Doing nothing requires no prior skill, no personal trainers, no exercise machines, and no financial commitment. All you need to do is change your way of thinking. Instead of rushing around from task to task, always worrying about what is next, grant yourself permission to linger in the moment. The prophetic function of religion is the same as the function of psychoanalysis: the return of the repressed, the release from the unconscious of true perceptions of empirical reality in place of the wishful cultural and private fantasies we put there. Both religion and psychoanalysis show humans in their basic creatureliness and attempts to pull the scales of their sublimations from their eyes. Both religion and psychoanalysis have discovered the same source of illusion: the fear of death which cripples life. Also religion has the same difficult mission as Dr. Freud: to overcome the fears of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to the person how one’s self-esteem was built: on the powers of others in order to deny one’s own creatureliness and death. Character is the vital lie that covers over the painful ambiguities of human’s worm-godlikeness—the despair of the human condition, the miraculousness of it tightly interwoven with the stink and decay of it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Religion as unrepression would reveal both truths about humans: one’s wormlikeness as well as one’s godlikeness. Humans deny both in order to live tranquilly in the World. Religion overcame this double denial by maintaining that for God everything is possible. What seems to humans to be fixed and determined for all time, beyond human wormlike powers, is for the possibility of a new heroism, the heroism of sainthood. This meant living in primary awe at the miracle of the created object—including oneself in one’s own godlikeness. Remember the awesome fascination of St. Francis with the revelations of the everyday World—a bird, a flower. It also meant unafraidness of one’s own death, because of the incomparable majesty and power of God. And so religion overcomes the specific problems of fear-stricken animals, while at the same time showing them what empirical reality really is. If we were not fear-stricken beings who repressed awareness of ourselves and our World, then we would live celebrating God’s creation. The ideal of religious sainthood, like that of psychoanalysis, is thus the opening up of perception: this is where religion and science meet. However, I am not saying that science of society is merged into organized religion. Far from it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

We know only too well how easily traditional religious heroism has given way to the hero system of the secular societies. Today religionists wonder why youth has abandoned the churches, not wanting to realize that it is precisely because organized religion openly subscribes to a commercial-industrial hero system that almost openly defunct; it so obviously denies reality, builds war machines against death, and banishes sacredness with bureaucratic dedication. Humans are treated at things and the World is pulled down to their size. The churches subscribe to this empty heroics of possession, display, manipulation. I think that today Christianity is in trouble not because of its myths are dead, but because it does not offer its ideal of heroic sainthood as an immediate personal one to be lived by all believers. In a perverse way, the churches have turned their backs both on the miraculousness of creation and o the need to do something heroic in the World. The early promise of Christianity was to bring about once and for all the social justice that the ancient World was crying for: Christianity never fulfilled this promise, and is as far away from it today as ever. No wonder it has trouble being taken seriously as a hero system. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Even worse, as they have done all through history the churches still bless unheroic wars and sanctify group hatred and victimage. It is an age-old story known to all, so there is no point in lingering on it. However, these kinds of betrayal of an ideal heroism seem to be more and more obvious to today’s youth. They are even becoming obvious to the organized religions themselves, which are wondering the imaginations and the heroic impulses that are stifled in the youth. One way, of course, is by a reaffirmation of traditional evangelism, which still seems to offer a way to overcomes exaggerated fears of life and death by heroic dedication to special purity and worthiness. There is no easy way out of the dilemma; organized society seems to represent a necessary denial of religious heroism. In the United States of America today courageous priests like Daniel Berrigan are again proving this truth: that society will move against religious sainthood (heroism) when it poses a threat to its own system of heroic apotheosis, no matter how self-defeating and immoral that system has become. Also, if we say that science of society is partly immersed in a tragic perspective, this should not give any comfort to represent incontrovertible truths. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Humans simply cannot accept human limitations as inevitable in the scheme of things. If we talk about the “Devil” side of human nature abut human’s depravity, we cannot be fatalistic or cynical about them. If we are skeptical about utopia and acknowledge the Devil, it is only the better to fight for the Angel side. Today there is a real onslaught of intellectual conservatism, recredit leftist thought. It is all right to glorify thinkers like Edmund Burke and to offer profound theological and philosophical commentaries on the tragedies of the human condition, on the follies of history, on the natural limitations of humans. However, this is not offered as corrective, but as a substitute for social action, for the achievement of social justice, as an apologetic for the system as it is, for a traditional herd patriotism. This is what makes most intellectual and moral conservatism today fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical. Psychology has to show how people welcome unfreedom and how the basic motives of human nature are not so biological or hereditary as conservatives often make out. Nor is freedom to obey and to delegates one’s powers are as free as the like to imagine. Sure, society goes on because of a silent accord by the majority that they prefer structure to chaos, and are willing to be lulled to sleep because of the security and ease it offers them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

However, it also holds over their heads the ideology of death, power, immortality—just as shamans and kings once did—and dominated them with it. However, how do we get rid of the power to mystify? The talents and the processes of memorization and mystification have to be exposed. Which is another way of saying that we have to work against both structural and psychological unfreedom in society. The task of science would be to expose both of these dimensions. One of the reasons for our present disillusionment with theory in the social sciences is that it has done very little in this liberating direction. Even those intelligent social scientists who attempt a necessary balance between conservative and Marxist perspective are amiss in this. We often get a vista of the future—but it is such a slow, patent, scientific future, still unrelated to the pressing problems of an insane World. All some seem to want to present us with is an indefinite program extending far into the unknown future, devoted to patient checking, refining, extending the blend of conservatism and Marxism. I am hardly saying that a general critical science of society that unites the best of both wings of thought is a present reality, and need not be delayed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

We have, as of today, a powerful critique of hero systems, of systems of death and denial and the toll that they take, It is a toll of unfulfilled life based on a continuing denial of social justice; it is a toll of internal victimage based on the inequality of social classes and the state repression of freedom; it is a toll of external victimage that helps siphon off internal social discontent and transform magically social problems into military adventures. Whatever form of government uses victimage, the use is still the same: to purify evil social arrangements, distract attention from the failure to solve internal problems. Scientists must expose these things from their own scientific forums. In science, as in authentic religion, there is no easy refuge for empty-headed patriotism, or for putting off to some future date the exposure of large-scale social lies. I do not see why conservatives and radicals could not unite on such a science, if their sentiments are where their words are. Both believe in free public information, increasing the awareness of the masses as well as their responsibility. Both wings of thought agree on limiting the authority of the leaders, exposing their talents for memorization and their shortcomings. This is, after all, the dearest and grandest feature of a democracy, that it tires to keep these critical functions alive. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The problem has always been that the leader is the one who usually is the grandest patriot, which means the one who embraces the ongoing system of death denial with the heartiest hug, the hottest tears, and the least critical distance. The leader lives with one’s head full into the clouds of the cultural symbols; one loves in an abstract World, a World detached from concrete realities of hunger, suffering, death; one’s feet are off the ground, one carries out one’s duties much like funeral directors and people who perform autopsies or executions—in a kind of emotional and psychological divorce from the realities of what one is doing. The result is that the leader is actually in a state of limited responsibility to human beings in this World—and what power one has in this state! The whole thing is lopsided and rather eerie—like compulsive neurosis of psychosis. Words, symbols, shadowboxing—no wonder so much pulsating life is so serenely ground up by the nation-states. It is all too true, alas, but we do not like in an ideal World. If we wanted to imagine such a World, give in to utopian fantasies, we already know what we would want our leaders to be like: persons who abstracted and objected least, who took each single life and its suffering full in the face as it is. Which is another way of saying that they would know the reality of death as a primary problem. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We might even let our musing go wild while we are at it, and imagine that we would choose leaders for exactly this quality; that they themselves were conscious of their own fear of life and death, and of the cultural system as a way of saying that we would want out leaders to be well-analyzed people, except that even the best analysis does not guarantee to produce this level of self-conscious, tragic sophistication. Yet, democracy does not encroach on utopia a little bit, because it already addresses itself to the problem of mystification by free flow of self-criticism. We could carry the utopian musings further and say that the gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its own system of heroic transcendence—and this is precisely what democracy is doing much of the time. This is why authoritarians always scoff at it: it seems ridiculously intent on discrediting itself. The free flow of criticism, satire, art, and science is a continuous attack on the cultural fiction—which is why totalitarians from Plato to Mao have to control these things, as has long been known. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

If we look at denouement of psychiatry and social science today, they represent a fairly thorough self-revelation of the fictional nature of human meanings—and noting as theoretically more powerfully liberating than that. Lifton has even detected self-mockery and caricature as peculiar signs of a new type of modern humans who is attempting to transcend the horror and absurdity of his cultural World. If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a World-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to humankind the reason for its self-created unhappiness and self-introduced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system which embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once it peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how people defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the World. They would argue and propagandize for the non-absoluteness of the many different hero systems in the family of nations, and make public a continuing assessment of the costs of humankind’s impossible aims and paradoxes: how a given society is trying too hard to get rid of the guilt and the terror of death by laying its trip on a neighbour. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Then people might struggle, even in anguish, to come to terms with themselves and their World. Yet I know that this is a fantasy; I can imagine how popular and influential such a body would be on the planet; it would be the perfect scapegoat for all nations. And so, like a true Enlightenment dreamer, now supposedly sobered by experience, I turn my gaze to the stars and imagine how wider visitors from some other planet would admire such a World-scientific body. However, nothing, then, changes: must we scientists still despair of the masses of people and forever turn out yearnings to the Fredericks and the Catherines—but not in outer-space garb? We have already witnessed the greatest things in our time. “And now, I, Nephi, do not speak all the words of my father. However, to be short in writing, behold, he saw others multitudes pressing forward; and they came and caught hold of the end of the rod of iron; and they did press their way forward, continually holding fast to the rod of iron, until they came forth and fell down and partook of the fruit of the tree. And he also saw other multitudes feeling their way towards that great and spacious building. And it came to pass that many were drowned in the depths of the fountain; and many were lost from his view, wandering in strange roads. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

“And great was the multitude that did enter into that strange building. And after they did enter into that building they did point the finger of scorn at me and those that were partaking of the fruit also; but we heeded them not. These are the words of my father: For as many as heeded them, had fallen away. And Laman and Lemuel partook not of the fruit, said my father. And it came to pass after my father had spoken all the words of his dream or vision, which were many, he said unto us, because of these things which he saw in a vision, he exceedingly feared for Laman and Lemuel; yea, he feared lest they should be cast off from the presence of the Lord. And he did exhort them then with all the feeling of a tender parent, that they would hearken to his words, that perhaps the Lord would be merciful to them, and not cast them off; yea, my father did preach unto them. And after he had preached unto them, and also prophesied unto them of many things, he bade them to keep the commandments of the Lord; and he did cease speaking unto them,” 1 Nephi 8.29-38. Let me move on to another area of my learnings. I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on with me. I like it when I can listen to myself. To really know what I am experiencing in the moment is by no means an easy thing, but I feel somewhat encouraged because I think that over the years I have been improving at it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

I am convinced, however, that it is a lifelong task and that none of us ever is totally able to be comfortably close to all that is going on within our own experience. In place of the term “realness” I have sometimes used the word “congruence.” By this I mean that when my experiencing of this moment is present in my awareness and when what is present in my awareness is present in my communication, then each of these three levels matches or is congruent. At such moments I am integrated or whole, I am completely in one piece. Most of the time, of course, I, like everyone else, exhibit some degree of incongruence. I have learned, however, that realness, or genuiness, or congruence—whatever term you wish to give it—is a fundamental basis for the best communication. What do I mean by being close to what is going on it me? Let me try to explain what I mean by describing what sometimes occurs in my work as a therapist. Sometimes a feeling “rises up in me” which seems to have no particular relationship to what is going on. Yet I have learned to accept and trust this feeling my awareness and to try to communicate it to my client. For example, a client is talking to me and I suddenly feel an image of one as a pleading little kind, folding one’s hands in supplication, saying, “Please let me have this, please let me have this.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

I have learned that if I can be real in the relationship with one and express this feeling that has occurred in me, it is very likely to strike some deep note in one and to advance our relationship. Let me give another example. It is often very hard for me, as for other writers, to get close to my self when I start to write. It is so easy to be distracted by the possibility of saying thing which will catch approval or will look good to colleagues or make a popular appeal. How can I listen to the things that I really want to say and write? It is difficult. Sometimes I even have to trick myself to get close to what is in me. I tell myself that I am not writing for publication; I am just writing for my own satisfaction. I write on old scraps of paper so that I do not have to reproach myself for wasting paper. I jot down feelings and ideas as they come, helter-skelter, with no attempt at coherence or organization. In this way I can sometimes get much closer to what I really am and feel and think. The writings that I have produced on this basis turn out to be ones for which I never feel apologetic and which often communicate deeply to others. So it is a very satisfying thing when I sense that I have gotten close to me, to the feelings and hidden aspects of myself that live below the surface. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

when I can dare to communicate the realness in me to another, I feel a sense of satisfaction. This is far from easy, partly because what I am experiencing keeps changing every moment. Usually there is a lag, sometimes of moments, sometimes of days, weeks, or months, between the experiencing and the communication: I experience something; I feel something, but only later do I dare communicate it, when it has become cool enough to risk sharing it with another. However, when I can communicate what is real in me at the moment that it occurs, I feel genuine, spontaneous, and alive. When I encounter realness in another person, it is a sparkling thing. Sometimes in the basic encounter groups which have been a very important part of my experience these last few years, someone says something that comes from one transparently and whole. When a person is not hiding behind a façade but is speaking from deep within oneself, it is so obvious. When this happens, I leap to meet it. I wan to encounter this real person. Sometimes the feelings thus expressed are very beneficial feelings; sometimes they are decidedly negative ones. I think of a man in a very responsible position, a scientist at the head of a large research department in a huge electronics firm. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

One day in such an encounter group, this man fond the courage to speak of his isolation. He told us that he had never had a single friend in his life; there were plenty of people whom he knew but not one he could count as a friend. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “there are only two individuals in the World with whom I have even a reasonably communicative relationship. These are my two children.” By the time he finished, he was letting loose some of the tears of sorrow for himself which I m sure he had held in for many years. However, it was the honesty and realness of his loneliness that caused every member of the group to reach out to him in some psychological sense. It was also most significant that his courage in being real enabled all of us to be more genuine in our communication, to come out from behind the facades we ordinarily use. Immediately after Paul’s declaration in 2 Corinthians 5.17, “If anyone is Christ, he is a new creation,” he said, “All this is from God” (verse 18). God has made us new creatures. God has given us the gift of sanctification, and He gives it by the same grace and at the same time as He gives us justification. One reason we do not appreciate the grace of God more is that we either do not understand or do not appreciate the radical dimension of this instantaneous act of sanctification, which God gives at salvation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Perhaps because many of us had a moral lifestyle before conversion, we find it difficult to accept Paul’s description of our attitude toward God: “The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God,” reports Romans 8.7-8. As we think back to our pre-conversion days, we do not think of our attitude as being hostile to God’s law. Mercifully receive, O Lord, the prayers of Thy Church; that all adversities and errors may be destroyed, and it may serve Thee in quiet freedom; and give Thy peace in our times, though Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, let the strong crying of Thy Church ascend to the ears of Thy loving-kindness; that receiving forgiveness of sins, it may be devout by the working of Thy grace, and tranquil under the protection of Thy power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Look mercifully, O good Shepherd, on Thy flock; and suffer not the sheep which Thou hast redeemed with precious Blood to be torn in pieces by the assaults of the devil. O God, Who hast promised that Thou wilt never be absent from Thy Church unto the end of the World, and that the gates of Hell shall never prevail against the Apostolic confessions; graciously make Thy strength perfect in out weakness, and show the efficacy of Thy Divine promises, while Thou deignest even to be present in Thy feeble ones. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

For then do we beyond doubt feel Thy presence, when Thou dispensest to each one, at all time, in fitting manner, things desirable, and by perpetual protection guardest us from the attack of all our adversaries. O Lord, I marvel that Thou shouldst become incarnate, be crucified, dead, and buried. The sepulcher calls forth my adorning wonder, for it is empty and Thou art risen; the four-fold gospel attests it, the living witnesses prove it, my heart’s experience knows it. Given me to die with Thee that I may rise to new life, for I wish to be as dead and buried to sin, to selfishness, to the World; that I might not hear the voice of the charmer, and might be delivered from his lusts. O Lord, there is much ill about me—crucify it, much flesh within me—mortify it. Purge me from selfishness, the fear of man, the love of approbation, the shame of being thought old-fashioned, the desire to be cultivated or modern. Let me reckon my old life dead because of crucifixion, and never feed it as a living thing. Grant me to stand with my dying Saviour, to be content to be rejected, to be willing to take up unpopular truths, and to hold fast despised teachings until death. Help me to be resolute and Christ-contained. Never let me wander from the path of obedience to Thy will. Strengthen me for the battles ahead. Give me courage for all the trials, and grace for all the joys. Help me to be a holy, happy person, free from every wrong desire, from everything contrary to Thy mind. Grant me more and more of the resurrection life; may it rule me, may I walk in its power, and be strengthened through its influence. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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