We mortal cross the ocean of this World each in one’s average cabin of life. If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get the best thing God invents. I have found the experience of therapy to have meaningful and sometimes profound implications for education, for interpersonal communication, for family living, for the creative process. People in therapy are up against a situation which one perceives as a serious and meaningful problem. It may be that one finds oneself behaving in ways in which one cannot control, or one is overwhelmed by confusions and conflicts, or one’s marriage is going on the rocks, or one finds oneself unhappy at work. One is, in short, faced with a problem with which one has tried to cope, and found oneself unsuccessful. One is therefore eager to learn, even though at the same time one is frightened that what one discovers in oneself may be disturbing. Thus one of the conditions nearly always present in an uncertain and ambivalent desire to learn or change, growing out of a perceived difficulty in meeting life. When one comes to therapy, what are the conditions which this individual meet? If therapy is to occur, it seems necessary that the therapist be, in the relationship, a unified, or integrated, or congruent person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

What I mean is that within the relationship with the therapist, one must be exactly what one is—not a façade, or a role, or a pretense. I have used the term “congruence” to refer to this accurate matching of experience with awareness. It is when the therapist is fully and accurately aware of what one is experiencing at this moment in the relationship, that one is fully congruent. Unless this congruence is present to a considerable degree it is unlikely that significant learning can occur. Though this concept of congruence is actually a complex one, I believe all of us recognize it in an intuitive and commonsense way in individual with whom we deal. With one individual we recognize that one not only means exactly what one says, but that one’s deepest feelings also match what one is expressing. Thus whether one is angry or affectionate or ashamed or enthusiastic, we sense that one is the same at all levels—in what one is experiencing at an organismic level, in one’s awareness at the conscious level, and in one’s words and communications. We furthermore recognize that one is acceptant of one’s immediate feelings. We say of such a person that we know “exactly where one stands.” We tend to feel comfortable and secure in which a relationship. With another person we recognize that what one is saying is almost certainly a front or a façade. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

We wonder what one really feels, what one is really experiencing, behind this façade. We may also wonder if one knows what one really feels, recognizing that one may be quite unaware of the feelings one is actually experiencing. With such a person we tend to be cautious and wary. It is not the kind of relationship in which defenses can be dropped or in which significant learning and change can occur. Thus this second condition for therapy is that the therapist is characterized by a considerable degree of congruence in the relationship. One is freely, deeply, and acceptantly oneself, with one’s actual experience of one’s feelings and reactions matched by an accurate awareness of these feelings and reactions as they occur and as they change. A third condition in therapy is that the therapist will experience a warm caring for the client—a caring which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates “I care.” Not “I care for you if you behave thus and so.” This attitude is called “unconditional positive regard,” since it has no conditions of worth attached to it. I have often used this term “acceptance” to describe this aspect of the therapeutic climate. It involves as much feeling of acceptance for the client’s expression of negative, “bad,” painful, fearful, and abnormal feelings as for one’s expression of “good” beneficial, mature, confident and social feelings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Unconditional positive regard also involves an acceptance of and a caring for the client as a separate person, with permission for one to have one’s own feelings and experiences, and to find one’s own meanings in them. To the degree that the therapist can provide this safety-creating climate of unconditional positive regard, significant learning is likely to take place. An empathic understand is also important. The therapist is supposed to experience an accurate, empathic understanding of the client’s World as seen from the inside. To sense the client’s private World as if it were your own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality—this is empathy, and this seems essential to therapy. To sense the client’s anger, fear, or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear, or confusion getting bound up in it, is the condition we are endeavoring to describe. When the client’s World is this clear to the therapist, and one moves about in it freely, then one can both communicate one’s understanding of what is clearly known to the client and can also voice meanings in the client’s experience of which the client is scarcely aware. That such penetrating empathy is important for therapy. The therapist must be well able to understand the patient’s feelings, never in any doubt about what the patient means, and remarks fit in just right with the patient’s mod and content. And the therapist’s tone of voice must convey the complete ability to share the patient’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

A fifth condition for significant learning in therapy is that the client should experience or perceive something of the therapist’s congruence, acceptance, and empathy. It is not enough that these conditions exist in the therapist. They must, to some degree, have been successfully communicated to the client. When these five conditions exist, it has been our experience that a process of change inevitably occurs. The client’s rigid perceptions of oneself and of others loosen and become open to reality. The rigid ways in which one has construed the meaning of one’s experience are looked at, and one finds oneself questioning many of the facts of one’s life, discovering that they are only fact because one has regarded them so. One discovers feelings of which one has been unaware, and experiences them, often vividly, in the therapeutic relationship. Thus one learns to be more open to all of one’s experience—the evidence within oneself as well as the feelings one has regarded as more acceptable. One becomes a more fluid, changing, learning person. In this process it is not necessary for the therapist to “motivate” the client or to supply the energy which brings about the change. Nor, in some sense, is the motivation supplied by the client, at least in any conscious way. Let us say rather that the motivation for learning and change springs from the self-actualizing tendency of life itself, the tendency for the organism to flow into all the differentiated channels of potential development, insofar as these are experienced as enhancing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Therefore, therapy producing a type of significant learning which takes place when the five conditions are met: When the client perceives oneself as faced by a serious and meaningful problem; when the therapist is a congruent person in the relationship, able to be the person one is; when the therapist feels an unconditional positive regard for the client; when the therapist experiences an accurate empathic understanding of the client’s private World, and communicates this; when the client to some degree experiences the therapist’s congruence, acceptance, and empathy. To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it. Sometimes ordinarily quiet and rational persons may freeze with rage or become actually abusive if their aloofness and independence are threatened. Absolute panic may be induced at the thought of joining any movement or professional group where real participation and not merely payment of dues is required. If they do become involved they may thrash about blindly to extricate themselves. Hey can be more expert in finding methods to escape than a person whose life is attacked. Were the choice between love and independence, as a patent once put it, they would choose independence without hesitation. This brings up another point. Not only are they willing to defend their detachment by every available means, but they find no sacrifice too great in its behalf. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

External advantages and inner values will be equally renounced—consciously, by setting aside any desire that might interfere with independence, or unconsciously, by automatic prohibition. Anything so vigorously defended must have an overwhelming subjective value. We can hope to understand the functions of detachment and eventually to be helpful therapeutically only if we are aware of this. As we have seen, each of the basic attitudes towards others have its beneficial value. In moving toward people the person tries to create for oneself a friendly relation to one’s World. In moving against people one equips oneself for survival in a competitive society. In moving away from people one hopes to attain a certain integrity and serenity. As a matter of fact, all three attitudes are not only desirable but necessary to our development as human beings. It is only when they appear and operate in a neurotic framework that they become compulsive, rigid, indiscriminate, and mutually exclusive. This considerably detracts from their value, but does not destroy it. The gains to be derived from detachment are indeed considerable. It is significant that in all Eastern philosophies detachment is sought as a basis for high spiritual development. Of course we cannot compare such aspirations with those of neurotic detachment. There detachment is voluntarily chosen as the best approach to self-fulfillment and is adopted by persons who could, if they wanted, live a different kind of life; neurotic detachment, on the other hand, is not a mater of choice but of inner compulsion, the only possible way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Nonetheless, some of the same benefits may be derived from it—though the extent to which this will be so depends on the severity of the whole neurotic process. In spite of the ravaging force of a neurosis, the detached person may preserve a certain integrity. This would hardly be a factor in a society in which human relationships were generally friendly and honest. However, in a society in which there is much hypocrisy, crookedness, envy, cruelty and greed, the integrity of a none too strong person easily suffers; keeping at a distance helps to maintain it. Furthermore, since neurosis usually robs a person of one’s peace of mind, detachment may provide an avenue of serenity, its extent varying with the amount of sacrifice one is willing to make. Detachment allows one, in addition, some measure of original thinking and feeling, provided that within one’s magic circle emotional life has not been altogether deadened. Lastly, all of these factors, together with one’s contemplative relation to the World and the comparative absence of distraction, contribute toward the development and expression of creative abilities, if one has any. I do not mean that neurotic detachment is a precondition for creation, but that under neurotic stress detachment will provide the best change of expressing what creative ability there is. Substantial though these gains may be, they do not seem to be the main reason why detachment is so desperately defended. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Actually the defense is equally desperate if for one reason or another the gains are minimal or are heavily overshadowed by concomitant disturbances. This observation leads into further depths. If the detached person is thrown into close contact with others one may very readily go to pieces or, to use the popular term, have a nervous breakdown. I use the term advisedly here because it covers a wide range of disturbances—functional disorders, alcoholism, suicidal attempts, depression, incapacity for work, psychotic episodes. The patient oneself, and sometimes the psychiatrist too, tends to relate the disturbance to some upsetting event that occurred just prior to the “break down.” A sergeant’s unjust discrimination, a husband’s philandering and lying about it, a wife’s behaving neurotically, a homosexual episode, unpopularity in college, the need to make a living when life have previously been sheltered, and so on may be held to blame. True enough any such problem is relevant. The therapist should take it seriously and try to understand what in particular was set off in the patient by a specific difficulty. However, to do that is hardly sufficient, because the question remains why the patient has been so intensely affected, why one’s whole psychic equilibrium has been endangered by a difficulty which by and large cannot be considered greater than ordinary frustrations and upsets. In other words, even when the analyst understands how the patient reacted to a particular difficulty, one still needs to understand why there is such a distinct disproportion between the provocation and its effect. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

In answer we could point to the fact that the neurotic trends involved in detachment, like other neurotic trends, give the individual a feeling of security as long as they function, and that, conversely, anxiety is aroused when they fail to function. As long as the detached person can keep at a distance one feels comparatively safe; if for any reason the magic circle is penetrated, one’s security is threatened. This consideration brings us closer to an understanding of why the detached person becomes panicky if one can no longer safeguard one’s emotional distance from others—and we should add that the reason one’s panic is so great is that one has no technique for dealing with life. One can only keep aloof and avoid life, as it were. Here again it is the negative quality f detachment that gives the picture a special color, different from that of other neurotic trends. To be more specific, in a difficult situation the detached person can neither appease nor fight, neither co-operate nor dictate terms, neither love nor be ruthless. One is as defenseless as an animal that has only one means of coping with danger—that is, to escape and hide. Appropriating pictures and analogies that have appeared in associations or dreams: one is like the pygmies of Ceylon, invincible so long as they hide in the forests but easily beaten when they emerge. One is like a medieval town protected by one wall only—if that wall is taken, the town is defenseless against the enemy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Such a position fully justifies one’s anxiety toward life in general. It helps us to understand one’s remoteness as an over-all protection to which one must tenaciously cling and which one must defend at whatever cost. All neurotic trends are at bottom defensive moves, but the others also constitute an attempt to cope with life in a beneficial way. When detachment is the predominate trend it renders a person so helpless in any realistic dealing with life that in the course of time its defensive character becomes uppermost. If you want to understand something, try to change it. “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when people shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and case out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for behold, your reward is great in Heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all beings shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets,” reports Luke 6.20-26. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Readers and students of the New Testament often find that it is not the refined argument of Paul or the mystical wisdom of John, but the simple sayings of Jesus, as recorded by the first three evangelists, which are the most difficult to interpret. The words of Jesus seem so clear and straightforward and adequate that it is hard to imagine that anybody could miss the meaning. However, when we are asked to express the meaning in our own words, we discover one level of meaning after another. We realize that words of Jesus which we have known since our earliest childhood are incomprehensible to us. And if we try to penetrate them, we are drive from one depth to another; we are never able to exhaust them. Nothing seems simpler, and yet nothing is more perplexing, than, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer, the Parables, and the Beatitudes. We have heard the four Beatitudes and the four Woes as Luke reports them. Their meanings seems unmistakable. The poor, those who are hungry now, those who weep now, those who are isolated and insulted, are praised, congratulated, so to speak, because they can expect precisely the opposite of their present situation. And the rich, those who are full, those who laugh, those who are popular and respected, are pitied, because they must expect precisely that which is contrary. Two questions arise. What is promised and to whom is it promised? What is the kingdom which is to be owned by the less affluent, and who are the less affluent who shall own it? Ans who are the rich against whom the Woes shall be directed, and what shall happen to them? #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Matthew tried to answer these questions. He said that the poor are the poor in spirit, and that those who hunger, hunger after righteousness. He said that those who weep, mourn for the state of the World. And to them is promised the kingdom of Heaven, the vision of the Divine Spirit, the comfort and mercy of the realm of God. Is Matthew’s interpretation right? Or has Matthew, and have the official Christian Churches, following him, spiritualized the Beatitudes? Or, on the other has, has Luke, and have the many sectarian and revolutionary movements, following him, distorted the Beatitudes from a materialistic point of view? Both assertions have been made and both are wrong. If we want the true answer, we must look at those to whom Jesus spoke. He spoke to two kinds of people. One kind lived with their hearts turned toward the coming stage of the World. They were poorly adjusted to things as they were. They were suffering under the conditions of their lives. Many were disinherited, insecure, hungry, oppressed. There is no distinction made in the Beatitudes between spiritual and material wants, and there is no distinction made between spiritual and material fulfillment. Those whom Jesus spoke were in need of both. Neither the prophets nor Jesus spiritualized the message of the Kingdom. Nor did they understand it and interpret it to say that the Kingdom would come as the result of a merely material revolution. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Christianity pronounces the unity of body and soul. The Beatitudes praise those who will be fulfilled in their whole being. However, the other kind of people to whom Jesus spoke were those to whom He promised the Woes. They were unbroken in their relation to the present stage of the World. They lived with their hearts in things as they are. They were well-established in their lives; they enjoyed prestige, power and security. Jesus threatened them spiritually and materially. They were bound to this eon, and they were to vanish with this eon. They had no treasure beyond it. The situation of the people of Galilee to whom Jesus spoke is still our situation. The Woes are promised today to all of us who are well off, respected, and secure, not simply because we have such security and respect, but because it inevitably binds us, with an almost irresistible power, to this eon, to things as they are. And the Beatitudes are promised today to all of us who are without security and popularity, who are mourning in body and soul. And they are promised not simply because we lack so much, but because they very fact of our lacks and our sorrows may turn our heats away from things as they are, toward the coming eon. The Beatitudes do not glorify those who are poor in misery, individuals or classes, because they are less affluent. The Woes are not promised to those who are rich and secure, classes or individuals, because they are rich. If this were so, Jesus could not have promised to the less affluent the reversal of their situation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Jesus praises the less affluent in so far as they live in two Worlds, the present World and the World to come. And He threatens that rich in so far as they live in one World alone. (However, this does not mean that the rich are unrighteous. God loves all of his children.) This brings a tremendous tension into our lives. We live in two orders, one of which is a reversal of the other. The coming order is always coming, shaking this order, fighting with it, conquering it and conquered by it. The coming order is always at hand. However, one can never say: “It is here! It is there!” One can never grasp it. However, one can be grasped by it. And whenever one is grasped by it, one is rich, even if one be less affluent in this order. One’s wealth is one’s participation in the coming order, in its battles, its victories and defeats. One is blessed, one may rejoice and leap even when one is isolated and insulted, because one’s isolation belongs to this order, while one belongs to the other order! One is blessed, while they who cast out one’s name are to be pitied. By their dread and despair, and by their hatred of one, they prove that the Woes Jesus has directed against them have already become real. They lose the one and only order they have; they disintegrate in body and spirit. Perhaps we are right to consider the catastrophe of our present World as a fulfillment of the Words which Jesus directed against a rich, abundant, laughing, self-congratulating social order. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, if we believe this, we can also believe that those who have become poor and hungry and sorrowing and persecuted in this catastrophe are those in whom the other order is made manifest. They may betray it, but they are called first. Only through the paradox of the Beatitudes can we begin to understand our own life and the life of our World. “The Lord looks down from Heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are al alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one,” reports Psalm 14.2-3. Starting from ruin—we must see the soul and the person in its ruined condition, with its malformed and dysfunctional mind, feelings, body, and social relations, before we can understand that it must be delivered and reformed and how that can be done. One of the greatest obstacles to effective spiritual formation in Christ today is simple failure to understand and acknowledge the reality of the human situation as it affects Christians and non-Christians alike. We must start from where we really are. And where we recall that all people undergo a process of spiritual formation. Their spirit is formed, and with it their whole being. Spiritual formation is not just something for religious people. No one escapes. The most hardened unlawful person as well as the most devout of human beings have had a spiritual formation. They have become a certain kind of person. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

You have had a spiritual formation and I have had one, and it is still ongoing. It is like education: everyone gets one—a good one or a bad one. We reemphasize that those are fortune or blessed who are able to find or are given a path of life that forms their spirit and inner World in a way that is good. Remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to our as the life of a gnat. However, it is immortals whom we jokes with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortals horrors or everlasting splendors. Strangely, it is precisely the intrinsic greatness of the person that makes it in its ruined condition “a horror and a corruption such as you now meet only in a nightmare.” If we were insignificant, our ruin would not be horrifying. The hardest thing to accept in the Christian religion is the great value it places upon the individual soul. Still older Christian writers used to say that God has hidden the majesty of the human soul from us to prevent our being ruined by vanity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

This explains why even in its ruined condition a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost. And in its lostness it is still capable of great strength, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty and goodness—enough so to hide from the unenlightened, or those who do not wish to understand, the horror it has become and is becoming. Gracious Lord, Almighty, Jesus Christ, let Thy sufferings assist us, and defend us from all pain and grief, all peril and misery, all uncleanness of heart, all sin, all scandal and infamy, from evil diseases of soul and body, from sudden and unforeseen death, and from all persecution of our foes visible and invisible. For we know that in what day or hour we call to mind Thy Passion, we shall be safe. Therefore relying on Thine infinite tenderness, we beseech Thee, O most loving Saviour, by Thy most benignant and sacred sufferings to protect us with gracious assistance, and in continual tenderness to preserve us from all evil. O God, the Son of God—so loving, yet hated—so forbearing, yet assaulted unto death—Who didst show Thyself so gentle and merciful to Thy persecutors; grant that through the wounds of Thy Passion our sins may be expiated, and as in Thy humiliation Thou didst suffer death for us, so now, being glorified, bestow on us everlasting brightness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

O Lover to the uttermost, may I read the meltings of thy heart to me in the manager of thy birth, in the garden of thy agony, in the cross of thy suffering, in the tomb of thy resurrection, in the Heaven of thy intercession. Bold in this thought I defy my adversary, tread down one’s temptations, resist one’s schemings, renounce the World, am valiant for truth. Deepen in me a sense of my holy relationship to thee, as spiritual bridegroom, as God’s fellow, as sinners’ friend. I think of thy glory and my vileness, thy majesty and my meanness, thy beauty and my deformity, thy purity and my filth, they righteousness and my iniquity, thy purity and my filth, thy righteousness any my iniquity. Thou hast loved me everlastingly, unchangeably may I love thee as I am loved; Thou hast loved me everlastingly, unchangeably, may I love thee as I am loved; Thou hast given thyself for me, may I give myself to thee; thou has died for me, may I live to thee, in every moment of my time, in every moment of my mind, in every pulse of my heart. May I never dally with the World and its allurements, but walk by thy side, listen to thy voice, be clothes with thy graces, and adorned with thy righteousness. “And it came to pass that the Lord said unto me: If they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore thy garments shall be made clean. And because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father,” reports Ether 12.37. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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