Twenty-first century man is living in one of the World’s most challenging periods, unprecedented in history. People are hollering about enforcing gun control, but then have allowed 14 million people illegal immigrant into this country without background checks. One cannot even say that they are “undocumented” because some do have fake identity documents or stolen identities. These days people can rent or buy guns on the underground market. While allowing states to legalize marijuana, and considering it federally, Americans seem to be unaware that in 2021, approximately 107,000 people died from drug overdose. In 2023, approximately 46,000 people died from gun shot wounds. How can we restrict the rights of Americans to bear arms, which they may need to protect themselves, but allow people into this country that we know nothing about? Already, county, city, state, and federal budgets are insufficient, the country is running a historic deficit, record numbers of people are homeless, people are underpaid, there is soaring inflation, record high home prices and rents, and these refugees are costing taxpayers $20 billion. As anyone can see, the country is in a state of crisis. Furthermore, if a group of people carried out 911, think about the risk we are putting the nation in by allowing 14 million people to invade the county without knowing anything about them. Whatever it is, White Guilt, greed, racism, or malicious intentions, America need come to their senses and understand we are facing a greater risk than we ever have in the past. This is a dynamic period when man has almost unlimited choices for good and evil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

In all civilizations of the World our modern epoch, in both socialistic and capitalistic societies, we are face with the compelling need to understand more clearly the forces that dominate our World and to modify our attitudes and behaviour accordingly. If our best minds are persuaded and assembled to concentrate on the nature of this new epoch in evolutionary and moral history, this it the only way it will happen. For we are confronted with a very basic change. Man has intervened in the evolutionary process, and he must better appreciate this fact with its influence on his life and work, and then try to develop the wisdom to direct the process, to recognize the mutable and the immutable elements in his moral nature and the relationship between freedom and order. Science now permits us to say that “objective” nature, the World which alone is “real” to us as the one in which we all, scientists included, are born, love, hate, work, reproduce and die, is the World given us by our senses and our minds—a World in which the Sun crosses the Sky from East to West, a World of three-dimensional space, a World of values which we, and we alone, must make. It is true that scientific knowledge about macroscopic or subatomic events may enable us to perform many acts we were unable to perform before. However, it is as inhabitants of this human World that we perform them and must finally recognize that there is a certain kind of scientific “objectivity” that can lead us to know everything but to understand nothing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Man sees in two ways: with his physical eyes, in an empirical sensing or seeing by direct observation, and also by an indirect envisaging. He possesses in addition to his two sensing eyes a single, image-making, spiritual and intellectual Eye. And it is the in-sight of this inner Eye that purifies and makes sacred our understanding of the nature of things; for that which was shut fast has been opened by the command of the inner Eye. And we become aware that to believe is to see. The creator in any realm must surrender himself to a passionate pursuit of his labours, guided by deep personal intimations of an as yet undiscovered reality. We must learn to unlock a consciousness that at first sight may seem to be remote but is proved on acquaintance to be surprisingly immediate, since it stems from the need to reconcile the life of action with the life of contemplation, of practice with principle, of thought with feeling, of knowing with being. For the whole meaning of self lies within the observer, and its shadow is cast naturally on the object observer. The divorce of man from his work, the division of man into an eternal and temporal half, results in an estrangement of man from his creative source, and ultimately from his fellows and from himself. If it does not converge in the person, the Universe itself is a vast entity where man will be lost; for material forces or energies, or impersonal ideals, or scientifically objectified learning are meaningless without their relevance for human life and their power to disclose, even in the dark tendencies of man’s nature, a low of transcending man’s arbitrariness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

For the personal is a far higher category than the abstract universal. Personality itself is an emotional, not an intellectual, experience; and the greatest achievement of knowledge is to combine the personal within a larger unity, just as in the higher stages of development the parts that make up the whole acquire greater and greater independence and individuality within the context of the whole. Reality itself is the harmony which gives to the component particulars of a thing the equilibrium of the whole. And whole physical observations are ordered with direct references to the experimental conditions, we have in sensate experience to do with separate observations whose correlation can only be indicated by their belonging to the wholeness of mind. Man’s relationship with his creativity demands a clarification that can widen and deepen his understanding of the nature of reality. Work is made for man, not man for work. There is a sacramenta character of work, which is more easily achieved when the principal objects of our attention have taken on a symbolic form that is generally recognized and accepted; and this suggests a law in the relationship of a person and his chosen discipline: that only when the spiritual, the creative, life is strong enough to insist on some expression through symbols is it valuable. For no work can be based on material, technological, historical, or physical aspirations alone. The human race is not entering upon a new phase of evolutionary consciousness and progress, a phase in which, impelled by the forces of evolution itself, it must converge upon itself and convert itself into one single human organism infused by a reconciliation of knowing and being in their inner unity and destined to make a qualitative leap into a higher form of consciousness as we know it, or otherwise destroy itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

For the entire Universe is one vast field, potential for incarnation and achieving incandescence here and there of reason and spirit. And in the whole World of quality with which by the nature of our minds we necessarily make contact, we here and there apprehend pre-eminent value. If we recognize that we are unable to focus our attention on the particulars of a whole without diminishing our comprehension of the whole, and of course, conversely, we can focus on the whole only by diminishing our comprehension of the particulars which constitute the whole, only then can this be achieved. The kind of knowledge afforded by mathematical physics ever since the seventeenth century has come more and more to furnish mankind with an ideal for all knowledge. This error about the nature of knowledge needs to be exposed. For knowledge is a process, not a product and the results of scientific investigation do not carry with them self-evident implications. There are now, however, signs of new centers of resistance among men everywhere in almost all realms of knowledge. Many share the conviction that a deep-seated moral and philosophical reform is needed concerning our understanding of the nature of man and the nature of knowledge in relation to the work man is performing, in relation to his credo and his life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

We are at a crossroads: one road leads to a completely mechanized society with man as a helpless cog in the machine—if not to destruction by a thermonuclear war; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope—to a society that puts technique in the service of man’s well-being. We can find the necessary new solutions with the help of reason and passionate love for life, and not through irrationality and hate. For many of the young generation who belittle the value of traditional thought, keep in mind the most radical development must have its continuity with the past; we cannot progress by throwing away the best achievements of the human mind—and to be young is not enough. “For him that is joined to all the living, there is hope,” reports Ecclesiastes 9.4. A specter is stalking in our midst whom only a few see with clarity. It is not the old ghost of communism or fascism. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society, devoted to maximal material output and consumption, directed by computers; and in this social process, man himself is being transformed into a pater of the total machine, well fed and entertained, yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling. With the victory of the new society, individualism and privacy will have disappeared; feelings toward others will be engineered by psychological conditioning and other devices, or drugs, which also serve a new kind of introspective experience. In the technetronic society, the trend seems to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic an attractive personality effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Perhaps its most ominous aspect at present is that we seem to lose control over our own system. We execute the decisions which our computer calculations make for us. We as human beings have no aims except producing and consuming more and more. We will nothing, nor do we not-will anything. We are threatened with extinction by nuclear weapons and drugs and with inner deadness by the passiveness which our exclusion from responsible decision making engenders. How did it happen? How did man, at the very height of this victory over nature, become the prisoner of his own creation and in serious danger of destroying himself? In the search for scientific truth, man came across knowledge that he could use for the domination of nature. He had tremendous success. However, in the one-sided emphasis on technique and material consumption, man lost touch with himself, with life. Having lost religious faith and the humanistic values bound up with it, he concentrated on technical and material values and lost the capacity for deep emotional experiences, for the joy of sadness that accompany them. The machine he built became so powerful that it developed its own program, which now determines man’s own thinking. At the moment, one of the gravest symptoms of our system is the fact that our economy rests upon drugs and on the principle of maximal consumption. We have a well-functioning economic system under the condition that we are producing goods which threaten us with physical destruction, that we transform the individual into a total passive consumer and thus deaden him, and that we have created a bureaucracy which makes the individual feel impotent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Are we confronted with a tragic, insolvable dilemma? Must we produce sick people in order to have a healthy economy, or can we use our material resources, our inventions, our computers to serve the ends of man? Must individuals be passive and dependent in order to have strong and well-functioning organizations? Among those who recognize the revolutionary and drastic change in human life which the “megamachine” could bring about are the writers who say that the new society is unavoidable, and hence that there is no point in arguing about its merits. At the same time, they are sympathetic to the new society, although they express slight misgivings about what it might do to man as we know him. There is a dreadful lack of humanness. If an increasing number of people become fully aware of the threat the technological World poses to man’s personal and spiritual life, if they determine to asset their freedom by upsetting the course of this evolution, the dehumanized society may not be the victor. The “megamachine” started with its first manifestations in Egyptian and Babylonian societies. If technology is permitted to follow its own logic, it will become a cancerlike growth, eventually threatening the structured system of individual and social life. There is also a greater possibility of the restoring of the social system to man’s control. If one connects the system “Man” with the whole system, the present social system can be understood a great deal better. Human nature is not an abstraction nor an infinitely malleable and hence dynamically negligible system. It has its own specific qualities, laws, and alternatives. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The study of the system Man permits us to see what certain factors in the socioeconomic system do to man, how disturbances in the system of man produce imbalances in the whole social system. By introducing the human factor into the analysis of the whole system, we are better prepared to understand its dysfunctioning and to define norms which relate the healthy economic functioning of the social system to the optimal well-being of the people who participate in it. All this is valid, of course, only if there is agreement that maximal development of the human system in terms of its own structure—that is to say, human well-being—is the overriding goal. The increasing dissatisfaction with our present way of life, its passiveness and silent boredom, its lack of privacy and its depersonalization, and the longing for a joyful, meaningful existence, which answers those specific needs of man which he has developed in the last few thousand years of his history and which make him different from the animal as well as from the computer. This tendency is all the stronger because the affluent part of the population has already tasted full material satisfaction and has found out that the consumer’s paradise does not deliver the happiness it promised. (The less affluent, of course, have not yet had any chance to find out, except by watching the lack of joy of those who “have everything a man could want.” Ideologies and concepts have lost much of their attraction; traditional clichés like “right” and “left” or “communism” and “capitalism” have lost their meaning. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

People seek a new orientation, a new philosophy, one which is centered on the priorities of life—physically and spiritually—and not on the priorities of death. There is a growing polarization occurring in the United States of America and the whole World: There are those who are attracted to force, “law and order,” bureaucratic methods, and eventually to non-life, and those with a deep longing for life, for new attitudes rather than ready-made schemes and blueprints. This new front movement which combines the wish for profound changes in our economic and social practice with changes in our psychic and spiritual approach to life. In its most general form, its aim is the activation of the individual, the restoration of man’s control over the social system, the humanization of technology. It is a movement in the name of life, and it has such a broad and common base because the threat to life is today a threat not to one class, to one nation, but a threat to all. Today, a widespread hopelessness exists with regard to the possibility of changing the course we have taken. This hopelessness is mainly unconscious, while consciously people are “optimistic” and hope for further “progress.” If Spinoza’s work is a treatise aiming at the “salvation” of the individual (salvation meaning the conquest of freedom by awareness and labour), Marx’s intent is also the salvation of the individual. However, while Spinoza deals with individual irrationality, Marx extends the concept. He sees that the irrationality of the individual is caused by the irrationality of society in which he lives, and that this irrationality itself is the result of the planlessness and the contradiction inherent in the economic and social reality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Marx’s aim, like Spinoza’s, is the free and independent man, but in order to achieve this freedom man must become aware of those forces which act behind his back and determine him. Emancipation is the result of awareness and effort. More specifically, Marx, believing that the working class was the historical agent for universal human liberation, believed that class-consciousness and struggle were the necessary conditions for man’s emancipation. Like Spinoza, Marx is a determinist in the sense of saying: If you remain blind and do not make the utmost efforts, you will lose your freedom. However, he, like Spinoza, is not only a man who wants to interpret; he is a man who wants to change—hence his whole work is that attempt t teach man how to become free by awareness and effort. Marx never said, as is often assumed, that he predicted historical events which would necessarily occur. He was always an alternativist. If he is aware of the forces operating behind his back, if he makes the tremendous effort to win his freedom, man can break the chains. In this century man has the alternative of choosing between socialism and barbarism. Dr. Freud, the determinist, was also a man who wanted to transform: he wanted to change neurosis into health, to substitute the dominance of the Ego for that of the Id. What else is neurosis—of whatever kind—but man’s loss of freedom to act rationally? What else is mental health but man’s capacity to act according to his true interest. Dr. Freud, like Spinoza, and Marx, saw to what degree man is determined. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

However, Dr. Freud also recognized that the compulsion to act in certain irrational and thus destructive ways can be changed—by self-awareness and by effort. Hence his work is the attempt to devise a method of curing neurosis by self-awareness and the motto of his therapy is: “The truth shall make you free.” Several main concepts are common to all three thinkers: Man’s actions are determined by previous causes, but he can liberate himself from the power of these causes by awareness and effort. Theory and practice cannot be separated. In order to achieve “salvation,” or freedom, one must know, one must have the right “theory.” However, one cannot know unless one acts and struggles. Dr. Freud, for instance, believed it to be necessary that the patient make an economic sacrifice by paying for his treatment, and the sacrifice of frustration by not acting out his irrational fantasies in order to achieve a cure. It was precisely the great discovery of all three thinkers that theory and practice, interpretation and change are inseparable. While they were determinists in the sense that man can lose the battle for independence and freedom, they were essentially alternativists: they taught that man can choose between certain ascertainable possibilities and that it depends on man which of these alternatives will occur; it depends on him as long as he has not yet lost his freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Thus Spinoza did not believe that every man would achieve salvation, Marx did not believe that socialism had to win, nor did Dr. Freud believe that every neurosis could be cured by his method. In fact, all three men were skeptics and simultaneously me of deep faith. For them freedom was more than acting in the awareness of necessity; it was man’s great chance to choose the good as against the evil—it was a chance of choosing between real possibilities on the basis of awareness and effort. Their position was neither determinism nor indeterminism; it was a position of realistic, critical humanism. The position of alternativism described here is essentially that of the Hebrew Bible. God does not interfere in man’s history by changing his heart. He sends his messengers, the prophets, with a threefold mission: to show man certain goals, to show him the consequences of his choices, and to make protest against the wrong decision. It is up to man to make his choice; nobody, not even God, can “save” him. The clearest expression of this principle is expressed in God’s answer to Samuel when the Hebrew wanted a king: “Now therefore hearken unto their voice; howbeit ye protest solemnly unto them, and show them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.” After Samuel has given them a drastic description of Eastern despotism, and the Hebrews still want a king, God says: “Hearken to their voice and make them a king,” reports 1 Samuel 8.9, 22. The same spirit of alternativism is expressed in the sentence: “I put before your today a blessing and curse, life and death. And you choose life.” Man can choose. God cannot save him; al God can do is to confront him with the basic alternatives, life, and death—and encourage him to choose life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

We have examined man’s heart, its inclination for good and evil. Have we reached ground that is more solid than the vision we previously had? In some ways this work might be compared with that of the detective in mystery stories. It is worth emphasizing, however, that whereas the detective wants to discover the criminal the analyst does not want to find out what is bad in the patient, but attempts to understand him as a whole, good and bad. Also, he deals not with several people, all under suspicion, but with a multitude of driving forces in one person, all under suspicion not of being bad but of being disturbing. Through concentrated and intelligent observation of every detail he gathers clues, sees a possible connection here and there, and forms a tentative picture; he is not too easily convinced of his solution, but tests it over and over again to see whether it really embraces all factors. In mystery stories there will be some people working with the detective, some only apparently doing so and secretly obstructing his work, some definitely wanting to hide and becoming aggressive if they feel threatened. Similarly, in analysis part of the patient co-operates—this is an indispensable condition—another part expects the analyst to do all the work and still another use all its energies to hide or mislead and become panicky and hostile when threatened with discovery. It is mainly from the patient’s free associations that the analyst derives his understanding of unconscious motivations and reactions. The patient is not usually aware of the implications of what he presents. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Therefore the analyst, in order to form a coherent picture out of the multitude of discrepant elements presented to him, must not only listen to the manifest content but also try to understand what the patient really wants to express. He tries to grasp the red thread that passes through the apparently amorphous mass of material. If too many unknown quantities are involved, he sometimes fails in this endeavour. Sometimes the context also speaks for itself. To further highlight this illustration, a patient tells me that he had a bad night and that he feels more depressed than ever. His secretary has had an attack of influenza, and this not only disturbs his business arrangements but also upsets him because of his fear of infection. He talks then about the frightful injustice done to small European countries. Then he thinks of a physician who annoyed him by failing to give him clear information about the contents of a drug. Then a tailor comes up in his mind who had not delivered a coat as promised. The main theme is annoyance at untoward events. The egocentric nature of the grievances is shown by his enumerating the secretary’s illness in one line with the unreliability of the tailor, as if both were personal offenses against him. The fact that the secretary’s flu has rearoused his fear of infection does not lead him to think that he should try to overcome this fear. He expects, instead, that the World should be so arranged as not to arouse his fears. The World should attend to his needs. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Here the theme of justice comes in: it is unfair that others do not heed his expectations. Since he is afraid of infection nobody in his environment should all ill. Thus others become responsible for his difficulties. He is as helpless against influences as small European countries are against invasion (actually he is helpless in the clutches of his own expectations). The association concerning the doctor also acquires a special meaning in this contest. It, too, implies expectations not complied with and in addition it refers to his grievance against me for not offering him a clear solution of his problems, instead of groping around and expecting his co-operative activity. Patients who are able to recall the origins of a symptom and to give uninhibited expression to the emotions attendant upon the situation in which it evolved were subsequently relieved symptomatically and generally improved in their overall adjustment. This function of emotional purging or catharsis came gradually to be perceived as but one phase of a more general process in which the patient, under the accepting, encouraging, and supportive friendship of the therapist, was enabled to give expression to his conflicts, his anxiety, his guilts, his resentments, to relieve his previously bottled-up feelings without fear of rejection or misunderstanding. To this basic process whereby the suffering supplicant is helped to achieve release from the tormenting burden of his previously suppressed (or repressed) emotions, from the personal isolation stemming from his previously unshared feelings, is given the name ventilation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Catharsis and ventilation are the naturally inevitable first steps in any truly intimate personal relationship, requiring nothing more than an accepting (and probably understanding) auditor. It is difficult to imagine any formal psychotherapy which could either in theory or expert practice deliberately prevent the occurrence of such ventilation. (It is possible that full ventilation may be prevented or delayed by the inexperienced, insensitive, or inept therapist who is overly active and insufficiently appreciative of the self-curative forces in nature.) And ventilation and catharsis as general factors may prove to account for a sizable portion of the total therapeutic impact of all psychotherapies. Knowing when we need to trust our instincts and go with our gut is an essential life skill. Many people play on the emotions of others. It is easy to do to some, and harder to impossible to do to others. That is because some people are more in tune than others. It does not make them any smarter, just more wary of individuals and their motives. If a little boy came crying to you, needing your help to get his poor baby calf that was stuck in the swimming pool, you would probably believe him and rush to help. In this situation, relaying on your emotions seems to be the right thing to do. However, if it was not a little boy, it was a grown man who came to you, asking the same thing, you would most likely be cautious and unwilling to help him, assuming that he had other intentions, perhaps even evil ones. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Not all people react the same way. Especially if he was very convincing, there are some who might still feel sympathy and empathy for the man. Society has taught us to help others. It is a natural human reaction to tend to those who are crying or upset. We want to fix it, most o us want to help. However, what happens when someone takes advantage of that part of us? Can we do anything to change the outcome? The spirit acquires the full authority given it by the Creator over the powers of the soul, and through the soul over the body. The conscious personal life is once more completely under the authority of the spirit. The dependency upon God, which man sough to break off in his mania for exalting himself by setting his reason, his emotions, or the flesh upon the throne, is restored again. The Spirit of God can exercise once more His controlling and quickening power. The deeds of the flesh are put to death by the Spirit, the powers and the gifts of the Spirit developed, the man becomes spiritual, full of Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Christ, the bringer of the New Being. When considering the human situation, it is quite convincing that man’s problems are basically ontological. There is something unassailable in his potions, for ontology, by definition, deals with ultimates. Although one may flee ontology, one can never quite escae it, since everyone possess some kind of ontology, albeit in an inchoate and disguised form. However, the fact must be faced that we live in a non-metaphysical age, and it may be unrealistic to describe man’s existential situation in ontological terms. To do so seems even to violate the method of correlation, for the theological answers are then clothed in the ontological forms so unappealing to modern man. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Charity is the pure love of Chrit. It is the love that Jesus as the Christ has for the children of men and that children of men should have for one another. It is the highest, noblest, and strongest kind of love and the most joyous to the soul. Charity is “the pure love of Christ,” or “everlasting love.” The prophet Mormon taught: “Charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in the iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” Jesus as the Christ is the perfect example of charity. In His mortal ministry, He always went about doing good, teaching the gospel and showing tender compassion for the less affluent, afflicted, and distressed. His crowning expression of charity was His infinite Atonement. He said, “Greater love hath no man, than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This was the greatest act of long-suffering, kindness, and selflessness that we will ever know. The Saviour wants all people to receive His love and to share it with others. He declared to His disciples: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. When you are at your worst and life has you down, when you have something horrible going on, whether it is a fire, medical problem, or some other type of disaster, the Sacramento Fire Department will be there for you and help you every time! They will do everything they can to make thing better again. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Depart. Solving problems can get them into trouble, even to the point at which they may lose a firefighter. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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