a process that involves the building of human dignity into each one of the now free persons. The sense of solidarity binding each member to the group, the collective consciousness now oriented toward freedom in the whole community—these are a necessary part of the welding together of people who have been slaves into a nation conscious of itself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

Some egalitarians hold that the strident quality in the movement is inevitable, and that the liberation movement cannot escape being oppositional since it has to fight so much opposition. The struggle may be one’s way of earning their own freedom and equality. When, in The Queen of the Damned, Queen Akasha finally walks out of her castle and marriage, one breathes a deep sign of relief. For at last she has been able to rebel against a destructive and stultifying entanglement. If I have the possibility of rebellion, it is implied at the same time that I do not need to rebel. I am free to choose to cooperate instead. Then my cooperation has a reality and an authenticity. It would not be thus if I were coerced into cooperating—for instance, if I had no possibility of rebellion; the cooperation of a slave is not cooperation at all, but slave labor. Or I can revel nonviolently. “We will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself,” reports Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King knew what a high price this might entail. However, it would achieve the sense of dignity, the rebirth, the self-esteem among people of the World—it would earn freedom for the people. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

No one can really escape from this inner loneliness by outer means. In the end, and however long put off, they will have to face it. Most often, such an hour comes in with sorrow or bereavement, hurt or disappointment. “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor Angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 8.38-39. These words are among the most powerful ever written. Their sound is able to grasp human souls in desperate situations. In my own experience they have proved to be stronger than the sound of exploding shells, of weeping at open graves, of the sighs of the sick, of the moaning of the dying. They are stronger than the self-accusation of those who are in despair about themselves and they prevail over the permanent whisper of anxiety in the depth of our being. What is it that makes these words so powerful? It is not their literal meaning, for in many respects that is strange to us. The Angels and principalities, the height and depth, and even life and death point to the constellations of the stars which, according to ancient beliefs, determine the fate of mortals and history. People are in their power, driven by fear and fighting for courage, sometimes victorious, more often defeated. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10