
I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better. Rage and envy and the feelings of persecution which go with humanity impairs the ability to be fully human. Feeling persecuted by others is not very compatible with find them wonderful and taking easy uncomplicated pleasure in the company. People who have been insufficiently mirrored, admired, and confirmed may go in for rather idealized hierarchical leadership-structures and hero-worship. Conversely, people who had lot of confirmation but lacked the opportunity to create and copy admired figures are more liable to sit around like garden gnomes being agreeable and democratic and lovable and cosy—even while Rome burns. The grandiose self and the wretched self correspond rather closely. A split of this kind is also more likely when an individual discovers too abruptly and unexpectedly the limitations to which one is subject. For instance, if one has been your source of support beyond an appropriate time, this in turn is more likely because an attachment figure sees you as an extension of one’s own self-esteem and one’s own grandiose phantasies, so that there is a merging beyond the time when this was necessitated by the individual’s weakness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

When people are too supportive of an individual, it is often because they are anxious phobic caregivers also, and this obstructs the individual’s normal development, which would otherwise has taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development, which would otherwise have taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development of identification with an admired figure who does things. We then get the kind of person who, smugly or desperately, conveys the impression “I am wonderful because I am so lovable.” Such individuals may have had the opportunity for gradually developing the skills needed for a more independent exercise of their functions. So, the individual will discover its lack of power. One will discover the extent to which one is defenceless and subject to intrusion, and that will be a terrible blow. Just going off to school or work for some people in the morning can be a terrible experience because they may not yet be psychologically individuated. Splits are due to inadequate recognition and confirmation: inadequate mirroring. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Splits are due to things going wrong in the development of appropriate integrations and individuations. One has not been appreciated in the right way for what one is and what one can become. One’s grand and one’s wretched self are isolated from one another. Repression is different. It puts the lid on certain experiences and feelings. Repression creates a horizontal split. This is a later development, when a more realistic self is beginning to be formed. Neither wretched nor grandiose self are very realistic: elements of both will be integrated in more realistic self-structures when development does as it should. With a more realistic self, the individual becomes able to take pride and pleasure in what one is and what one can do. This process is called the natural self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grans, when its natural excitement and self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grand, when one’s natural excitement and self-assertion are met with disapproval, the individual feels bad, and in some circumstances one may become anxious whenever one thinks of doing anything unbidden that might be fun or feel good. This is a repressed, guilty individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In some strata of British life, and probably elsewhere, people are shamed as a matter of routine at the very moments when they feel they have done something good or done something well—jokingly, of course, so that the ill-will can be disowned. There appears to be a determination that no one shall feel “bigheaded” or forget for a moment that “if there is laughter in the morning, there will be tears before bedtime.” Even the very possibility of someone achieving something has to be counteracted by “taking them down a peg or two.” No wonder that individuals brought up in this atmosphere avoid being noticed as far as they can, and are quietly angry: “sullen.” Whereas splitting has to do with defects in mirroring, repression has more to do with identification with admired figures, and especially with the idealization of rather ungiving and unforgiving figures—the dour, the jealous, the exhausted. Such people can confirm the fears and phantasies of weakness and inadequacy which the individual has necessarily accumulated already. A strong sense of self-esteem brings not only a sense of well-being, but also generally improved functioning. As, though the right therapeutic approach, patients feel better about themselves, their capacity for work improves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Conversely, many of the most severe work-disturbances are due to a decline in self-esteem and subsequent fear of fragmentation. People will often attempt to counteract painful feelings of unreality or fragmentation by forcing themselves into activities, ranging from the physical (in sports) to overwork. Their work (or their sport) is made the isolated activity of an isolated self-structure, a pocket lacking pleasant associated connections. Such people engage in their activities in an “automatic” way, passively, without pleasure or initiative, simply responding to cues or demands. If things go well in therapy, individuals will one day report that their work has changed, that they are now enjoying it, that they now have the choice of whether to work or not, that they now undertake it on their own initiative rather than by passive obedience. Last but not least, they find that their approach has now some originality rather than being humdrum and routine. A living self in depth has become the organizing center of the ego’s activities. Takes which we set ourselves, and to which we feel committed, can play an important role in giving meaning and validity to what might otherwise be a rather more fragile personality-structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

A skill is a good example of a compensatory structure. I may not be lovable or interesting to people, but I know I can design the best residential architecture than anyone in my town, or come first in exams, or tell fascinating stories about history, or impress others with my charm. Compensatory developments add to self-respect by achievements which are generally respected, and other more defensive manoeuvres which can do no more than serve to hide the pain suffered through lack of self-respect: unrealistic values, hostile phantasies, perversions. Clearly this is a tricky area in which to make pronouncements, since it depends so much on what is admired in the culture. To make yourself the most outstanding competitor would normally be seen as compensatory in our culture, but it might be seen as a defensive perverted individualism in a more collectively minded culture. If one is not careful, however, compensatory methods can lead to a “False Self.” It is a loss, and a grave one, to let oneself remain torpid to intuitive feeling so much of the time, while alert and alive to every lesser and lower feeling. There are times, however, when, in a hard problem, reason will come into conflict with intuition but when the later is so overwhelmingly strong that it seems one must perforce yield to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

In the times when these are difficult, we have to do what it takes to survive. Time alone can show the truth of such a matter. Let one therefore not fall into the peril of strict ideas about it. Let one rather withhold judgment and await its issue patiently. Intuition does not always flash suddenly out of the depths of the mind into consciousness: quite often if forms itself very slowly over a period of hours, days, or even weeks. Who hears this quiet whisper of intuition? Who, hearing, obeys? Not only is it most unnoticed but its guidance is also unsought; humans prefer and follow, the ego’s direction. It begins as an uncertain and intermittent feeling: it ends as a definite and persistent intuition. If humans followed their intuition more there would be fewer tragedies that could have been prevented or regrets that could have been avoided. The student should make one’s own research and observation on the need of accepting first intuitive impressions and being the best guidance. The undegraded feeling which first comes when an object, a person, or an event confronts one is mostly the correct intuition about it. However, it must be caught on the wing or it will be gone. If we understood this capacity to receive first impressions better, we should value them accordingly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The subtlety and depth of one’s intuitions will increase with quickness, readiness, and obedience of one’s response to them. If they are to remain and not vanish away, intuition must be caught quickly and inspiration must be followed up at once. If we respectfully meet each intuitive feeling and give it our trusting collaboration, it will little by little become a frequent visitor. First, we have to become willing to receive these divine intuitions. These intuitive feelings do not respond to direct frontal demands for their appearance. They must be gently coaxed out of their deeper levels where they reside, quietly lured out of their shy seclusion. To open ourselves and receive an intuition we must surrender the ego and submit the intellect to it. If one is to interpret it aright and not miss its importance, one should let oneself go when one feels this inner prompting. Let it absorb one’s being, draw one inwards to a deepening sense of itself. The deeper mind is so close to the source of our karma that we may at times get its right guidance not only intuitively from within but also circumstantially from without. The interval between the coming and the going of an intuitive thought is so short that one must immediately and alertly respond to it. If one misses it, one will find that the mind can go back to it only with difficulty and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

We can receive a new truth more easily in the mind’s quietude than in the mind’s agitation. When thinking is stilled, intuiting begins. Such internal silence is not useless idleness, it is creative experience. God may use some event, some person, or some book as a messenger to Him. It may make any new circumstance act in the same way. However, one must have the capacity to recognize what is happening and the willingness to receive the message. To let the intuitive feelings come through requires an inner passivity which meditation fosters but which extroversion inhibits. Submit yourself as an empty vessel to be filled with the intuitive leading of God. Do not stop short of this goal, do not be satisfied with a half-and-half sort of life. We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Love between the father and son, is a symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, want him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say it, he could mean nothing by saying, “I love my son but do not care how great a blackguard he is provided he has a good time.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The Church is the Lord’s bride whom he so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasize is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere “kindness” which tolerates anything expect suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with another human being, do we crease to care whether she or he is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does anyone regard it as a sign of love in another human being that one neither knows nor cares how he or she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when one’s beauty or handsomeness is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; one’s feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Of all powers one forgives most, but one condones least: one is pleased with little, but demands all. When Christianity says that God loves humans, it means that God loves human: not that He has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the lord of terrible aspect, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of one’s guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the Worlds, persistent and the artist’s love for one’s work and despotic as a human’s love for one’s garden, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between intimate partners. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. However, the fact seems unquestionable. The Impassible speaks as if it suffered passion, and that which contains in Itself the cause of its own and all other bliss talks as though it could be in want and yearning. The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love,” and look on things as if human are the center of them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Humans are not the center. God does not exist for the sake of humans. Humans do not exist for their own sake. “Thou has crated all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created,” reports Revelation 4.11. We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest well pleased. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us God must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that God could reconcile Himself to our present impurities—no more than the beggar maid could wish the King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love humans, could wish that humans were such as to tolerate one’s house the snapping, verminous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our “happiness” is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The body of believers called the church is to grow from the inside out in response to the Spirit. Built that way, the church prevails against anything. The church comes together on Saturday or Sunday mornings principally to be prepared to carry out its ministry the rest of the week in every walk of life. And the church must equip the humans to take the church into the World. The believer’s ministry is being Christ’s person right where one is, in the marketplace or the home, every moment of every day. This is part of the everyday business of holiness. This is the very nature of loving God. Therefore spiritual discipline is very important. We must practice fervent prayer and serious study of God’s Word. This is the life-or-death principle, churches that exercise spiritual discipline can be mightily used. The great revivals have been born in times when Christians were intent on prayer. The evidence also makes clear that revivals are not confined geographically. For the church of Jesus Christ is not confined to one area. It is one church, one body, one holy nation transcending human’s arbitrary geographic and political boundaries. As one holy nation, we must break free of any provincialism and work for unity in Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In my travels as a believer among fellow believers of other races and nationalities, the Lord has given me some of His richest fellowship in those very countries. The Holy Spirit can break down every barrier. However, the requirement for individual cells within God’s holy nation goes far beyond sharing financial resources; the church is called to give itself, to share in the hunger and pain of those in need. Jesus Himself shared the pain of the less affluent; He suffered for the entire World. As God’s visible presence in the World today, should not His people also participate in the suffering of the World? Most empathically, yes. Not until we go where need is and share in the suffering of the less affluent, alienated, isolated, and downtrodden will the holy nation of God’s people also become the loving nation. With the methods employed hitherto we have not succeeded in Christianizing the soul to the point where even the most elementary demands of Christian ethics can exert any decisive influence on the main concerns of the Christian European and American. The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor and naked heathen, but the spiritual who populate the Old World and the New World have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. If it is to meet its high educative task, Christianity must indeed begin again from the beginning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The human who does not know this from one’s own experience may be a most learned theologian, but one has no idea of religion and still less of education. Yet when I point out that the soul possesses by nature a religious function, and when I stipulate that it is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of God-image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind, then it is precisely the theologian who seizes me by the arm and accuses me of “psyhchologims.” However, were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul (quite apart from the holy ghost who is also there), psychology would interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a miserable vapour. I know, however, from hundredfold experience that it is nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the equivalents of everything that has been formulated in stick doctrines and a good deal more, which is just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold the light. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The beholding of the light requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision. I have been accused of “deifying the soul.” Not I but God Himself has defied it! I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturaliter religiosa, id est, possess a religious function. I did not invent or insinuate this function, it produces itself of it own accord without being prompted thereto by any opinions or suggestions of mine. With a truly tragic delusion these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images are lying dormant in their own unconscious. In order to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way for the faculty of seeing. How this is to be done without psychology, that is, without making contact with the psyche, is frankly beyond my comprehension. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Another equally serious misunderstanding lies in imputing to psychology the wish to be a new and possibly heretical doctrine. If a visually impaired man can gradually be helped to see it is not to be expected that one will at once discern new truths with an eagle eye. If he sees anything at all, one must be glad, and if he begins to understand what he is seeing, that is a blessing. Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths, when even the existing teachings have not yet been perceived and understood. In religious matters it is a well-known fact that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly, for it is in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed is first revealed as a relationship or correspondence like that of sponsus and sponsa. Accordingly when I says as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. The word “type” is, as we know, derived from “blow” or “imprint”; thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. Psychology as the science of the soul has to confine itself to its subject and guard against overstepping its proper boundaries by metaphysical assertions or other professions of faith. Should it set up a God, even as a hypothetical cause, it would have implicitly claimed the possibility of proving God, thus exceeding its competence in an absolutely illegitimate way. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Science can only be science; there is no “scientific” professions of faith and similar contradictiones in adiecto. We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a “God-image.” Nothing positive or negative has thereby been asserted about the possible existence of God, and more than the archetype of the “hero” posits the actual existence of a hero. Now if my psychological researches has demonstrated the existence of certain psyche types and their correspondence with well-known religious ideas, then we have opened up a possible approach to those experienceable contents which manifestly and undeniably form the empirical foundations of all religious experience. The religious-minded human is free to accept whatever metaphysical explanations one pleases about the origin of these images; not so the intellect, which must keep strictly to the principles of scientific interpretation and avoid trespassing beyond the bounds of what can be known. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Nobody can prevent the believer from accepting God, Purusha, the Atman, or Tao as the Prime Cause and thus putting an end to the fundamental disquiet of humans. The scientist is a scrupulous worker; one cannot take Heaven by storm. Should one allow oneself to be seduced into such an extravagance one would be sawing of the branch on which one sits. God, please open the way for me. God, please remove my obstacles. God, please carry me on your back, bringing me through difficulties to success. Heavenly God, please rain your blessings down on your people, like milk pouring from above. Unto Thee we offer blessings and thanksgiving from this time forth and forevermore. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, exalted in praises, God of thanksgiving, Lord of wonders, who takest delight in songs and psalms, Thou God and King, the life of the Universe. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, son; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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