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May Our Hearts Overflow with Gratitude and Our Strengths be Preserved in our Heritage and Lives

We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not imagine it. Human vitality is as great as their intentionality: they are interdependent. This makes mortals the most vital of all beings. They can transcend any given situation in any direction and this possibility drive one to create beyond oneself. Freedom is the recognition of necessity. Humans are distinguished by their capacity to know that one is determined, and to choose one’s relationship to what determines him or her. One can and must, unless one abdicated one’s own consciousness, choose how one will relate to necessity, such as death, old age, limitations of intelligence, and the conditioning inescapable in one’s own background. Will one accept this necessity, deny it, fight it, affirm it, consent to it? All these words have an element of volition in them. And it should, by now, be clear that mortals do not simply stand outside in their subjectivity, like a critic at the theater, and look at necessity and decide what one thinks of it. We can face fate directly, know it, dare it, toy with it, challenge it, quarrel with it—and love it. And though it is arrogance to say we are the masters of our fate, we are saved from the need to e the victims of it. We are indeed co-creators of our fate. We are involved in these relationships of pleasure, love, beauty, trust. Therefore, anyone has the possibility of changing one’s own behavior to make them more possible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

 Psychoanalysis requires that we should not rest with intentions, or conscious rationalizations, but must push on to intentionality. Our consciousness can never again be the simple one, based on the belief that because we think something consciously, it is necessarily true. Consciousness is an immediate experience, but its meaning must be mediated by language, science, poetry, religion, and all other aspects of the bridges of mortal’s symbolism. The huge World that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. However, the deepest question that ever asked admits of no reply but the dump turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, “Yes, I will even have it so!” The World thus finds in the heroic mortal its worthy match and mate; and the effort which one is able to put forth to hold oneself erect and keep one’s heart unshaken is the direct measure of one’s worth and function in the journey of human life. One can stand this Universe. One can still find zest in it, not by ostrich-like forgetfulness but by pure inward willingness to face the World [despite all the] deterrent objects there. “Will you or will you not have it so?” we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

What wonder that those dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the World! In nonalienated activity, I experience myself as the subject of my activity. Nonalienated activity is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining related to something, of producing something and remaining related to what I produce. This also implies that my activity and the result of my activity are one. I call this nonalienated activity productive activity. Productiveness is a character orientation all human beings are capable of, to the extent that they are not emotionally crippled. Productive persons animate whatever they touch. They give birth to their own faculties and bring life to other persons and to things. Our minds acts at time and at times suffers: in so far as it has adequate ideas, it necessarily acts: and in so far as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily suffers. Freedom is mortal’s capacity to take a hand in one’s own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. Freedom is the other side of consciousness of self: if we were not able to be aware of ourselves, we would be pushed along by instinct or the automatic march of history, like bees or mastodons. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

However, by our power to be conscious of ourselves, we can call to mind how we acted yesterday or last month, and by learning from these actions we can influence, even if so little, how we act today. And we can picture in imagination some situation tomorrow—say a dinner date, or an appointment for a job, or a Board of Directors meeting—and by turning over in fantasy different alternative for acting, we can pick the one which will do best for us. Consciousness of self gives us the power to stand outside the rigid chain of stimulus and response, to pause, and by this pause to throw some weight on either side, to cast some decision about what the response will be. That consciousness of self and freedom go together is shown in the fact that the less self-awareness a person has, the more one is unfree. That is to say, the more one is controlled by inhibitions, repressions, childhood conditionings which one has consciously forgotten but which still drive one unconsciously, the more one is pushed by forces over which one has no control. When persons first come for psychotherapeutic help, for example, they generally complain that they are driven in any number of ways: they have sudden anxieties or fears or are blocked in studying or working without any appropriate reason. They are unfree—that is, bound and pushed by unconscious patterns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

It may be after some months of psychotherapeutic work little changes begin to appear. The person begins to recall one’s dreams regularly; or in one session one takes the initiative in stating that one wants to change the subject on hand and get some help on a different problem; or one day ne can say that one felt angry when the therapist said such and such; or one is able to cry when previously one could never feel much of anything, or suddenly one laughs with spontaneity and wholeheartedness, or is able to state one does like Mary with whom he has been conventional friends for years but does like Carolyn. In such ways, slight as they may seem, one’s emerging self-awareness goes hand in hand with one’s enlarging power to direct one’s own life. As the person gains more consciousness of self, one’s range of choice and one’s freedom proportionately increase. Freedom is cumulative; one choice made with an element of freedom makes greater freedom possible for the next choice. Each exercise of freedom enlarges the circumference of the circle of oneself. We do not mean to imply that there are not an infinite number of deterministic influences in anyone’s life. If you wished to argue that we are determined by our bodies, by our economic situation, by the fact that we happened to be born into this twenty-first century in America, and so on, I would agree with you; and I would add many more ways in which we are psychologically determined, particularly by tendencies of which are unconscious. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

However, no matter how much one argues for the deterministic viewpoint, one still must grant that there is a margin in which the alive human being can be aware of what is determining one. And even if only in a very minute way to begin with, one can have some say in how one will react to the deterministic factors. Freedom is thus shown in how we relate to the deterministic realities of life. If you set out to write a sonnet, you run up against all kinds of recalcitrant realities in the laws of rhyme and scanning, and in the necessities of fitting words together; or if you build a house, you confront all kinds of determining elements in bricks and mortar and lumber. It is essential that you know your material and accept its limits. However, what you say in the sonnet is uniquely yours. The pattern and the style in which you build your house are products of how you, with an element of freedom, use the reality of the given materials. “For we know it is by the grace that we are saved, after all we can do,” reports 2 Nephi 25.23. Obedience leads to true freedom. The more we obey revealed truth, the more we become liberated. Obedience to the Word of Wisdom keeps us from addictions so we do not become slaves to alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. Our bodies will be healthy and our minds clear because the promises associated with this principle is that all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

An additional promise in the relation says we shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures. So by obedience we also gain knowledge. Obedience brings peace in decision making. If we have firmly made up our minds to follow the commandments, we will not have to redecide which path to take when temptation comes our way. That is how obedience brings spiritual safety. The arguments of freedom versus determinism are on a false basis, just as it is false to think of freedom as a kind of isolated electric button called free will. Freedom is shown in according one’s life with realities—realities as simple as the needs for rest and food, or as ultimate as death. When we are thwarted, it is our own attitude that is out of order. Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by the blind necessity but by choice. Acting out is a transmuting of an impulse (or intent) into overt behavior in order to avoid insight. To see the full implications of a desire or intention, to get insight about its meaning, typically upsets one’s self-World relationship more and is, therefore, more anxiety-creating and painful than to act out the desire physically, even if one gets rebuffed or hurt in the latter process. At least, if one can keep the whole problem on the level of muscular behavior, one does not have to face the more difficult threat to one’s self-esteem. This is why acting out is rightly associated with infinite, psychopathic and sociopathic character types. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

Acting out occurs not on the level of consciousness, but on the level of awareness which, is the capacity that the human being shares with animals, the more primitive developmental level prior to consciousness. In adult patients, acting out is generally an endeavor to discharge the desire or intention without having to transmute it into consciousness. It is not easy to live with intentionality without acting it out; to live in a polarity of intent and act means to live with one’s anxiety. Hence, if patients cannot escape into the act, they try to avoid the tension by doing the opposite, be denying the whole intention itself. This means that the acceptance of limitations need not at all be a giving up, but can and should be a constructive act of freedom; and it may well be that such a choice will have more creative results for the person than if one had not had to struggle against any limitation whatever. The mortal who is devoted to freedom does not waste time fighting reality; instead, one extols reality. There is all the difference in the World in how persons relate to the reality of situations. Some people give up when they face a challenge. Others do what they are supposed to do, but they continually resent the fact that they are faced with such a situation and though they outwardly obey they inwardly rebel against the rules. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

Some people sink into consciousness through plentiful hours of contemplation as they reflect on how to progress in their lives and solve problems. They seek in their consciousness of self to understand what is wrong in their lives beforehand that they should have succumbed to a particular situation, and use this deterministic fact as an avenue to new self-knowledge. This allows individuals to affirm their elemental freedom to know and to mold deterministic events; they meet a severely deterministic fact with freedom. It is doubtful whether anyone really achieves freedom who does not responsibly choose to be free, and whoever does so choose becomes more integrated as a person by virtue of having faced a challenge. Through the power to survey one’s life, mortals can transcend the immediate events which determine them. Whether one has faced hardship, one can still in one’s freedom choose how one will relate to these facts. And how one related to a merciless realistic fact like death can be more important for one than the fact of death itself. Freedom is most dramatically illustrated in heroic actions rather than compromise; but even more significant is the undramatic, steady day-to-day exercise of freedom on the part of any person developing toward psychological and spiritual integration in a distraught society like our own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying “Yes” or “No” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to become what we truly are. Freedom and liberty are precious gifts that come to us wen we are obedient to the laws of God and the whisperings of the Spirit. If we are to avoid destruction, fences or guardrails must be built beyond which we cannot go. The fences which we must stay within are the principles of revealed truth. Obedience to them makes us truly free to reach the potential and the glory which our Heavenly Father has in store for us. Belief in God is great, it lets us know that there is light, hope, love, progression, harmony, peace, and prosperity waiting for us, and that we are not just trapped in an everlasting game of darkness and stress. Freedom thus obtained—that is, by obedience to the law of Christ—is freedom of the soul, the highest form of liberty. And the most glorious thing about it is that is it within the reach of every one of us, regardless of what people about us, or even nations do. Beautify your gardens, your houses, your farms; beautify the city. This will make us happy, and produce plenty. There should be no doubt what our task is today. If we truly cherish the heritage we have received, we must maintain the same virtues and the same character of our stalwart forbears—faith in God, courage, industry, frugality, self-reliance, and integrity. Our opportunity and obligation for doing so is clearly upon us.  #RandolphHarris 10 of 10

 

 

 

Forbidden Fruit a Flavor Has that Lawful Orchards Mocks

CaptureWe have time so things do not happen all at once. For the longest time she did not answer. I felt I could say no more. My heart ached as much as it had ever ached. We lay so near to one another, so bound in one another’s limbs, so warm and belonging to each other that the night had gone quiet of all its random sounds for us. At last she stirred ever so faintly, ever so tenderly. Although there are many theories concerning personality development, there is rather general agreement on at least one important point—the significance of early family life. The emotional environment created by parents (or parent substitutes) is of crucial importance. And although there may be great disagreements as to details, there is general consensus that in families that are relatively healthy in their emotional attitudes, children generally develop a high degree of their potential, while in relatively unhealthy families children are likely to realize less of their potential and often tend to develop personality problems. Thinking in opposite extremes is always risky, and so it is ere. There are, of course, no completely healthy or unhealthy families. Rather we might think of a long life or scale along which families could theoretically be places as relatively healthy or unhealthy. And no family would be found at either extreme. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

This discussion will probably be most meaningful to us if we think of it as it applies to our own personal lives. For must of us it will be helpful to think of ourselves in two roles. One role is that of one’s own childhood: “What effects did the family situation in which I lived as a child have upon my personality? How are these influences affecting my relationships with other people, including my own family, now?” The second role that might well be kept in mind is our relationship to our children (or future children): “Am I emotionally equipped to be an effective parent? How can I become better able to meet the emotional needs of my children?” While it is important to see that our childhood family had a profound influence on our present degree of maturity, which in turn will have a great deal to do with the quality of our relationships with our children, it is also important to know that we can change and reach higher levels of maturity. If this were not true, there would be little purpose in discussing personal and family life; and the future would look bleak indeed. Every family tends to develop repeated patterns of behavior. The parent will do something to which the child’s response by repeating his or her original action in an ever more forceful way. Like a snowball rolling downhill, this circular pattern gains size and momentum with each repetition of the cycle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

One is tempted to use the phrase vicious circles in regard to many of these patterns, for it is most easy to see them in operation in negative aspects of personality development and in the growth of our fear of love, but as we shall see later there can be healthy cycles also. Unhealthy cycles begin with feelings of rejection in family life. Since parents are the primary influence in the family, it is basically the relationship of children with their parents that is under consideration, even though children often feel rejected by brothers or sisters. It can be safely assumed, however, that in early childhood the existence of such feelings can be traced back to the parents, for it is they who establish the emotion tone of the home. It is no accident that the phrase feeling of rejection rather than simply the word rejection is used. There is an important distinction, for while it can be shown that children often experience feelings of rejection it often remains a question whether the rejection really exists. There are probably a few parents who are so hostile and unfeeling in their relation to their children that they do not want to express feelings of affection. More often parents are crippled by personality problems, are frightened of their love, and so are unable to communicate their love freely. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

When parents have emotion damage of their own to work through, they behave toward their children in ways that appear to be rejecting. Unfortunately, feelings of rejection are damaging even though the parent does not mean to be rejecting. First of all, every child experiences some feelings of rejection from parents or, in those instances where the child is not reared by his or her natural parents, from those who become substitute parents and who are primarily responsible for the child’s early experiences. A child reared in an orphanage and foster homes, for example, may have frequently changing series of parents, a process that in itself may feel like abandonment and rejection to the child. However, whatever our family circumstances were, each one of us experienced some of these feelings of rejection, and our children will experience some from us. This is only to ay that no parent is perfect. As we discuss these cycles of rejection we are talking about all of us, and we are talking about our children. The degree to which children feel rejected will vary, of course, for parents differ in their maturity and in their ability to express love. However, every one of us is involved, for feelings of rejection are part of the universal dilemma of being human and rearing child in an imperfect World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Secondly, there are many kinds of rejection that children encounter. Perhaps the most easily recognizable is that which is accompanied by open hostility toward the child. Most of us have known parents who could not speak to a child without speaking in anger. One such couple seemed unable even to call their children in from playing in the backyard without using a tone of voice seething with hostility. Such parents are often overly severe in punishment and no doubt take out on the child their feelings of frustration in other areas of life. More basically, they are so frightened of genuine emotional involvement that they seem unable to experience their love for their children. We can understand more clearly what freedom is if we first look at what it is not. Freedom is not rebellion. Rebellion is a normal interim move toward freedom: it occurs to some extent when the little child is trying to exercise his or her muscles of independence through the power to say “No”; it occurs more clearly when the adolescent is trying to become independent of parents. In adolescence (as possibly in other stages too) the strength of the rebelliousness against what the parents stand for is often excessive because the young person is fighting one’s own anxiety at stepping out into the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

When parents say, “Don’t” the child often must scream defiance at them, because that “don’t” is exactly what one feels the craven side of oneself is saying, the side of oneself which is tempted to take refuge behind the walls of parental protection. However, rebellion is often confused with freedom itself. It becomes a false port in the storm because it gives the rebel a delusive sense of being really independent. The rebel forgets that rebellion always presupposes an outside structure of rules, laws, expectations—against which one is rebelling; and one’s security, sense of freedom and strength are dependent actually on this external structure. They are borrowed, and can be taken away like a bank loan which can be called in at any moment. Psychologically many persons stop at this stage of rebellion. Their sense of inner moral strength comes only from knowing what moral conventions they do not live up to; they get an oblique sense of conviction by proclaiming their atheism and disbelief. Many adults are against external compulsions on love, against rigidly curtailing free development of children. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

And some people think the parent should not interfere with what their children are doing, and, in the extreme forms of their doctrines, the child must be allowed to do anything he or she wished. It was not seen, at one time, that such structureless living actually increased children’s anxiety. It also was not see that the parent must obviously take a good deal of responsibility for the child’s actions, and that absolute freedom consists of the parent’s doing this in the context of a genuine respect for the child as a person, actually and potentially, that one gives all realistic room for the potentialities of the child to develop, and that one cannot require the child to falsify one’s wants and emotions. Since the rebel gets his or her sense of direction and vitality from attacking the existing standards and mores, one does not have to develop standards of one’s own. Rebellion acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs, to the state were one can lay new foundations on which to build. The negative forms of freedom confused freedom with license, and overlooked the fact that freedom is never the opposite of responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Another common error is to confuse freedom with planlessness. Some individuals these days argue that if the system of economic laisse-faire is so successful and working in California (which boasts of being the World’s fifth largest economy has a budget surplus of $14 billion)—letting everyone do as they wish—were altered as history marches on, our freedom would vanish with it. The argument goes like this: Freedom is like a living thing. It is invisible. And if the individual’s right to own the means of production is take away, one no longer has the freedom to earn one’s living in one’s own way. Then one can have no freedom at all. Well, if these writers were right it would indeed be unfortunate—for who then could be free? Not you nor I nor anyone else except a very small group of persons—for in this day of giant industries, only the minutest fraction of citizens can own the means of production anyway. Laissez-faire was a great idea, as we have seen, in earlier centuries: but times change, and almost everyone nowadays earns their living by virtue of belonging to a large group, be it an industry, or a university, or a corporation, or a club. It is a vastly more interdependent World, this “One World” of our twentieth century, than the World of the entrepreneurs of earlier centuries or of our own pioneer days; and freedom must be found in the context of economic community and the social value of work, not in everyone’s setting up own’s own factory or university. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Fortunately, if we keep our perspective, this economic interdependence need not destroy freedom. The pony express was a great idea, also, back in the days when sending a letter from coast to coast was an adventure. Also, keep in mind that new inventions do not always replace the old one. Although we now have vacuums, the old fashion straw broom with a sturdy wooden handle is still thriving. However certainly we are thankful—complain as we may about mail service these days—that now when we write a letter to a friend on the coast, we do not have to give more than a passing thought to its method of travel; we drop it in the box with an air-mail stamp and forget about it. We are free, that is, to devote more time and concern to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned about how the letter gets there. We are more free intellectually and spiritually precisely because we accept our position in economic interdependence with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

I have often wondered why there is such anxiety and such an outcry that freedom will be lost unless we preserve the old laissez-faire practices. Is not one of the reason the fact that modern mortals have so thoroughly surrendered inward psychological and spiritual freedom to the routine of their work and to the mass patterns of social conventions that one feels the only vestige of freedom left to one is the opportunity for economic aggrandizement? Has one made the freedom to compete with one’s neighbor economically a last remnant of individuality, which therefore must stand for the whole meaning of freedom? That is to say, if the citizen of the suburbs could not buy a new car each year, build a Mc Mansion, and paint it a slightly different color from his or her neighbor’s, might one feel that one’s life would have to purpose, and that one would not exist as a person? The great weight placed on competitive, laissez-faire freedom seems to me to show how much we have lost a real understanding of freedom. To be sure, freedom is indivisible: and this is precisely why one cannot identify it with a particular economic doctrine or segment of life, least of all a segment of the past; it is a living thing, and its life comes precisely from how the whole person relates oneself to the community of one’s fellow people. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Freedom means openness, a readiness to grow; it means being flexible, ready to change for the sake of greater human values. To identify freedom with a given system is to deny freedom—it crystallizes freedom and turns it into a rigid doctrine. To cling to a tradition, with the defensive plea that is we lose something that worked well in the past we will have lost all, neither shows the spirit of freedom nor makes for the future growth of freedom. We shall keep faith with those courageous mortals, the pioneer industrialists, the mortals of the commerce and the capitalists of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in the Western World, as well as with the independent frontiers people of our own country, if we emulate their courage, dare to think boldly as they did, and plan the most effective economic measures for our day as they did for theirs. Mortals have always lived in a social World, and that World conditions our psychological health. We simply propose that our social and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize oneself, to develop and use one’s potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from one’s fellow mortals. The good society is, thus, the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people—freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but absolutely, as the opportunity to realize ever greater human values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Freedom follow that collectivism, as in fascism and communism and socialism, is the denial of the values we recognize as freedom, and must be opposed at all costs. However, we shall successfully overcome them only as we are devoted to absolute ideals which are better, chiefly the building of a society based on a genuine respect for persons and their freedom. The living human being is not a dead image and cannot be described like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be described at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing my own or another’s psychical structure. However, the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are entirely alike. Only in the process of mutual alive relatedness can the other and I overcome the barrier of separateness, inasmuch as we both participate in the dance of life. Yet our full identification of each other can never be achieved. Even a single act of behavior cannot be fully described. One could write pages of descriptions of the Mona Lisa’s smile, and still the pictured smile would not have been caught in words—but not because her smile is so mysterious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Everybody’s smile is mysterious (unless it is the learned, synthetic smile of the marketplace). No one can fully describe the expression of interest, enthusiasm, biophilia, or of hate or narcissism that one may see in the eyes of another person, or the variety of facial expressions, of gaits, of postures, of intonations that exists among people. The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental characteristic is that of being active, not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers. To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which—though in varying degrees—every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated personality, to be interested, to list, to give. Yet none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone; it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. It the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the structure of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules. (Of course, in the being mode there is also thinking that is alive and productive.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Perhaps the being mode may best be described in a symbol. A blue glass antique Victorian chandelier appears to be blue when light shines through it because it absorbs all other colors and this does not let them pass. This is to say, we call the chandelier blue precisely because it does not retain the blue waves. It is named not for what it possessed but for what it gives out. Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is of nonbeing, for instance, stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by sitting on it, by holding onto our ego and our possessions—can the mode of being emerge. To be requires giving up one’s selfishness, by humbling oneself before God. However, most people find giving up their having orientation too difficult; any attempt to do so arouses their intense anxiety and feels like giving up all security, like being thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim. They do not know that when they have given up their attachment to solely focusing on the material World, they can begin to use their own proper forces and walk by themselves with full faith in the Lord. What holds people back is the illusion that they cannot walk by themselves, they have would collapse if they were not supported by the things they have. However, the reason we are alive today is because God willed it to be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

People who do not walk in faith are like children who are afraid that they will never be able to walk, after they have fallen for the very first time. However, nature and human help prevent human beings from becoming lost. Those who believe that they would collapse without using the crutches of having also need human help, in addition to God’s guidance. When one is caught in a whirlpool of emotion, it is difficult to find a way out alone. When answers to urgent prayer do not seem to come, it can be that we do not understand some truths about prayer, or because we do not recognize answers when they come. Our Heavenly Father did not put us on Earth to fail but to succeed gloriously. It may seem paradoxical, but that is why recognizing answers to prayer can sometimes be very difficult. Some face life with only their own experience and capacity to help them. Others, seek, through prayer, divine inspiration to know what to do. When required, they qualify for power beyond their own capacity. Communication with our Heavenly Father is a scared privilege. It is based upon unchanging principles. When we receive help from out Heavenly Father, it is in response to faith, obedience, and the proper use of agency. We are here on Earth to gain experience we can obtain in no other way. We are given the opportunity to apply the truth so we can grow, develop, and gain spiritual maturity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pride, Determination, Resilience—To be Alive is Power!

The purpose of faith is to offer new vistas in terms of World and human development while refusing to betray the intimate correlation between universality and individuality, dynamics of form, freedom and destiny. There is a realization that spirit and nature are not separate and apart; intuition and reason must regain their importance as the means of perceiving and fusing inner being with outer reality. The enlarged meaning of life, of biology, is not revealed in the test tube of the laboratory but is experienced within the organism of life itself. The principle of life consists in the tension which connects spirit with the realm of matter, symbiotically joined. The element of life is dominant in the very texture of nature, thus rendering life, biology, a transempirical science. The laws of life have their origin beyond their mere physical manifestations and compel us to consider their spiritual source. In fact, the widening of the conceptual framework has not only served to restore order within the respective branches of knowledge, but has also disclosed analogies in mortal’s position regarding the analysis and synthesis of experience in apparently separated domains of knowledge suggesting the possibility of an ever more embracing objective description of the meaning of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Knowledge no longer consists in a manipulation of mortals and nature as opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a means of liberating humankind from the destructive power of fear, pointing the way toward the goal of the rehabilitation of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in the human person. The works published also endeavor to reveal that the cry for patterns, systems and authorities is growing less insistent as the desire grows stronger in both East and West for the recovery of dignity, integrity and self-realization which are the inalienable rights of mortals who may now guide change by means of conscious purpose in the light of rational experience. When dealing with problems of international understanding as well as to problem dealing with prejudice and the resultant tensions and antagonisms, the growing perception and responsibility is to point to the new reality that the individual person and the collective person supplement and integrate each other. The excellent film, Pride (2007), starring Terrance Howard, is an excellent reminder of the resistance people went through in the 1970s, when trying to be productive members of society and protect their children. They faced opposition from even their own culture for trying to advance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The thrall of totalitarianism of both left and right has been shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of truth and human totality. Humankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacramental humanity and in the unity of knowledge. This new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets. The purpose of such inquiries is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine World history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of a mortal in relation to God, to oneself, one’s fellow mortal and the Universe, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For the meaning of life consists in respecting mortal’s hopes and dreams which leader to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that the organization of human communities and the establishment of freedom and peace are not only intellectual achievement but spiritual and moral achievements as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of human personality, the unmediated wholeness of feeling and thought, and constituting a neverending challenge to mortals, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffering, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of one’s life. Justice itself, which has been in a state of pilgrimage and crucifixion and now is being slowly liberated from the grip of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in the West, begins to question its own premises. The modern revolutionary movements which have challenged the sacred institutions of society by protecting social injustice in the name of social justice are here examined and re-evaluated. In the light of this, we have no choice but to admit that the unfreedom against which freedom is measured must be retained with it, namely, that the aspect of truth out of which the night view appears to emerge, the darkness of our time, is little abandonable as in mortal’s subjective advance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

 Thus the two sources of mortal’s consciousness are inseparable, not as dead but as living and complementary, an aspect of that principle of complementarity through which we seek to unite the quantum and the wave, both of which constate the very fabric of life’s radiant energy. There is in humankind today a counterforce to the sterility and danger of quantitative, anonymous mass culture; a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward World unity on the basis of sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality may not be evaluated in mere numerical terms but is proportionate and analogical in its reality. For when equality is equated with interchangeability, individuality is negated and the human person extinguished. We stand at the brink of an age of a World in which human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false separation of mortals and nature, of time and space, of freedom and security, is acknowledge, and we are faced with a new vision of mortals in their organic unity and history offering a richness and diversity of quality and majesty of scope hitherto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom of mortal’s spirit to the new reality, in articulating its thought and belief, faith is to encourage a renaissance of hope in society and of pride in mortal’s decision as to what one’s destiny will be. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

All great changes are preceded by a vigorous intellectual re-evaluation and reorganization. The hubris may be avoided by showing that the creative process itself is not a free activity if by free we mean arbitrary, or unrelated to cosmic law. For the creative process in organic nature and the basic laws of the inorganic realm may be but varied expressions of a universal formative process. Faith hopes to show that although the present apocalyptic period is one of exceptional tensions, there is also at work an exceptional movement toward a compensating unity which refuses to violate the ultimate moral power at work in the Universe, that very power upon which all human effort must at last depend. In this way we may come to understand that there exists an inherent independence of spiritual and mental growth which though conditioned by circumstances, is never determined by circumstances. In this way the great plethora of human knowledge may be correlated with an insight into the nature of human nature be being attuned to the wide and deep range of human thought and human experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

In spite of the infinite obligation of mortals and in spite of their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of nationalisms, and in spite of the homelessness of mortal passions rendered ineffectual by the scientific outlook, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding of a World consciousness, the purpose of faith is to help quicken the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth and interpret the significant elements of the spiritual progress now taking shape out of the core of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which restores mortals to humankind while deepening and enhancing one’s communion with the Universe. The individual is interested because to create is to be more fully and more freely oneself. Perhaps at no other time in all of human history has there been such general recognition that to be creative in one’s own everyday activity is an absolute good. Science and art, of course, have always been interested; the act of the imagination is their business. A scientific theory is an imagining of the way things could really be behind their appearances, expressed formally and accompanied by a set of rules whereby the goodness of the imagination may be appraised; a work of art is an expression of individual vision couched in a form which aspires to an audience of at least one who can say, “Yes, so it is!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Beyond these local interests, whether individual or national, is the increasing recognition by mortals in all parts of the globe that our capacity for creative thought and action may literally makes all the difference in the World. The power of scientific discovery has suddenly increased the stakes, both for ethics and for politics; in its crassest form, science servers merely national striving for power, but in its purest serves that aspect of power involving the spread of our form of life and intelligence throughout the Universe. Human creativity may prove to be the key to success or failure in humankind’s quest for knowledge, in one’s journey beyond the bounds of the sure and the seen, in one’s exploration of the unknown. There are some considerations that make the psychology of human creativity so vitally important. We should turn our attention from the appraisal of personal health and stability to the appraisal of potential for creative development in humanity. It would be interesting and possibly very useful if we could learn more about the nature of creative activity, so that we might more readily find and foster creativity in individuals in our society, for the common good of all. All creation has been committed and offered to the human spirit, that mortals may penetrate it and thus be able to understand more and more fully the infinite grandeur of one’s Creator. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Some people argue that there is an evil character to psychological research. The objections to such research are mainly on these counts: it is vivisection; it is an expression of the effort of organized society to encroach upon the individual and to rob one of one’s freedom; it is presumptuous because it seeks to describe and to understand what is intrinsically a mystery. Psychological diagnosis is, moreover, a form of name-calling; it is a way of having the last word; it does not respect the individual. Finally, it is the present seeking to impose itself upon the future and to perpetuate the status quo through techniques which will identify the potentially constructive deviant and permit a stultifying society to control the individual. Since psychological research at its worst may indeed be destructive in just such ways, socially responsible psychologists have reason to sleep almost as uneasily as socially responsible physicist. This particular study has proceeded in recognition of some of the dangers which may be inherent in it, and it has been asked to participate have been willing to trust the investigators and to accept the inevitable hazards of all efforts at increasing knowledge. Both scientists and artists have something to fear when they embark upon the unknown. That which is essentially mysterious cannot yield itself to scrutiny; on the other hand, whatever we can find out about its nature is ours to know. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Since you claim to assess, you must know value. I myself know nothing concerning value of persons. I am interested in learning how you go about making your judgments. Assessment id s peculiar word to use of personality. It is a particularly odd word to couple with the word research, for scientific research is an inquiry into the true state of affairs, with description and explanation as its aims, whereas assessment is an appraisal for the purpose of attaching value. Yet both words are properly part of the name of the psychological institute. Their presence together indicates a central perplexity which confronts the scientific investigator who would deal with problems of human personality. Our dilemma has its origins in one of the uniquely human achievements—the moral valuation of things. In the Bible, the Fall of Man (into our present human condition) is ascribed to the act of our first parents in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The psychological experience thus symbolized is at the heart of the human achievement in a material Universe, for the fall from innocence might better be called the accession to conscience and the beginning of civilization. Just as it is the human being alone who judges things ethically, so it is particularly the human act which is so judged. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

A research program which accepts as its central purpose the study of excellence of human functioning is thus confronted by a special difficulty: how is such knowledge to be pursed in a purely descriptive and objective spirit in a domain of experience where fact is so interlaced with value? In the physical sciences it is still possible to hold that the description of the World is an enterprise that is not concerned with ethics. Even there, of course, eminent scientific minds, viewing the events which follow from such description, are becoming increasingly concerned with the responsibility of the scientists to one’s fellow mortals as well as to the facts. In a sense, the discovery of fact is itself an ethical act. The consequences of scientific research, it need hardly be said any longer, are sometimes for weal and sometimes for woe. Even in our description of physical relations we re not yet beyond good and evil. Still, the laws that describe the functioning of the nonhuman World have noting of ethics in them, for the events that they subsume are ethically neutral. The psychology of human personality, however, is persistently beset by the ethical character of the phenomena it tasks as its domain. When one sets out to give even a tentative definition of excellence of human functioning, one comes almost immediately to question of ethical valuation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

To say that fact is interlaced with value is not to state the matter so strongly enough, or, for that matter, accurately. It is more correct to say that human values are themselves among the salient facts, and that ethics are an integral part of the phenomena with which the psychologist must deal. Still, one might easily draw this matter too fine and lose contact with ordinary human feeling about the meetness of evaluating others. Psychological assessment is part and parcel of everyday life. This fact finds expression in the common phrase sizing someone up. It is interesting in this connection that all of us use a normative approach to human functioning when we undertake such appraisal. The source of the image is that comfortably normative mart, the haberdashery shop. Psychological diagnosis could perhaps be even better vilified than it was by some creative writers who turned their words upon it. It is like a ready-to-wear suit and usually fits just about as well. The sizing up of others and even of ourselves is  down-to-Earth practice which is not likely to vanish, whatever the garb that mortals in outer space may eventually find themselves wearing. In the economic and political field there is an erroneous alternative between unrestricted inequality and absolute equality of income. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

As long as no one is being oppressed and denied their constitutional rights if everybody’s possessions are functional and personal, then whether someone has somewhat more than another person does not constitute a social problem, for since possession is not essential envy does not grow. On the other hand, those who are concerned with equality in the sense that each one’s shares must be exactly equal to anyone else’s show that their own having orientation is as strong as ever, except that it is denied by their preoccupation with exact equality. Behind this concern their real motivation is visible: envy. Those demanding that nobody should have more than themselves are thus protecting themselves from the envy they would feel if anyone had even an ounce more of anything. What matters is that both luxury and poverty shall be eradicated; equality must mean the quantitative equality of each morsel of material goods, but that income is not differentiated to a point that creates different experiences of life for different groups. This is what is called crude communism, which negates the personality of mortals in every sphere; this type of communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. However, human existence requires that we have, keep, take care of, and use certain things in order to survive. This holds true for our bodies, for food, shelter, clothing, and for the tools necessary to produce our needs. This form of having may be called existential having because it is rooted in human existence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

It is a rationally directed impulse in the pursuit of staying alive—in contrast to the characterological having we have been dealing with so far, which is a passionate drive to retain and keep that is not innate, but that has developed as the result of the impact of social conditions on the human species as it is biologically given. Existential having is not in conflict with being; characterological having necessarily is. Even the just and the saintly, inasmuch as they are human, must want to have in the existential sense—while the average person wants to have in the existential and in the characterological sense. “Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; therefore, let us go down to the land of our father’s inheritance, for behold he left gold and silver, and all manners of riches. And all this he has done because of the commandments of the Lord,” reports 1 Nephi 3.16. Psychotherapy should give us a spring of data, the richness and depth of which are unique, on how wish, will, and intentionality are experienced by living, feeling, suffering people. There is an ideal way of willing, a willing by participation, which puts us in harmony with one’s body and World. That is one realm of wishing and willing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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Social Life is the Movement of One’s Own Heart and Mind

 

The turbulence inside her was unreadable, indeed, unknowable, and if I caught anything definitive it was a high pitch of terror that hearkened back to things which had befallen her in the past. I could not fathom it, there was not time for such mental mining, and her confusion was putting up too much of a fight. I had to go on. Our fear of emotional intimacy is such a pervading factor in our existence that it has tremendous influence on our personalities and our relationships with others. This is true because we most often express our fear of love by maintaining emotion distance from others. Many symptoms of personality illness appear to serve the purposes of achieving and perpetuating this distance. In one form of severe emotional illness, for example, the patient will remain for hours at a time in one position. Often the position is unusual and even grotesque, almost as if one were saying, “I am different, I am unapproachable.” If you did speak to such a person there would probably be no visible response. And you might have the eerie feeling at the moment that you were not in the presence of another person. In a way you would be right, for such an individual has gone about as far as possible to absent oneself emotionally from others. The fear of closeness with its risk of hurt is so intense that one has built an almost impenetrable wall between oneself and the World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Most of us have not suffered so much emotional damage that we have had to go to such extremes to remain distant from others. However, we have all experienced enough hurt and are sufficiently frightened that we build walks of one kind or another between ourselves and others. Churches often provide illustrations of wall-building on an institutional level. No doubt one reason many people are attracted to churches is that they hope to experience the love for each other that religion talks about. Yet the church frequently appears bent on creating only the appearance of helping people to know each other. So Erich Good and Olivia Good, newcomers to the community, may sit for many weeks in church services among strangers who nod self-consciously to the Goods and to each other as they leave at the end of the hour. They may attend church suppers or couples’ groups and discover that they learn only the most banal superficialities about those around them. They may become involved in activities and committee meetings and find that they are mostly business and that the pleasant chats before and after meetings center around safe topics—jobs, vacation, sports, the children, and the weather. So churches, which are made up of individuals, of course, seem at least as frightened as the rest of us in doing anything to break through our walls of isolation despite the skill with which they may depict our need for love. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

So important is this wall-building in our lives that much will be said of the various ways we have of separating ourselves from others. All of us probably engage to some to some extent in the wall-building device of storing up resentments. Someone irritates us, but we do not express our resentment—at any rate not all of our anger. That would be very direct and open, and therefore much too frightening. Instead we cling to our resentment like a long-lost brother, storing it away so we can feel sullen when we are in danger of recognizing and expressing our love for the person. Many a woman, for example, has clung to knowledge of an extramarital infatuation on the part of her husband and used it in this way for years. And whenever he says, “I love you!” she can reply, “Well, you should have thought of that before you fooled around with that woman!” The martyr role is another very efficient way of building walls. One college student’s mother was a master at it. He left for school each morning, not bothering to tidy up his room, because he was content to live amid some disorder. Each day his mother went in and straightened and cleaned it. When he returned in the evening, she reminded him with wounded voice of her sacrifice and how he “could at least show some appreciation after causing me all that work.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

Then the boy, when he played by the rules of the game, would feel guilty about his dereliction of duty and his unexpressed anger about her martyrdom. For who has a right to feel angry at such a self-scarifying mother? The effect of this daily household drama was to keep both of them in a constant state of tension in their relationship with each other. As long as they could perpetuate this ritual, they were quite safe from experiencing and expressing their love for each other, love that must have been quite frightening to both of them. Every marriage counselor is familiar with the “he loves me, he loves me not!” games that men and women often play. Every bit of negative behavior on the partner’s part is interpreted as evidence of the lack of love. A husband may react to a cluttered house with the feeling, “If she really loved me, she would do her share and keep the house picked up. It is the least she can do!’ A wife may feel, “He must not love me very much. He is constantly forgetting anniversaries and other things he knows are important to me.” Or we may be critical of the quality of our own love by using similar standards. “Surely, if I really loved him,” we may say to ourselves, “I would be more considerate to his feelings” or “more tolerant of his kooky friends.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Such tallying up of evidences of love is usually completely meaningless, for it is based on the unreasonable assumption that when we love a person we act that way. Unfortunately we human beings are not so rational as all that! For to express live is frightening to us. One woman had been separated from her husband for a number of weeks when she appeared at her weekly therapy session with an account of new developments in her relationship with her husband. She said, “He was back home every night this week. Then about the middle of the week we fell out and I thought he was going to quit me again. However, for the first time when I really gotten angry, he did not walk out on me. And when it was over, we began to feel pretty lose to each other. And that frightened me when I began to see that things might really work out for us. I guess I am afraid to let myself get involved with him again for fear I will just get to enjoying it and he will walk out again. So, do you know what I did? I have just now figured it out. I went back into the past and dug up all kinds of stuff that I could bitch at him about. Just to foul things up, so I would not let myself know how much I love him!” Judging by our behavior, one might begin to conclude that our love ebbs and flows like an ocean. Love does not come and go, but our experience of love and our expression of love is intermittent. And the satisfying moments of giving and receiving love are followed by times of withdrawal of one kind or another, because the experience of life is frightening. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

Language is an important factor in fortifying the having orientation. The name of a person—and we all have names (and maybe numbers if the present-day trend toward depersonalization continues)—creates the illusion that he or she is a final, immortal being. The person and the name become equivalent; the name demonstrates that the person is a lasting, indestructible substance—and not a process. Common nouns have the same function: for instance, love, pride, hate, joy give the appearance of fixed substances, but such nouns have no reality and only obscure the insight that we are dealing with processes going on in a human being. However, even nouns that are names of things, such as table or lamp, are misleading. The words indicate that we are speaking of fixed substances, although things are nothing but a process of energy that causes certain sensations in our bodily system. However, these sensations are not perceptions of specific things like table or lamp; these perceptions are the result of a cultural process of learning, a process that makes certain sensations assume the form of specific percepts. We have naively believed that things like tables and lams exists as such, and we fail to see that society teaches us to transform sensation into perception that permit us to manipulate the World around us in order to enable us to survive in a given culture. Once we have given such percepts a name, the name seems to guarantee the final and unchangeable reality of the percept. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

The need to have has still another foundation, the biologically given desire to live. Whether we are happy or unhappy, our body impels us to strive for immortality. However, since we know by experience that we shall die, we seek solutions that make us believe that, in spite of the empirical evidence, we are immortal. This wish has taken many forms: the belief of the Pharaohs that their bodies enshrined in the pyramids would be immortal; many religious fantasies of life after death, in the happy hunting grounds of early hunter societies; the Christian paradise. In contemporary society since the eighteenth century, history and the future have become the substitutes for the Christian Heaven: fame, celebrity, even notoriety—anything that seems to guarantee a footnote in the record of history—constitutes a bit of immortality. The craving for fame is not just secular vanity—it has a religious quality for those who do not believe in the traditional hereafter any more. (This is particularly noticeable among political leaders.) Publicity paves the way to immortality, and the public relations agents become the new priests. However, perhaps more than anything else, possession of property constitutes the fulfillment of the craving for immortality, and it is for this reason that the having orientation has strength. If my self is constituted by what I have, then I am immortal if the things I have are indestructible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

From Ancient Egypt to today—from physical immortality, via mummification of the body, to mental immortality, vis the last will—people have remained alive beyond their physical/mental lifetimes. Via the legal power of the last will the disposal of our property is determined for generations to come; through the laws of inheritance, I—inasmuch as I am an owner of capital—become immortal. A helpful approach to understanding the mode of having is to recall one of Dr. Freud’s most significant findings, that after going through their infant phase of mere passive receptivity followed by a phase of aggressive exploitative receptivity, all children, before they reach maturity, go through a phase where their character and energy is mainly focused having, saving, and hoarding money and material things as well as feelings, gestures, words, energy. It is the character of the stingy individual and is usually connected with such other traits as orderliness, punctuality, stubbornness, each to a more than ordinary degree. An important aspect of Dr. Freud’s concept is the symbolic connection between money and the unmentionable—gold and dirt—of which he quotes a number of examples. His concept of the money is just a way of saying people place too much importance on money when their spiritual life, nature and humanity are more important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

The predominant orientation is possession and occurs in the period before the achievement of full maturity and is pathological if it remains permanent. For Dr. Freud, in other words, the person exclusively concerned with having and possession is a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it would follow that the society in which most of the members are of possessive character is a sick society. Normal, constructive anxiety goes with becoming aware of and assuming one’s potentialities. Intentionality is the constructive use of normal anxiety. If I can have some expectations and possibility of acting on my powers, I move ahead. However, if the anxiety becomes overwhelming, then the possibilities for action are blotted out. Pronounced neurotic anxiety destroys intentionality, destroys our relationship to meaningful contents of knowledge or will. This is the anxiety of nothingness. Without intentionality we are indeed nothing. Mortal’s vitality is as one’s intentionality: they are interdependent. This makes mortals the most vital of all beings. One can transcend any given situation in any direction and this possibility drives one to create beyond oneself. Vitality is the power of creating beyond oneself without losing oneself. The more power of creating beyond itself a being has the more vitality it has. The World of technical creations is the most conspicuous expression of mortal’s vitality and its infinite superiority over animal vitality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Only mortals have complete vitality because one alone has complete intentionality. If the correlation between vitality and intentionality is rightly understood one can accept the biological intentionality of courage within the limits of its validity. Overwhelming anxiety destroys the capacity to perceive and conceive one’s World, to reach out toward it so form and re-form it. In this sense, it destroys intentionality. We cannot hope, plan, promise or create in severe anxiety; we shrink back into a stockade of limited consciousness hoping only to preserve ourselves until the danger is past. Intentionality and vitality are correlated by the fact that mortal’s vitality shows itself not simply as a biological force, but as a reaching out, a forming and re-forming of the World in various creative activities. The degree of one’s courage. This is a combination of strength and value, with moral nobility. Vitality and intentionality are united in this ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and from moralism. Taking a final lead from the origin of the World itself, we can go further and relate intentionality to intensity of experience, or to the degree of intentness in life. There have been a number of attempts to identity what we mean by vitality in the psychological sphere: such words as aliveness and so on are used, but without anyone’s having much conviction that one has said anything. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Does not intentionally give us a criterion for defining psychological vitality? The degree of intentionality can define the aliveness of the person, the potential degree of commitment, and one’s capacity, if we are speaking of a patient, for remaining at the therapeutic task. Without an ultimate concern as its basis every system of morals degenerates into a method of adjustments to social demands, whether they are ultimately justified or not. And the infinite passion which characterizes a genuine faith evaporates and is replaced by a cleaver calculation which is unable to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith. This is a description of what has happened on a large scale in Western civilization. It is concealed only by the fact that in many representatives of humanist faith, moral strength was and is greater in members of a religiously active community. However, this is a transitory stage. There is still faith in these mortals, ultimate concern about human dignity and personal fulfillment. There is religious substance in them, which, however, can be wasted in the next generation if the faith is not renewed. This is possible only in the community of faith under the continuous impact of its mythical and cultic symbols. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” 1 Nephi 3.19. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11

They Say that Nothing is Ever Lost, that Matter is Merely Changed to Energy and Back Again

I have guests here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. If a person’s freedom were entirely and literally taken away, what would happen to the individual? One evening a king of a far land was standing at his window, vaguely listening to some music drifting down the corridor from the reception room in the other wing of the palace. The king was wearied from the diplomatic reception he had just attended, and he looked out of the window pondering about the ways of the World in general and nothing in particular. Hos eye feel upon a man in the square below—apparently an average man, walking to the corner to take the tram home, who had taken that same route five nights a week for many years. The king followed this man in his imagination—pictured him arriving home, perfunctorily kissing his wife, eating his late meal, inquiring whether everything was right with the children, reading the paper, going to bed, perhaps engaging in the love act with his wife or perhaps not, sleeping, and getting u and going off to work again the next day. And a sudden curiosity seized the king which for a moment banished his fatigue, “I wonder what would happen if a man were kept in a cage, like the animals at the zoo?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

So the next day the king called in a psychologist, told him of his idea, and invited him to observe the experiment. Then the king caused a cage to be brought from the zoo, and the average man was brought and placed therein. At first the man was simply bewildered, and he kept saying to the psychologist who stood outside the cage, “I have to catch the tram, I have to get to work, look what time it is, I will be late for work!” However, later on in the afternoon the man began soberly to realize what was up, and then he protested vehemently, “The king cannot do this to me! It is unjust, and against the laws.” His voice was strong, and his eyes full of anger. During the rest of the week the man continued his vehement protests. When the king would walk by the cage, as he did every day, the man made his protests directly to the monarch. However, the king would answer, “Look here, you get plenty of food, you have a good bed, and you do not have to work. We take good care of you—so why are you objecting?” Then after some days the man’s protests lessened and then ceased. He was silent in his cage, refusing generally to talk, but the psychologist could see hatred glowing like a deep fire in his eyes. However, after several weeks the psychologist noticed that more and more it now seemed as if the man were pausing a moment after the king’s daily reminder to him that he was being taken good care of—for a second the hatred was postponed from returning to his eyes—as though he were asking himself what the king said were possibly true? #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

And after a few weeks more, the man began to discuss with the psychologist how it was a useful thing if a mortal were given food and shelter, and that mortal has to live by one’s fate in any case and the part of wisdom was to accept one’s date. So when a group of professors and graduate student came in one day to observe the man in the cage, he was friendly toward them and explained to them that he had chosen this way of life, that there are great values in security and being taken care of, that they would of course see how sensible his course was, and so on. “How strange!” thought the psychologist, and how pathetic—why is it he struggles so hard to get them to approve of his way of life? In the succeeding days when the would walk through the courtyard, the mortal would fawn upon him from being the bars in his cage and thank him for the food and shelter. However, when the king was not in the yard and the man was not aware that the psychologist was present, his expression was quite different—sullen and morose. When his food was handed to him through the bars by the keeper, the man would often drop the dishes or dump over the water and then be embarrassed because of his stupidity and clumsiness. His conversation because increasingly one-tracked: and instead of the involved philosophical theories about the value of being taken care of, he had gotten down to simple sentences like “It is fate,” which he would say over and over again, or just mumble to himself, “It is.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

It was hard to say just when the last phase set in. However, the psychologist became aware that the mortal’s face seemed to have no particular expression: his smile was no longer fawning, but simply empty and meaningless, like the grimace a baby makes when there is gas on its stomach. The man ate his good, and exchanged a few sentences with the psychologist from time to time; his eyes were distant and vague, and though he looked at the psychologist, it seemed that he never really saw him. And not the man, in his destiny conversations, never used the word “I” any more. He had accepted the cage. He had no anger, no hate, no rationalization. However, he was not insane. That night the psychologist sat in his parlor trying to write a concluding report. However, it was very difficult for him to summon up works, for he felt within himself a great emptiness. He kept trying to reassure himself with the words, “They say that nothing is ever lost, that matter is merely changed to energy and back again.” However, he could not help feeling something had been lost, something had been taken out of the Universe in the experiment, and there was left only a void. Hatred surges up in a person when one realizes on is captive. The fact that such a great amount of hatred is generated when people have to give up their freedom proves how essential a value freedom is for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Often the person in actual life who has had to surrender much of one’s freedom, usually in one’s childhood when one can do nothing about, and to give up some of one’s right and room to exist as a human being, may seem on the surface to have accepted the situation and adjusted to the surrender. However, we do not need to penetrate far under the surface to discover that something else has come in to fill the vacuum—namely hatred and resentment of those who have forced the individual to give up his or her freedom. And usually this smoldering hatred is in direct proportion to the degree in which the person’s right to exist as a human being has been taken away from one. To be sure that hatred is repressed; for the person enslaved is not permitted to express hating thoughts toward the masters; but it is there nonetheless, and may come out, the cases of children for example, in symptoms like the child’s failing in school, or excessive physical sickness, or bed-wetting prolonged beyond the early years, and so on. Indeed it is not possible for a human being to give up one’s freedom without something coming in to restore the inner balance—something arising from inner freedom when one’s outer freedom is denied—and this something is hatred for one’s conqueror. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

Hating or resenting is often the person’s only way from committing psychological or spiritual suicide. It has the function of preserving some dignity, some feeling of one’s own identity, as though the person—or persons, in the case of nations—were to be saying silently to their conquerors, “You have conquered me, but I reserve the right to hate you.” In cases of severe neurotics or psychotics, it often exceedingly clear that the person, driven to the wall by earlier unfortunate conditions, has kept in one’s hatred an inner citadel, a last vestige of dignity and pride. Such contempt for the conquerors keeps the person still an identity in one’s own right even though outward conditions deny one the essential rights of the human being. In cases in therapy, furthermore, where a person who has been drastically curtailed in the exercise of one’s powers as a human being is unable, after a period of time, to feel or bring out one’s hatred and resentment, prognosis is less good. Just at the capacity of the little child to stand over against one’s parents was essential to one’s being born as a free person, so the harmed person’s capacity eventually to hate of feel anger is a mark of one’s inner potentialities for standing against one’s oppressors. Another proof of the fact that s people surrender their freedom they must hate is seen in fact that totalitarian governments must provide for their people some object for the hatred which is generated by the government’s having take away their freedom. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

As shown so vividly in the novel 1984, if a government sets out to take away people’s freedom, it must siphon off their hatred and direct it towards outside groups—otherwise the people would revolt, or go into collective psychosis, or become psychologically dead and inert, no good as people or as a fighting force. One way to deal with intense anger, pain, suffering, and hatred is to drown it out by focusing on something that in individual feels will help their life to progress, while they are enduring the situation. Many people turn to religion, psychology, writing, or some other hobby that will increase their understanding and tolerance. It might also be helpful to study human beings and human behavior to see that many people in society are fractured and are not really who they are they are. As long as one is becoming educated or learning a skill, they are growing, and that is surely productive. The tendency to grow in terms of one’s own nature is common to all living beings. Hence we resist any attempt to prevent our growing in the ways determined by our structure. In order to break this resistance, whether it is conscious or not, physical or mental force is necessary. Inanimate objects resist control of their physical composition in various degrees through the energy inherent in their atomic and molecular structures. However, they do not fight against being used. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

The use of heteronomous force with living beings (for instance, the force that tends to bend us in directions contrary to our given structure and that is detrimental to our growth) arouses resistance. This resistance can take all forms, from overt, effective, direct, active resistance to indirect, ineffectual, and, very often, unconscious resistance. We cannot regress, we can only move forward. Only the achievement of inner independence is conducive to freedom and ends the need for fruitless rebellion. Human beings have a specific structure—like any other species—and can grow only in terms of this structure. Freedom does not mean freedom from all guiding principles. It means the freedom to grow according to the laws of the structure of human existence (autonomous restrictions). It means obedience to the laws that govern optimal human development. Any authority that future this goal is rational authority when this furtherance is achieved by way of by helping to mobilize one’s activity, critical thinking, and faith in life. It is irrational authority when it imposes on one’s heteronomous norms that serve the purpose of authority, but not the purposes of the individual’s specific structure. The having mode of existence, the attitude centered on property and profit, necessarily produce the desire—indeed the need—for power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

To control other living human beings we need to use power to break their resistance. To maintain control over private property we need to use power to protect it from those would take it from us because they, like us, can never have enough. We cannot always sense the will and intent of other people, no matter how charming they may seem to be. We cannot predict the future and it is best to get to know a person. Will and intentionality are intimately bound up with the future. Both meanings—simple future, something will happen; and personal resolve, I will make it happen—are present in varying degrees in each statement of intentionality. “I will come to New York in September” may have very little resolve and be almost entirely a simple statement of the future. However, “I will get married” or “I will write a poem” are much less a comment on the future and mostly a statement of resolve. The future does not consist of simply a state of time which is going to occur, but contains that the element, “I will make it so.” Power is potentiality, and potentiality points toward the future: it is something to be realized. The future is the tense in which we promise ourselves, we give a promissory note, we put ourselves in line. Humans are the only beings that can make promises, and this gives us the ability to put ourselves in the future. We are saying, “Let it be so.”  #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

The community of faith constitutes itself through ritual symbol and interprets itself in mythical symbols. The hopelessness of many patients, which may be expressed in depression, despair, feelings of “I can’t,” and related helplessness, can be usefully seen, from one point of view, as the inability to see or construct a future. Love is an implication of faith, namely, we are putting hope and trust into the future. And to digress for a moment, after studying sociology, it becomes clear why so many people are hard on law enforcement, whether it is fair or not. Nonetheless, people, especially those who have been victims of crimes realize if this person, as they are usually guilty of many crimes, had been caught, then the individual and their families would have never been a victim of a crime. Some people really just seem to slip through the system no matter how hard the system is working to contain them. Then, there is another side of it, people feel like if they were doing the things that these criminally oriented people were doing that they would have been caught, which may or may not be true. It also could be that some people have a higher sense of righteousness and their conscience would not allow them to engage in certain behaviors, but it is also clear that the threshold of punishment is higher for some for whatever reasons. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

However, just keep in mind people are people no matter what they look like and take things slowly. It may not be a good idea to be so eager to meet new people. Enjoy the friends you have, make the best of life. Sometimes it is very hard to shake a person, even after just hanging out with the person once, and you do not want them feeling like they have a lifetime pass to access your life. It can be hard to escape from people, much more difficult than one can imagine. Thank God for the battle verses in the Bible. We go into the unknown every day of our lives, outwardly and inwardly in the unseen life of the spirit, which is often by far the sternest battlefield for our souls. Either way, the Lord your God goes before you. He shall fight for you. One of the most powerful ways to pray is to find a promise in the Scripture and remind God what he said about you. If you present your case before God, the good news is that Jesus is called our Advocate. Another word for advocate is lawyer. In the courtroom of Heaven, imagine Jesus is our lawyer. God is the judge. Do not tell God why you cannot be successful. Present your cause based on God’s Word and you cannot lose. He will be faithful and true to his Word. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11

 

The Soul Selects its Own Society and then Shuts the Door to its Divine Majority Present No More

If you think that I am going to explain to you how this was done, or anything about it, you are wrong. Psychologists have traditionally been much more interested in psychological illness than in psychological health. Many people focus heavily on mental illness, but few shed light on what a picture of mental health looks like. People do not seem to really be interested of dealing with mental health, but they tend to love to focus on mental illness more. Of course, this greater attention to disease and malfunction is not just an oddity of the psychological profession. Most of us pay little attention to our health when it is good, just as we pay little attention to our automobile as long as it is running well. It is when we are physically ill tat our body comes to our notice, and it is usually when we are a bit upset and anxious that we become self-conscious; wen we are just being our natural self we are in good health mentally. In brief, disease is more vivid and more noticeable than efficient functioning, and consequently has had more scientific attention paid to it. This natural tendency to give more notice to the pathological resulted in a relative neglect in psychological theory of the conditions and characteristics that define psychological health. However, we should also look at the more heroic human reactions to terrible stress and look at the beneficial sides of human nature and the unusual vitality of human beings rather than just focusing on disease. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

Psychological health has always been defined so negatively, in terms of what is present when health is absent. Clearly ineffective persons usually possess traits which display confusion and uncertainty. However, people who are competent tend to be conscientious, well-behaved, and responsible. Effective subjects are also independent and fair-minded. However, we must avoid any implication that the healthy person psychologically must necessarily be a good person morally. For the most part it is probably a healthy thing to be well behaved, and as a rule we are in better health when we are cool and collected than when we are agitated. However, there are times when it is a sign of greater health to be unruly, and an implication of greater inner resources to be able to upset one’s own balance and to seek a new order of selfhood. The ability to permit oneself to become disorganized is in my judgment quite crucial to the development of a very high level of integration. Because we are capable of reflecting upon ourselves, we are committed, willy-nilly, to an artistic enterprise in the creation of our own personality. By our very nature as intelligent beings, we are compelled to make an image of ourselves which will be coherent and of enduring recognizability, to us and others. One judges the degree of success of this inevitable reflective act by precisely the criteria with which one judges a work of art, or a scientific theory at that level of generality where science and art alike are concerned with problems of universal validities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

A person may be said to be most elegant, and most healthy, when one’s awareness includes the broadest possible aspects of human experience, and the deepest possible comprehension of them, while at the same time one is most simple and direct in one’s feelings, thoughts, and actions. Certain fact concerning temporary upset and agitation in especially healthy or potentially healthy persons can this be explained in terms of the creative act necessary in order to achieve integration at the most complex level. A certain amount of discord and disorder must be permitted into the perceptual system if a more complex synthesis is to result. Usually, of course, some discord is brought in by new experiences that are common to all of us. At some time in life there arises also what might he called the crisis in belief, in which it becomes necessary to re-examine the basis of one’s religious or philosophical beliefs, and to come to some sort of explanation for oneself of what the Universe is all about and what life itself signifies. The choice of a life work and the choice of a life mate are two other nearly Universal crises. The more energy a person has at one’s disposal, the more fully will one become committed to the most complex possible integration. In this connection I think it is important to remember that intelligence is a form of energy. The capacity to symbolize, to create a valid image of reality, is the peculiarly human energy, the triumphant form of energy in the living World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

The image of the self is a complicated pattern, an artistic endeavor, as I have suggested, to which we are committed whether we will or no. In psychological sickness our image of ourself blurs, the colors run, it is not integrated or beautiful.  We become conscious of its existence momentarily, and hence awkwardness ensures. However, in health there is no awkwardness, for the moment of health is the moment of conscious creative synthesis, when without thinking about it at all we know that we make sense to ourselves and to others. In the most elegant cases, this synthesis involves a tremendous interpenetration of symbols, drawn from pleasures of the flesh, our philosophy, and the meaning of our work, with complex overdetermination of actions and feelings which are themselves expressively simple. When such simplicity and complexity has been achieved, I think that two new and mist important affects come into existence in the individual’s experience. One of these is the feeling that one is free and that life and its outcome are in one’s own hands. The other is a new experience of the passage of time, and a deeper sense of relaxed participation in the present moment. All of experience is consequently permanent at the very moment of its occurrence, and life ceases to be a course between birth and death and becomes instead a fully realized experience of change in which every single state is as valid and as necessary as every other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

It is one of the more puzzling facets of human existence that we often avoid those experiences that we most desire. We long to give and receive expressions of love, but at the critical moment we frequently back away. And in a similar way we frustrate ourselves in many of our strongest desires, such as our wish to be free and spontaneous in our actions. Our avoidance of longed-for experiences is rooted in fear. We are, as we shall see, afraid of freedom, afraid of pleasures of the flesh, and afraid of being ourselves with other people. And the most basic of all these fears is our fear of emotional closeness with others; in a word, live. Most of us would like to find more satisfaction and less frustration in our personal and family lives. If we can become more aware of our fear of love, the role it plays in our loves, and where it came from, this awareness can help us begin to move in that direction where we find more satisfaction in life. If we can discover that our other fears are the handmaidens of our fear of love, adding and abetting our avoidance of the experience of intimacy, it will also help us to return to an equilibrium. At the first glance the idea that we are afraid to love does not seem to make sense. And while it may not be easy to understand it intellectually, it is even more difficult for many of us to become emotionally aware of this fear within us. Yet there seems to be no better explanation for the fact that moments of feeling very close to another person are rare and short-lived. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

Sometimes the previous warmth may be replaced by emotional distance, and could even appear to have been supplanted by coldness. Why do such experiences occur? The answer appears to be that the experience of love frightens us, even though we may not be aware of our fear. This fear of closeness is felt so intensely and is present in all of us, although some of us are less frightened than others. And if we can become aware of the fear of intimacy within ourselves, a good deal will have been accomplished, for awareness of ourselves and of our fear of love is a step in the direction of emotional health because it opens the door to the possibility of dealing creatively with the fear rather than being blindly enslaved to it. Why does emotion closeness to others frighten us? The explanation is possessed in the fact that caring always involves vulnerability. When we open ourselves and permit another person to know that we love him or her, we risk being hurt. And because we know how it feels to be hurt, this risk is frightening. Everyone has probably experienced feelings similar to those of someone in throes of marital difficulties who declares, “I do not ever want to care for anyone that much again! It just hurts too much.” The vulnerability of the lover is inescapable in every sphere of human relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

So striking is the relationship between love and vulnerability that it can be stated almost mathematically. The closer we are emotions to another human being and the more openly we express our caring, the more open we are to the possibility of being hurt by that person and the more intensely the hurt will be felt. And it is this possibility that frightens us and keeps us wary about establishing close relationships. The probabilities are that we will experience some of the hurt that we fear when we risk love. If we established significant and close relationships, we will sometimes be disappointed by those we life. If we share confidences, we will sometimes be betrayed. If we count on people, they will sometimes let us down. If we express warmth, others will sometimes seem indifferent or even cold. It works the other way, too, of course. It is inevitable that we will sometimes hurt those who love us, even though we also love them. Sometimes we will be fully aware of what we are doing and yet seem unable to stop ourselves. At other times we will not recognize, at the moment at least, the fact that we are inflicting hurt. What it comes down to is that all of us appear unable to enjoy very long periods of closeness. The vulnerability of it is so frightening that one or the other of us finds some way of interrupting it. At such times it is almost as though at some deep level of our beings we find it necessary to say, “Sooner or later I am going to be hurt by this one whom I love, therefore I must hurt first!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

We of course do not mean that hatred or resentment in themselves are good things, or that the mark of the healthy person is how much one hates. Nor do we mean that the goal of development is that everyone hates one’s parents or those in authority. Hatred and resentment are destructive emotions and the sign of maturity is to transform them into constructive emotions. However, the fact that the human being will destroy something—generally in the long run oneself—rather than surrender one’s freedom proves how important freedom is. Because hatred and resentment do not fit the ideal picture of the benign, self-controlled, ever-poised, well-adjusted bourgeois citizen, as a consequence, these emotions are generally repressed. Now it is a well-known psychological tendency that when we repress one attitude or emotion, we often counterbalance it by acting or assuming an attitude on the surface which is just the opposite. You may, for example, often find yourself acting especially politely toward the person you dislike. If you are relatively free from anxiety, you may be saying to yourself in this formal politeness, quoting from St. Paul, I treat my enemy well in order to heap coals of fire on one’s head.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

However, if you are a less secure person who has to confront more difficult problems in development, you may try to persuade yourself that you love this very person you hate. It is not unusual that a person who is excessively dependent upon a dominating person or authority figure, for example, will act toward the other as through one loved the individual to cover up one’s hatred. Like a boxer in a clinch, one clings to the very one who is the enemy. In real life one does not get rid of hatred and resentment this way; one generally displaces the emotions on other people, or turns them inward in self-hate. It is thus crucial that we be able to confront our hatred openly. And it is even more essential that we face our resentment, since that is the form hatred generally takes in polite and civilized life. Most people in our society, on looking into themselves, may not be aware of any particular hatred, but they no doubt will find a good deal of resentment. Perhaps the reason that resentment is such a common, chronic corrosive emotion in this age for information of individual competitiveness is that hatred has been so generally suppressed. Furthermore, if we do not confront our hatred and resentment openly, they will tend sooner or later to turn into the one affect which never does anyone any good, namely self-pity. Self-pity is the reserved form of hatred and resentment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

One can then nurse one’s hatred, and retain one’s psychological balance by means of feeling sorry for oneself, confronting oneself with the thought of what a tough lot has been one’s, how much one has had to suffer—and refrain from doing anything about it. Many people rebel against the denial of freedom but never can get fully beyond the stage of rebellion. Middle classes are shot through with suppressed resentment, and it emerges indirectly in the form of morals. Resentment is at the core of our morals. Anyone in our day who wishes an illustration of so-called morality motivated by resentment need look no farther than gossip in small town. No one can arrive at real love or morality or freedom until one has frankly confronted and worked through one’s resentment. Hatred and resentment should be used as motivations to re-establish one’s genuine freedom: one will not transform those destructive emotions into constructive ones until one does this. And the first step is to know whom or what one hates. To take, for an example, people under dictatorial government, the first step in their revolt to regain freedom would be their shifting back their hatred to the dictatorial powers themselves. Hatred and resentment temporarily preserve the person’s inner freedom, but sooner or later one must use the hatred to establish one’s freedom and dignity in reality, else one’s hated will destroy oneself. The aim is to hate in order to win the new. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10

 

 

Will Moves through Desire Beyond My Power to Deem

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. We have seen that becoming a person means going through several stages of consciousness of oneself. The first is that of the innocence of the infant before consciousness of self is born. The second is the stage of rebellion, when the person is trying to become free to establish some inner strength in one’s own right. This stage is most clearly seen in the child of two of three or the adolescent, and may involve defiance and hostility. In greater or lesser degree rebellion is a necessary transition as one cuts old ties and seeks to make new ones. However, rebellion is not to be confused with freedom. The third stage we may call the ordinary consciousness of self. In this stage a person can to some extent see one’s errors, make some allowance for one’s prejudices, use one’s guilt feelings and anxiety as experiences to learn from, and make one’s decisions with some responsibility. This is what most people mean when they speak of a healthy state of personality. However, there is a fourth stage of consciousness which is extraordinary in the sense that most individuals experience it only rarely. This stage is most clearly illustrated when one gets a sudden insight into a problem—abruptly, seemingly from nowhere, pops up an answer for which one has struggles in vain for days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Sometimes insights we are struggling for come in dreams, or at moments of reverie when one is thinking about something else: in any case, we know that the answer emerges from what are called subconscious levels in the personality. Such consciousness may occur in scientific, religious or artistic activity alike; it is sometimes popularly called dawning of ideas or inspiration. As all students of creative activity make clear, this level of consciousness is present in all creative work. What shall this level be called? Objective self-consciousness because of the glimpses it affords into objective truth? Or self-surpassing consciousness? Or self-transcending consciousness in the ethical-religious tradition? All of these terms distort as well as clarify. I propose a term which is less dramatic but perhaps, for our day, more satisfactory, creative consciousness of self. The classical psychological term for this awareness is ecstasy. The word literally means to stand outside of oneself, that is, to catch a view of, or experience something, from a perspective outside one’s usual limited viewpoint. Ordinarily what a person sees in the objective World around one is always more or less distorted and clouded by the fact that one sees it subjectively. As human beings, what we see is always through personal eyes, and interpreted by each person through one’s own private World; we see a dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

This fourth level of consciousness cuts below the split between objectivity and subjectivity. Temporarily we can transcend the usual limits of conscious personality. Through what is called insight, or intuition, or the other only vaguely understood processes which are involved in creativity, we may get glimpses of objective truth as it exists in reality, or sense some new ethical possibility in, let us say, an experience of unselfish love. The immediate expression of love is action. Faith implies love and the expression of love is action. The mediating link between faith and works is love. Only God can reunite the estranged with oneself. However, love is an element of faith if faith is understood as ultimate concern. Faith implies love, loves lives in works: in this sense faith is actual in works. Where there is ultimate concern there is the passionate desire to actualize the content of one’s concern. Concern in its very definition includes the desire for action. The kind of action is, of course, dependent on the type of faith. Faith of the ontological type drives toward elevation about the separation of being from being. Faith of the ethical types drives toward transformation of the estranged reality. In both of them love is working. Mystical love united by negation of self. Ethical love is predominantly formative. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

To be, rather, turned outward means to pierce in imagination beyond what one knows at the moment. Mortals in fulfilling themselves goes through a process of transcending oneself. This is simply one side of the basic characteristics of growing, healthy human being, that from moment to moment one is enlarging one’s awareness of oneself and one’s World. Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself, it is the ultimate power behind faith and love. If all life does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation. This creative self-consciousness is a stage that most of us achieve only at rare intervals; and none of us, except the satins, religious or secular, and the great creative figures, live very much of our lives on this level. However, it is the level which gives meaning to our actions and experiences on the lesser levels. Many people may have experienced this consciousness in some special moment, let us say, in listening to music, or in some new experience of love or friendship which temporarily takes them out of the usual walled-in routine of the lives. It is as though for a moment one stood on a mountain peak, and viewed one’s life from that wide and unlimited perspective. One gets one’s sense of direction from one’s view from the peak and sketches a mental map which guides one for weeks of a patient plodding up and down the lesser hills when effort is dull and inspiration is conspicuous by its absence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

For the fact that at some instant we have been able to see truth unclouded by our own prejudices, to love other persons without demand for ourselves, and to create in the ecstasy that occurs when we are totally absorbed in what we are doing—the fact that we have has these glimpses gives a basis of meaning and direction for all of our later actions. This fourth level is what is meant in such statements as those in the Bible about losing one’s life for the sake of the values one believes in. Thus it is true that there is a kind of self-forgetting on this level of consciousness. However, the word self-forgetting is a poor term; this consciousness in another sense is the most fulfilled state of human existence. One cannot demand the awareness we are discussing, and as we have said it often occurs in moments of receptivity and relaxation rather than action. Nonetheless the evidence in studies of creative people is that they get their important insights on those particular problems on which they have wrestled with perseverance and diligence, even though insight itself may come at a moment of lull. One cannot command one’s dreams, for example, but one gets fruitful insights from them to the extent that one is actively concerned with doing so, and can train oneself to be vigilant in one’s sensitivity to one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

The person who has creative self-consciousness are disciplined into wholeness, one has created oneself. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that in the whole all is redeemed and affirmed—one does not negate any more. In the having mode, we have to keep in mind the object is not permanent: it can be destroyed, or it can be lost, or it can lose its value. Speaking of having something permanently rests upon the illusion of a permanent and indestructible substance. If I seem to have everything, I have—in reality—nothing, since my having, possessing, controlling an object is only a transitory moment in the process of living. There is no alive relationship between me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. However, there is also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of identity, for instance, sanity, rests upon my having it (and as many things as possible). The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. The relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

Victorian mortals used this will to push down and suppress what one called lower bodily desires. However, one surely cannot be a mortal of decision without taking bodily desires into considerations. Our discussion of which indicates that bodily wished must be brought into integration with will, or else the one will block the other. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the sexual organs when we are excited by pleasures of the flesh. In therapy, when a patient in a given hour is blocked off from one’s wishes and intentionality in general, a good place to start is for the therapist simply to help the patient become aware of one’s bodily feelings and one’s bodily state at that moment. Many people in the Victorian era were coming to terms with their body from which their culture has alienated them. Each dealt with the body as a tool, an instrument, unaware that this is an expression of the very alienation one sought to overcome. When people are sick, they find their inherited will power may be strangely ineffective. Many find that listening to their body is of critical importance in getting well. When one can be sensitive to their body, heat that is it fatigued and need to rest more, or sense that their body is strong enough to increase exercise, they are more likely to get well. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

 We find awareness of our body blocked off (a state similar to what patients have in analysis when they say they are not with it), several people get worse. This may seem like a poetic and mystical viewpoint for someone seriously ill to be indulged in, but actually it is a hard-rock, empirical issues of whether one will live or die. As far as I can judge, this is true for other patients as well. This bodily awareness sometimes comes spontaneously, but by no means necessarily so. Will is a listening, which brings to mind particularly the listening to the body. In our society, it often requires considerable effort to listen to the body—an effort of sustained openness to whatever cues may come from one’s body. In recent years, the work of the body re-educationalist, the teachers of exercise and of Yoga, have brought out the significant interrelation between the capacity to listen to the body and psychological well-being. The presence of volition is betrayed in the phrases we use, such as I “accept” fatigue, I “agree” to rest, I “consent” to follow my physician’s (or teacher’s) recommendation, I “adopt” a regimen. There is, therefore, a willing which is not merely against bodily desires but with the body, a willing from within; it is willing of participation rather than opposition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

Will moves through desire. The fact that my desires are felt and experiences in my body, with all the glandular changes that go therewith—the fact that they are embodies desires—means that I cannot escape taking some stand in regard to them. That is to say, if I have a wish, I cannot avoid willing about it, even if only to deny that I have the wish. Pure detachment works only if we can disengage our bodies. Hence, the outright denial of awareness of wishes generally involves doing violence to one’s body. My body is an expression par excellence of the fact that I am an individual. Since I am a body, separate from others as an individual entity, I cannot escape putting myself on the line in some way or other—or refusing to put myself on the line, which is the same issue. One may try to conform to someone else psychologically, be an imprint of the other in ideas; but Siamese twins bodily are very rare. The patient who cannot experience oneself as bodily separate from another, say one’s mother, is generally representative of serious pathological illness, often of the schizophrenic kind. The fact that my body is an entity in space, has this motility and this particular relation to space which my movements give it, makes it a living symbol of the fact that I cannot escape in some way or other taking a stand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Will is embodied will. Thus, so many words having to do with will refer to our physical place—taking a position, accepting a viewpoint, choosing an orientation. Or we say, that someone is upright, straight, or the opposite, prone, cringing, ducking, all referring to will and decision as shown through the position of the body. One can never become an individual self so long as one follows the spirit of someone else and goes around, walking crooked; one can achieve some selfhood only when one walks straight through, in the stance of the mortal of single-minded will. Even more interesting is the body as a language of intentionality. It not only expresses intentionality; it communicates it. When a patient comes in the door of my consulting room, intentionality is expressed in one’s way of walking, one’s gestures; does one lean toward me or away? Does one talk with a half-closed mouth; and what does one’s voice say when I stop listening to the words and listen only to the tone? Not only in the therapeutic hour but in real life as well our communication has, much more than we are aware of it, the subtle character of the dance, the meaning communicated by virtue of the forms we continuously create by our bodily movements. You can tell a lot about a person by the flutter of their eyes at moments of fear, in the tremor of their mouth hovering in the verge of crying or smiling, in all these expressions, there is a language which can be more significant, and is surely more eloquent, than most spoken words. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Obviously, body language communicates much more than the bright intellectualized talking of the sophisticated patient who chatters for months in order to avoid awareness of one’s own underlying feelings. There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect. “O Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness! O Lord, wilt thou make my path straight before me! Wilt thou not place a stumbling block in my way—but that thou wouldst clear my way before me, and hedge not up my way, but the ways of mine enemy. O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is one that putteth one’s trust in a mortal or maketh flesh one’s arm. Yea, I know that God will give liberally to one that asketh. Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss; therefore I will lift up my voice unto thee; yea, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold my voice shall forever ascend unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God. Amen,” reports 2 Nephi 4.33-35. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11

His Character is a Tonic, His Future is a Dispute—Unfair an Immortality that Leaves this Neighbor Out!

I was never going to leave. I would never abandon either of you. However, now that we are gathered together, I think we can move on. There are other matters on my mind. Last night we talked about a certain quest. I made a promise. And I mean to keep it. However, I was to clarify certain things…about the quest and what we hope to gain from it. To acquire, to own, and to make a profit are the sacred and unalienable rights of the individual in the age of information. What the sources of property are does not matter; nor does possession impose any obligations on the property owners. The principle is: “Where and how my property was acquired or what I do it is nobody’s business but my own; as long as I do not violate the law, my right is unrestricted and absolute. This kind of property may be called private property (from Latin privare, “to deprive of”), because the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to deprive others of its use or enjoyment. While private ownership is supposed to be a natural and universal category, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history (including prehistory), and particularly the cultures outside Europe in which economy was not life’s main concern. In an industrial society these are: the wish to acquire property, to keep it, and to increase it, to make a profit, and those who own property are admired and envied as superior beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

 Prior to the end of the First World War, everything one owned was cherished, taken care of, and used to the very limits of its unity, and in modern times people are starting to become a society that likes to hang on to things, keep the same care for six years or more, live in the same house for thirty years or more, and keep the same career for a lifetime. People are also becoming more sincere. They do not polish their egos all the time in order to be a desirable object on the market. They do not protect their image by constantly lying, with or without knowing it; they do not expend their energy in repressing truth, as some used to. And frequently, they impress their elders by their honesty—for their elders secretly admire people who can see or tell the truth. Among them are politically and religiously oriented groups of all shadings, but also many without any particular ideology or doctrine who may say of themselves that they are just searching. While they may not have found themselves, or a goal that gives guidance to the practice of life, they are searching to be themselves instead of having and consuming. Today, millions of people in America and Europe try to find contact with tradition and with teachers who can show them the way. Quite a large number of groups and individuals are moving in the direction of being, and they represent a new trend transcending the having orientation of the majority, and they are historically significant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

It will not be the first time in history that a minority indicates the course that historical development will take. The existence of this minority gives hope for the general change in attitude from having to being. This hope is all the more real since some of the factors that made it possible for these new attitudes to emerge are historical changes that can hardly be revered: the breakdown of patriarchal supremacy over women and of parents’ domination of the young. The life pilgrimage of the human being requires developing the capacity to love outwardly and creating independently. This is no simple job to be initiated by a sudden resolution and performed in one great burst of freedom, nor is it accomplished by one big blow-up against one’s parent. Actually in real life it is a matter of long, uphill growth to new levels of integration—growth meaning not automatic process but re-education, finding new insights, making self-conscious decisions, and throughout being willing to face occasional or frequent bitter struggles. A person in psychotherapy often must work through one’s patterns for months to discover how much one has been tied without knowing it, and to see time and again that this enchainment underlies one’s inability to love, to wok, or to marry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

One then finds that the struggle to become a person in one’s own right often brings considerable anxiety and occasionally some actual terror. It is not surprising that those who are fighting to break such chains go through terrific emotional upsets and conflicts, and sometimes experience temporary madness. The conflict is in essence that of moving out from a protected, familiar place into new independence, from support to temporary isolation, while at the same time one feels one’s own anxiety and powerlessness. The struggle takes a severe (that is, neurotic) form when the individual has been unable to grow at previous stages in one’s development; thus neurotic conflicts have grown, and the eventual break is more traumatic and radical. The child must face and adjust to, by hook or crook, the World one is born into. However gradually in anyone’s development the authoritarian problem becomes internalized: the growing person takes over the rules and plants them in oneself; and one tends to act all one’s life as though one still were fighting the original forces which would enslave the individual. However, it now has become in internal conflict. Fortunately, there is a happy moral in this point: since the person has taken over the suppressive forces and keeps them going in oneself, one also has in oneself the power to get over them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

For adults, then, who are engaged in rediscovering themselves, the battle is centrally an internal one. The struggle to become a person takes place within the person oneself. None of us can avoid taking a stand against exploitative persons or external forces in the environment, to be sure, but the crucial psychological battle we must wage is that against our own dependent needs, and our anxiety and guilt feelings which will arise as we move toward freedom. The basic conflict, in fine, is between that part of the person which seeks growth, expansion and health against the part which longs to remain on an immature level, tied still to the psychological umbilical cord and receiving the pseudo-protection and pampering of the parent in exchange for independence. Intentionality is shown in the act itself. By my act I reveal myself, rather than by looking at myself. The imputation that is correlated with intentionality is not a speculative matter, but an act which, because it always involves responding, is responsible. Since the apostle Paul was attacked because of his doctrine that faith in divine forgiveness and not human action makes mortals acceptable to God, the question of faith in relation to love and action has been asked and answered in many ways. The question and answer mean something quite different if faith is understood as the belief in things without evidence or if faith is understood as the state of being ultimately concerned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

In the first case, it is natural to deny any direct dependence of love and action on faith; in the second case, love and action are implied in faith and cannot be separated from it. In spite of all distortions in the interpretation of faith, the latter is the classical doctrine however inadequately it was expressed. One is ultimately concerned only about something to which one essentially belongs and from which one is existentially separated. There is no faith, we have seen, in the quiet vision of God. However, there is infinite concern about the possibility of reaching such quiet vision. It presupposed the reunion of the separated; the drive toward the reunion of the separated is love. The concern of faith is identical with the desire of love: reunion with that to which one belongs and from which one is estranged. In the great commandment of the Old Testament, confirmed by Jesus, the object of ultimate concern, and the object of unconditional love, is God. From this is derived the love of what is God’s, represented by both the neighbor and oneself. Therefore, it is the fear of God and the love of Christ which, in the whole Biblical literature, determines the behavior toward other human beings. The consciousness of ultimate identity in the One makes identification with all beings possible and necessary. This is not the Biblical concept of love, which is person-centered, but it is love in the sense of the desire for reunion with that which one belongs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

In both types of faith, love and action are not commended as something external to faith (as it would be if faith were less than ultimate concern) but are elements of the concern itself. The separation of faith and love is always the consequence of a deterioration of religion. Is there a such thing as love without faith? There is certainly love without the acceptance of doctrines; history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines. Faith as a set of passionately accepted and defended doctrines does not produce acts of love. However, faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the separated. The question, however, remains whether or not love is possible without faith. Can a mortal love who has no ultimate concern? This is the right form of the question. The answer, of course, is that there is no human being without an ultimate concern and, in this sense, without faith. Love is present, even if hidden, in a human being; for every human being is longing for union with the content of one’s ultimate concern. As in faith, emotion is connected with the experience of love. However, this does not make love itself an emotion. Love is the power in the ground of everything that is, driving it beyond itself toward reunion with the other one and ultimately with the ground itself from which it is separated. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

 

Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown—As Genesis Recorded an Angel and a Wrestler Did Wrestle Long and Hard!

And you have such a lovely French accent, oh, yes. Where is Reese right now, Monsieur Erich? What is the name of Heaven is going on? Why are you asking questions about Meghan? You think I do not know you are behind everything that is happening? Aaliyah and Ava think you are some sort of foreign prince, with your melodious French accent and your mind reading gifts and your exorcism to rid the house of ghost and spirits. And oh, yes, Aunt Diane absolutely adored you! However, you sound more like Rasputin to me! You cannot just steal Reese from me! You cannot! (a stinging hurt spread through me, over my face, my skin. I had never felt anything quite like it.) Tennessee was back there, in the shadows, laughing cruelly, collecting just a seam of the light along the edge of his face and form. Leo was on his feet and so was Justin.) I have told you all I know. Let me see you out. But is not the path to self-awareness fraught with more vicissitudes, more peaks and precipices of difficult and conflict than implied in the past? True; and we now turn to the more dynamic aspects of becoming a person. For most people, particularly adults trying to overcome the earlier experiences which have blocked them in becoming persons in their own right, achieving consciousness of self involves struggle and conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

People find that becoming persons requires not only learning to feel, to experience and to want, as we pointed out in the past, but to fight against what prevents them from feeling and wanting. They discover that there are certain chains which hold them back. These chains, in essence, are the bonds which bind them to the parents, especially in our society to the mother. We have seen that the human being’s development is continuum of differentiation from the mass toward freedom as an individual. We have also noted that the potential person is originally a unity with the mother as a foetus in the womb, where it is fed automatically through the umbilical cord without any choice without any choice by mother or baby. When it is born and the physical umbilical cord is cut, it has become a physical individual, and feeding thereafter involves some conscious choice on the part of both parties—the infant can raise a howl in demand for food, and the mother can say Yes or No. However, the infant still is almost completely dependent on the parents, particularly the mother, who nurses him or her. One’s becoming an individual continues through an infinite number of steps—that emergence of consciousness of self with the rudimentary beginnings of responsibility and freedom, the movement out from the parental yard when one goes to school, the maturation into maturity at age of puberty, the struggles of going out on one’s own to college and in making vocational choices, the assuming of responsibility for a new family in marriage, and so on. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

All parents are imperfect. All parents, sometimes, are unjust. In some families, parent and child learn very early what acceptance of another person as oneself can bring and how forgiveness heals. In some families, the early lessons are forgotten and have to be learned anew much later. However, the point is that even when we were young children, dependence was not a one-way process. We needed much and were dependent on our parents. However, I question whether we needed more than they did. Even if they were not conscious of learning much or needing much from us, they did. And not the least of these needs was needing to be needed, needing to be able to give. All through life a person is engaged in this continuum of differentiation of oneself from the whole, followed by steps toward new integration. Indeed, all evolution can be described as the process of differentiation of the part from the whole, the individual from the mass, with the parts then relating to each other on a higher level. Since the human being, in contrast to a stone or a chemical compound, can fulfill one’s individuality only by conscious and responsible choice, one must become a psychological and ethical as well as a physical individual. In this forming of self-actualization, the newly formed self is motivated to try out new experiences, to “see what it can do.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Strictly speaking, the process of being born from the womb, cutting free from the mass, replacing dependency with choice, is involved in every decision of one’s life, and even is the issue facing one on one’s deathbed. For what is the capacity to die courageously expect the ultimate step in the continuum of learning to be on one’s own, to leave the whole? Thus every person’s life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation—how far has one freed oneself from automatic dependencies, become an individual, able then to relate to one’s fellows on the new level of self-chosen love, responsibility and creative work? The baby becomes a physical individual when the umbilical cord is severed at one’s birth, but unless the psychological umbilical cord is also in due time cut, one remains like a toddler bound to a hemlock stake in one’s parents’ front yard. He can go no farther than the length of his tethered rope. His development is blocked, and the surrendered freedom for growth turns inward and festers in resentment and anger. These are the people who, though they may seem to get along tolerably well within the ranger of the toddler’s rope, are greatly upset when they confront marriage, or when they go off to work or eventually face death. In ever crisis they tend figuratively or literally to go back to mother. As one young husband put it, “I cannot love my wife enough because I love my mother too much.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The young husband’s only error was in using the word “love” for his relation to his mother. Real love is expansive and never excludes loving others: it is only being tied to the mother which is exclusive and blocks one’s loving one’s wife. In our time the tendency to remain enchained is particularly strong, since when a society is so disrupted that it is no longer a “mother” in the sense of giving the individual minimal consistent support, he tends to cling much more closely to the physical mother of his childhood. There was once this gifted man of thirty and he was troubled with homosexual feelings, lack of any pleasurably feelings toward women but very great fears of them at the same time. He avoided intimacy with anyone, and also he was blocked in his completion of his doctoral dissertation for his graduate degree. An only child, he had developed a contempt for his father, who was weak and under the mother’s domination. The mother had often belittled the father in the boy’s presence; he once overheard her saying to the other in an argument, “You are worth more to us dead than alive, but you have always been a coward and you are afraid to take your own life.” The boy has been dressed carefully by his mother when he went to school, was not able to fight, and his mother would come to school when necessary to protect him from the rougher boys. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

When at school, the mother would intimately confide in the boy at length, telling him how much she suffered with the father, and required him to help her with her hair and make-up functions, a practice he did not enjoy. Even in college days when he returned for vacation he would be paralyzed with anxiety when hearing his mother coming up the stairs at night for fear she would come into his room when he was undressed. She had carried on an extramarital affair rather openly when he was a boy, which upset him greatly, and, as often happens in such situations, it made him much more jealous of her attentions. Later on in adolescence she tried to block his meeting girls but when he dated anyway, she endeavored to make dates for him with girls whose families could enhance her social position. When he was a boy, much was made of his piano playing and recitations in school and Sunday school. One time he greatly embarrassed his parents at Sunday-school exercises by being unable to recite the commandment “Honor thy mother and father”; and when his mother would have him play the piano at ladies’ meetings, he would forget the piece no matter how well he had known it beforehand. He was a very bright boy and had many successes in school and later gained some prestige in the armed forces, but these were treated by his mother as ways of enhancing her own prestige in the community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The reader has no doubt already noticed that his blockage in completing his doctoral work had much in common with his forgetting the piano solo; both were rebellions against his mother’s exploitation of his success. For one way to defend yourself against someone’s exploiting your success is to accomplish nothing which the other could take away. The mother’s frequent letters to him at the time of his therapy were long complaints and descriptions of her minor heart attacks, together with outright requests that he come home and take responsibility for her and hints that she would have another attack if he did not show more interest. The problems of this young man, which we have described in a somewhat oversimplified way, are in several ways typical of many young men in our society. First, he suffered from lack of feeling, confusion of his role in pleasure of the flesh and a lack of potency—both for passionate adult intimacy and in his work. A second relatively typical aspect is the family pattern. It will be noted that this family is significantly different from the patriarchal families which Dr. Freud had in mind when he first formulated his Oedipus doctrine. In our young man’s family the mother was the dominating figure, the father was weak and pictured as somewhat contemptible to the son. Another aspect is the boy had been favored by the mother, made prince consort and placed in the father’s position, this preferential treatment to continue so long as the boy pleased the mother. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” The young man derived no real sense of security and power from his position on the throne, for he was there not because of his own strength but as a puppet of the mother. The classical Oedipus portrait is present in this case, to be sure, but with important differences: the boy is deathly afraid of castration (losing his power), but it is the mother who castrates him, not the father. The father is not much of a rival—the mother has seen to that. The son has had no figure of masculine strength to identify with, so he lacks that normal source of the experience of power for a growing boy. So, this is not really a classical Oedipus case, it seems to be one that the mother has tried to manufacture possible to make her son a homosexual. As a substitute for this lack of power he has only his mother’s adulation, pampering and domineering attention. As would be expected, such a young man had frequent dreams of being literally a prince. His narcissism was very great, for it had to compensate for his actual, inner feeling that he was almost completely powerless. He could rebel a little against his mother by not accomplishing things and by occasional verbal spats, but this was only the passive protest of a slave towards it master. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is not in the slightest surprising that this man should be deathly afraid of women; nor is it surprising that he should be in so much inward conflict that he would be able to move ahead in work, love, or any intimacy with person. What is the way out of such a morbid intertwining? Of course a child can temporarily withdraw, seeking to protect oneself from exploitation by making oneself as little as possible, and thus try to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. One young man, looking back on a boyhood in which he was caught in the cross fire between a weak, alcoholic father and a dominating, martyr-type mother described in a poem how he saw himself in those early years, “You stand there by the table, still clutching your teddy bear…making it so small they will fail to find it. Then you are left alone to defend what they did not want—not being able to find it.” Or—and this generally occurs later—he can try to take arms against a sea of troubles, and struggle actively to achieve his freedom as a person in his own right. I wish now to give some examples from psychoanalysis of the problem of intentionality. Take the fascinating instance of a patient who cannot perceive some obvious thing not because anything is wrong with his eyes or his neurological functioning or anything of that sort, but because the intentionality in which he is trapped makes it impossible for him to see. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

A patient of mine presented data the very first session that his mother tried to end her pregnancy with him before he was born, that she then gave him over to a midwife aunt to raise the first two years of his life, after which she left him in an orphan’s home promising to visit him every Sunday, but rarely putting in an appearance. Now if I were to say to him—being naïve enough to think it would do some good—“Your mother hated you,” he would hear the words but they might well have no meaning whatever for him. Sometimes a vivid and impressive thing happens—such a patient cannot even hear the word, such as hate, even though the therapist repeats it. Supposed my patient is a psychologist or psychiatrist. He might then remark, “I realize all of this seems to say my mother did not want me, did not love me, but those are simply foreign words to me.” He is not prevaricating or playing a gam of hide-and-seek with me. It is simply a fact: the patient cannot permit himself to perceive the trauma until he is ready to take a stand toward it. This experience is surely not foreign to anyone: we sense that we shall be fired from our job, that someone we love will die imminently. However, what goes on is a curious inner conversation with ourselves, “I know I will be able to see this later on, but I cannot see it now.” This is simply a way of saying, “I know it is true, but I cannot yet permit myself to see it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The World can be too overwhelming if we are not able to take a stand toward a traumatic happening but also are unable to escape seeing it. Schizophrenia is one reaction to such a dilemma. Sometimes the therapist makes the mistake of setting out to drum into the patient’s head an obvious truth which the patient has not been able to admit—for example, telling a woman that she does not love her baby. What often happens then is that the patient, is she does not quit therapy, develops some other, probably worse, block between herself and reality. Intentionality presupposes such an intimate relationship with the World that we would not be able to go on existing expect if we could block the World out at times. This should not be called simply by the condemnatory term resistance. I do not doubt the reality of resistance, as Dr. Freud and others elucidated it, but I am emphasizing here a broader, structural phenomenon. That is, every intention is an attention, and attention is I-can. We are, therefore, unable to give attention to something until we are able in some way to experience an “I-can” with regard to it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The same principle is evident, also in exceedingly interesting ways, in memory. Patients often need one or two years of analysis before they can remember some obvious events in their childhood. When they suddenly do recall the event, has their memory gotten better? Of course not. However, what has happened is a change in the patient’s relation to one’s World, generally by way of one’s increased capacity to trust the therapist and, accordingly, oneself, or there is a reduction of one’s neurotic anxiety for other reasons. One’s relation to intentionality—in contrast to one’s mere conscious intention, which was assumedly there to being with—has changed. Memory is a function of intentionality. Memory is like perception in this regard; the patient cannot remember something until one is ready to take some stand toward it. Recovery of childhood memories is not the cause but the result of analysis. All of this hinges on the inseparability of knowing and willing, of cognition and conation, which we see nowhere more clearly than in psychotherapy. Patients some for therapy because they are aware that they cannot actin their lives because they do not know—are not aware of drives from their unconscious, do not know their own mechanisms, have never become conscious of the childhood genesis of these mechanisms, and so on. However, if this is the only approach, the patient will be possessed by the couch for eight or nine years, never acting because one does not yet know enough; and psychoanalysis becomes systematic training in indecision. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, it is also an error for therapy to reach in the opposite direction, as several schools have done of late, and insist that the function of the therapist is to clarify reality for the patient and get one to act accordingly. This makes the therapist the psychic police force of the society, whose job is to help the patient conform to the mores of our particular historical period—about which it can only be said that, if they are still viable at all, they are of exceedingly dubious merit. Our only way to avoid both errors is to move the problem to the deeper plane of intentionality. My thesis here is that the function of psychoanalysis should be to push intention toward the deeper, wider, organic dimension of intentionality. Has it not been always the function of psychoanalysis to demonstrate that there is a purely conscious intention, that we—whether we literally are murderers or not—are always pushed by the irrational, soul, dynamic forces of the dark side of life? Deliberation has been dethroned as the motive for actions. Whatever we do, infinitely more than our rational reasons and justification is involved. Psychoanalysis gives the data that makes the necessary distinction, as well as the necessary connection, between intention and intentionality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

We must now pause to distinguish intentionality from purpose or voluntarism. Intentionality is a form of epistemology, which neither purpose nor voluntarism are. Intentionality involves response, which neither purpose nor voluntarism do. Not solipsistic, intentionality is an assertive response of the person to the structure of one’s World. Intentionality gives the basis which makes purpose and voluntarism possible. A patient’s voluntary intention, so far as one is aware of it, may be to get one’s hours with me on time, to tell me this or that important thing that has happened to one, to relax and be completely honest. However, one’s unconscious intentions, in contrast, my well be to please me by playing the role of the good patient, or to impress me with how brilliant one’s free links are, or to force my unconditioned attention by describing what catastrophic things one may do to oneself and others. Intention is a psychological state; I can set myself voluntarily to do this or that. Intentionality is what underlies both conscious and unconscious intentions. It refers to a state of being and involves, to a greater or lesser degree, the totality of the person’s orientation to the World at that time. And what is most interesting is the times in psychotherapy when strong voluntary intention—correlated with will power—blocks the way to the person’s intentionality, and is just what keep the patient from communicating with the deeper dimensions of one’s experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Our William James, struggling there in bed with his Victorian will power and remaining paralyzed for as long as he struggled, is an engaging example. And as long as he struggled in that way, we could be sure that he would remain paralyzed. “You should work out your salvation with fear before God, and do not deny the coming of Christ; Contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but you receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that you humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place you may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that you live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he does bestow upon you. Be watchful unto prayer continually, that you may not be led away by the temptation of the devil, that he may not overpower you, that you may not become his subjects at the last day; for behold, he rewards you no good thing. And now my beloved people, I would exhort you to have patience, and that you bear with all manner of affliction that you do not revile against those who do cast you out because of your exceeding poverty, lest you become sinners like unto them; but that you have patience, and bear with those afflictions, with a firm hope that you shall one day rest from all your afflictions,” reports Alma 34.37-41. Intentionality, as I am using the term, goes below levels of immediate awareness, and includes spontaneous, bodily elements and other dimension which are usually called unconscious. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The fact that intention can reach down to the unconscious has beneficial as well as negative implications. For example, my intention at this moment is to put these ideas, which seem important to me, into readable form and to finish this essay in the not-too-distant future. However, unless I am participating in an intentionality which is more than that—for instance, unless I am committed to writing as good and true an essay as I can—I shall accomplish only a pedestrian job. I shall produce nothing of genuine significance or originality. For in my pressure to get the assignment done, I will be blocking off new ideas which might well up in me, new insights and forms emerging from the preconscious and unconscious dimensions of experience. Intention goes with conscious purpose. However, the gift of psychoanalysis is the depth dimension, a contribution which vastly enlarges intention, and indeed pushed it from a conscious purpose to the more total, organic, feeling and wishing mortal, the mortal who is the product of one’s past as well as moving toward the future. Psychoanalysis will not let intention rest as simple intention, but pushes it to the deeper, wider, organic plane of intentionality. “You cannot hide your crimes from God; and except you repent they will stand as a testimony against you at the last day. Repent and forsake your sins, and go no more after the lusts of your eyes,” reports Alma 39.8-9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

We have said that intentionality gives the underlying structure for wishing and willing. Speaking psychoanalytically, intentionality gives the structure within which repression and the blocking off of conscious intention takes place. Dr. Freud made it undeniably clear, in his use of free association, that associations which seem merely random are not at all random. In free association, the thoughts and memories and fantasies take their form, their pattern, their meaningful theme (which the patient, or any one of us engaging in free association not on the couch but in normal thinking and creativity, may not at all catch at the moment) from the fact that they are his fantasies, his manifestations, coming out of his way of perceiving the World and his commitments and problems. It is only afterwards that the person himself can see and absorb the meaning that has been in these apparently random, disconnected things he is say. Free association is a technique of going beyond mere conscious intention and giving oneself over to the realm of intentionality. It is in the basic, more inclusive realm of intentionality that these deeper meanings lie; but it is also here where we find the patient’s reasons for his repression in the first place. I believe that the long-run impact of Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis will be to deepen and enlarge our understanding of intentionality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The report of my death is grossly exaggerated. After each of these death-notices, psychoanalysis has gained new followers and co-workers and had created for itself new organs. Surely to be reported dead is an advance over being treated with dead silences! The motive for the circumstances is already there, a few investigators who, without being physicians, have made the application of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences their lifework. This hint began those investigations about myths. And naturally, opposition was not lacking from those who are not acquainted with analysis, and expressed itself with the same lack of understanding and passionate rejection as on the native soil of psychoanalysis. It never occurred to some to rail against a few unworthy individuals, fortune hunters and plunders, such as in time of war are always found on both sides. For I knew how to account for the behavior of these opponents and had besides discovered that psychoanalysis brings light to the worst in every mortal. I sang the song of the tall ones, the long-extinct ones, come again to form a colony, lost somewhere in the modern World. Gentle beings, out of time, out of place, and maybe out of luck. And of such tragic important to my fledgling and her human kindred. Do not make me say so much that other immortals might gather up my intent and use it to bad ends. Envision bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where coveted one’s can dwell. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

 

What is Given to the Eyes is the Intention of the Soul as the Soul is the Tension of the Body

I have given them every opportunity. Every type of advancement and profit sharing as well, but they want me in residence. They want my authority. Learning is not the accumulation of scraps of knowledge. It is a growth, where every act of knowledge develops the learner, thus making one capable of constituting ever more and more complex objectivities—and the object growth in complexity parallels the subjective growth in capacity. As we have been exploring the deeper significance of wish, we have noticed that a curious theme has been constantly emerging. Something more is going in a wish than meets the eye. This theme is implied when we speak of the autonomous element in wishing, or when we speak of the wish to imagination and spontaneity. And the theme is present especially when we consider the meaning of the wish, that aspect of the wish in human beings that goes beyond mere force and is expressed in language, art, and other symbols. The same theme was also present as the big “X” which James leaped over in his illustration of getting out of bed on a cold morning. Among the most common inner conflicts are those that are hard to resolve in any reasonable manner. Everyone has had to face the frustrations of wanting to hurt someone one likes, feeling guilty because of pleasures of the flesh they are feeling towards someone beyond their reach, aching to achieve certain unattainable goals, or feeling unworthy because one’s wishes to exploit others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

There is nothing in World more pitiful than an irresolute mortal, oscillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two, and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them. Most real-life situations cannot be neatly summarized. This is because there are important elements in the conflict that draw the person toward choice, but each good thing seems to be balanced by a disadvantage. One solution to such a conflict is to take the bad with the good. Another, of course, is to stay away from the entire situation, losing the benefits as well as the punishment. Making a choice can be so difficult, creates so much stress, that individuals experiences decidophobia—a fear of making a decision. Unless you are a very rare bird, you have undoubtedly experienced this particular phobia. In come people, it can get to be a pattern in which they never seem to be able to resolve any of their problems. This theme, running through our discussion like an obligato, is intentionality. By intentionality, I mean the structure which gives meaning to experience. It is not to be identified with intentions, but is the dimension which underlies them; it is mortal’s capacity to have intentions. It is our imaginative participation in the coming day’s possibilities in James’s example out of which comes the awareness of our capacity to form, to mold, to change ourselves and the day in relation to each other. James’s reverie as he lay in bed is a beautiful, albeit denied, expression of it. Intentionality is at the heart of consciousness. I believe that it is also the key to the problem of wish and will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

First, what does the term mean? We shall define it in two stages; the preliminary stage is the fact that our intentions are decisive with respect to how we perceive the World. This afternoon, for instance, I go up to see a house in the mountains. Suppose, first, that I am looking for a place which come friends can rent for the Summer months. When I approach the house, I shall question whether it is sound and well-built, gets enough Sun, and other things having the meaning of shelter to me. Or suppose that I am a real estate speculator: then what will strike me will be how easily the house can be fixed up, whether it will bring a price attractively higher than what I shall have to pay for it, and other things meaning profit. Or let us say that it is the house of friends I am visiting: then I shall look at it with eyes which see it as hospitality—its open patio and easy chairs which will make our afternoon talk more pleasant. Or, if this is a cocktail party at the house of friends who have snubbed me at a party at my house, I find myself feeing things that indicate that anyone would prefer my cottage to theirs, and other aspects of the invidious envy and social state for which we human beings are notorious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Or, finally, if this afternoon I am outfitted with my watercolor materials and bent on doing a sketch, I shall see how the house clings to the side of the mountain, the pattern of the lines of the roof leading up to the peaks above and sweeping away into the valley below, and, indeed, now I even prefer the house without too many fancy features for the greater artistic possibilities this give me. In each one of these five instances, it is the same house that provides the stimulus, and I am the same mortal responding to it. However, in each case, the house and experience have an entirely different meaning. However, this is only one side of intentionality. The other side is that it also does come from the object. Intentionality is the bridge between these. It is the structure of meaning which makes it possible for us, subjects that we are, to see and understand the outside World, objective as it is. In intentionality, the dichotomy between subject and object is partially overcome. The concept seems to me so important, and has been so neglected in contemporary psychology, that I ask the reader to go with me into an exploration of its meaning. What is given to the eyes [in our terms, what is perceived] is the intention of the soul. The soul is the tension of the body. It then meant how we know reality, that is, it was an epistemology. Two kinds of intentionality were made distinct: intensio primo, referring to knowing particular things—that is, objects which actually exist; and intensio secundo, the relations of these objects to general concepts—that is, knowing by conceptualization. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

All of this presupposes that we could not know a thing unless we already, in some way, participated in it. Intentionality is what the is what the intellect grasps about the thing understood. The intellect through a species of being informed in the act of intelligence through a species of being informed in the act of intelligence, forms itself some intention of the understood thing. In the process of knowing, we are in-formed by the thing understood, and in the same act, our intellect simultaneously gives form to the thing we understand. What is important here is the word in-form, or forming in. To tell someone something, to in-form one, is to form one—a process that can sometimes become very powerful in psychotherapy by the therapist’s saying just one sentence, or one word, at the right moment. How different this is from the indoctrination many of us got in graduate school, that information is simply dry data, external to us, which we manipulate! Intentionality thus begins as an epistemology, a way of knowing reality. It carries the meaning of reality as we know it. The mind is not simply passive clay on which sensations write, or something which merely absorbs and classifies facts. What really happens is that objects themselves conform to our ways of understanding. A good example of this is mathematics. These are constructs in our minds; but nature conforms, “answers,” to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical World, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. The human mind is an active, forming participant in what it knows. Understanding, itself, is then constitutive of its World. Consciousness is defined by the fact that it intends something, points toward something outside itself—specifically, that it intends the object. Thus, intentionality gives meaningful contents to consciousness. There are not-too-rare cases of the influence of the ideas of one mortal on another in such a germane way that they become part and parcel of the second mortal’s thought and may seem to have always been in his or hers. Intentionality is built into the warp and woof to free association, dreams, and fantasies. Consciousness never exists in a subjective vacuum but is always consciousness of something. Consciousness not only cannot be separated from its objective World, but, indeed constitutes its World. The upshot is that meaning is an intention of the mind. The act and experience of consciousness itself is a continuous molding and remolding of our World, self related to objects and objects to self in inseparable ways, self participating in the World as well as observing it, neither pole of self or World being conceivable without the other. This, of course, does not mean that we cannot bracket for the moment the subjective or objective side of the experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

When I measure my house to see how paint it will take to repaint it, or when I get a report on some endocrinological tests on my child, I bracket for the moment how I feel about it: I want only to understand as clearly as I can these measurements. However, then my responsibility is to put these objective facts back into the context in which they have meaning for me—my project to paint my house, or my caring for the health of my child. I believe that one of our serious errors in psychology is to bracket out part of experience and never put it back together again. If faith is the state of being ultimately concerned, all preliminary concerns are subject to it. The ultimate concern gives depth, direction and unity to all other concerns and, with them, to the whole personality. A personal life which has these qualities is integrated, and the power of a personality’s integration is one’s faith. It must be repeated at this point that such an assertion would be absurd if faith were wat it is in its distorted meaning, the belief in things without evidence. Yet the assertion is not absurd, but evident, if faith is ultimate concern. Ultimate concern is related to all sides of reality and to all sides of human personality. The ultimate is one object beside others, and the ground of all others. As the ultimate is the ground of everything that is, so ultimate concern is the integrating center of the personal life. Being without it is being with a center. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

When a person has lost their essence, such a state can only be approached but never fully reached, because a human being deprived completely of a center would cease to be a human being. For this reason once cannot admit that there is any mortal without an ultimate concern or without faith. The center unites all elements of a mortal’s personal life, the bodily, the unconscious, the conscious, the spiritual ones. In the act of faith every nerve of mortal’s body, every striving of mortal’s soul, every function of mortal’s spirit participates. However, body, soul, spirit, are not three parts of mortal. They are dimensions of mortal’s being, always within each other; for mortals is a unity and not composed of parts. Faith, therefore, is not a matter of the mind in isolation, or of the soul in contrast to mind and body, or of the body (in the sense of terrestrial faith), but is the centered movement of the whole personality toward something of ultimate meaning and significance. Ultimate concern is passionate concern; it is a matter of infinite passion. Passion is not real without a bodily basis, even if it is the most spiritual passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

In every act of genuine faith the body participates, because genuine faith is a passionate act. “Behold, when the time cometh that they shall dwindle in unbelief, after they have received so great blessings from the hand of the Lord—having a knowledge of the creation of the Earth, and all mortals, knowing the great and marvelous works of the Lord from the creation of the World; having power given them to do all things by faith; having all the commandments from the beginning, and having been brought by his infinite goodness into this precious land of promise—behold, I say, if the day shall come that they will reject the Holy One of Israel, the true Messiah, their Redeemer and their God, behold, the judgments of him that is just shall rest upon them,” reports 2 Nephi 1.10. The way in such the soul participates is manifold. The body can participate both in vital ecstasy and in asceticism leading to spiritual ecstasy. However, whether in vital fulfillment or vital restriction, the body participates in the life of faith. The same is true of the unconscious strivings, the so-called instincts of mortal’s psyche. They determine the choice of symbols and types of faith. Therefore, every community of faith tries to shape the unconscious strivings of its members, especially of the new generations. “My heart hath been weighed down with sorrow from time to time, for I have feared, lest for the hardness of your hearts the Lord your God should come out in the fulness of his wrath upon you, that ye be cut off and destroyed forever,” reports 2 Nephi 1.17. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Still, that is not the only fear I have been hiding in my heart, it is not the only burden that has been troubling my soul. I worry “that a cursing should come upon you for the space of many generations; and ye are visited by sword, and by famine, and are hated, and are le according to the will and captivity of the Devil. These things might come upon you, but you are a choice and favored people of the Lord. However, behold, his (God’s) will be done; for his ways are righteousness forever,” reports 2 Nephi 1.18-19. If the faith of somebody expresses itself in symbols which are adequate to one’s unconscious strivings, these strivings cease to be chaotic. They do not need repression, because they have received sublimation and are untied with the conscious activities of the person. Faith also directs mortal’s conscious life by giving it a central object of con-centration. The disrupting trends of mortal’s consciousness are one of the great problems of all personal life. If a uniting center is absent, the infinite variety of the encountered World, as well as of the inner movements of the human mind, is able to produce or complete disintegration of the personality. There can be no other uniting center than the ultimate concern of the mind. There are various ways in which faith unites mortal’s mental life and gives it a dominating center. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Faith can be the way of discipline which regulates the daily life; it can be the way of prayer and contemplation; it can be the way of concentration on the ordinary work, or on a special aim or on another human being. In each case, faith is presupposed; none of it could be done without faith. Mortal’s spiritual function, artistic creation, scientific knowledge, ethical formation and political organization are consciously or unconsciously expressions of an ultimate concern which gives passion and creative love to them, making them inexhaustible in depth and untied in aim. We have shown how faith determines and unites all elements of personal life, how and why it is its integrating power. In doing so we have painted a picture of what faith can do. However, we have not brought into this picture the forces of disintegration and disease which prevent faith from creating a fully integrated personal life, even in those who represent the power of faith most conspicuously, the saint, the great mystics, the prophetic personalities. Mortals are integrated only fragmentarily and have elements of disintegration or disease in all dimensions of one’s being.  There is a close, inner relationship between caring and intentionality, suggested already by the fact that the root word “tend”—to take care of—is the center of the term intentionality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

A word itself embodies a cumulative, creative wisdom in that it is the product of centuries of molding, forming, and re-forming on the part of an infinite number of people who are trying to communicate something important to themselves and to the fellow members of their culture. Let us see what help we can find in understanding intentionality and its related terms intend and intention by tracking down their etymological sources. All of these terms come from Latin Stem intendere, which consists of in plus tendere, tensum, the latter, interestingly enough, meaning to stretch, and from which we get our word tension. This tells us immediately that intention is a stretching toward something. Now a fact which may be surprising to many readers, as it was to me, is that the first meaning given for intend in Webster’s does not have to do with purpose or design, as when we say, “I intend to do something,” but is rather, to mean, signify. Only secondly does Webster give the definition to have in mind a purpose or a design. Most people in our voluntaristic Victorian tradition have tended to skip over the primary and central meaning and to use the concept only in its derivative meaning of conscious design and purpose. And since our psychology soon became able to prove that such conscious designs and purposes were mostly illusions and that we are not at all creatures of these nice, freely-chosen, voluntary plans, we were constrained to throw out the whole package of intents with the caboodle of intentions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We had known already that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and we now saw that these intentions, good or bad, were figments of our own self-conceit anyway. However, if you change self-conceit to self-concern and realize that there is no knowledge or act at all without this self-concern—that everything has its concern or intent in it, and that we know our World by virtue of these intents—if you make these sifts from the pejorative to the absolute form of the same words, how different the implication is! The more significant aspect of intention is its relation to meaning. We use this in one form in the legal phrase asking: What is the intent of the law? when referring to its meaning. Intent is the turning of the mind toward an object, hence a design, purpose. The design and purpose come after the hence. That is to say, the voluntaristic aspects of the experience are possessed in the fact that already the mind is turned toward an object which has a certain import and meaning for us. All the way through this etymology is, of course, that little word tend. It refers to movement toward something—tend toward tendency. To me, it seems to be the core of our whole quest; its presence there in the center is a perpetual reminder that our meanings are never purely intellectual or our acts purely result of pushes from the past; but in both we are moving toward something. And mirabile dictu, the word also means, as we briefly say, to take care of—we tend our sheep and cattle, and we tend to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Thus, when I declare, “Meaning is an intention of the mind,” I include both the meaning and the act, the movement toward something. I point out this dual meaning in the German language: the word meinung which signifies either opinion or meaning, has the same stem as the Germany verb meinen, to intend. In pondering the English language at this point, I was surprised—being brought up to think that the objective fact was the epitome of everything and occupied the place next to God is not indeed His Throne itself—to find that we also have that dual import. When I say, “I mean the BMW is black,” you take my sentence as giving you merely a statement of fact; it is a unilateral equivalence, “A” is “B.” However, when I say, “I mean to turn the corner, but the car says it is not recommended,” you take my mean as my intention, a statement of my commitment and conviction. Only later will we see if I can make it come true. Therefore, every meaning has within it a commitment. And this does not refer to the use of my muscles after I get an idea in order to accomplish the idea. And most of all, it does not refer to what a behaviorist might say on reading these paragraphs, “Just as we have always said—the consciousness is only in the act anyway, and we might as well study only the muscular action, the behavior, to start with.” No, our analysis leads to exactly the opposite conclusion, that a sheer movement of the muscles, as the larynx in talking, is exactly what you do not have. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

You have, rather, a human being intending something. And you cannot understand the overt behavior expect as you see it in relation to, and as an expression of, its intention. Meaning has no meaning apart from intention. Each act of consciousness tends toward something, is a turning of the person toward something, and has within it, no matter how latent, some push toward a direction for action. Cognition, or knowing, and conation, or willing, then go together. We could not have one without the other. This is why commitment is so important. If I do not will something, I could never know it; and if I do not know it; and if I do not know something, I would never have any content for my willing. In this sense, it can be said directly that mortals make their own meaning. Note that I do not say that they only makes one’s meaning, or that it is not dialectically related at every instant to reality; I say that if one is not engaged in making one’s meaning, one will never know reality. My task, so far, has been to define the concept of intentionality. I have emphasized that it contains both our knowing and our forming reality, and that these are inseparable from each other. From the point of view of intentionality, James’s reverie as he is compelled in bed is entirely sensible, and his sudden act of getting up is not at all a will-o’-the-wisp lucky instant or fortunate happening, but an understandable and reliable expression of his connection with the day’s events. It is his imaginative participation in the day and the events of the day, which is reaching out to him, grasping him, that accomplishes the getting up. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

One can also say that the integrating power of faith has healing power. This statement, however, needs comment in view of linguistic and actual distortions of the relation of faith and healing. Linguistically (and materially) one must distinguish the integrating power of faith from what has been called faith healing. Faith healing, as the term is actually used, is the attempt to heal others or oneself by mental concentration on the healing power in others or in oneself. There is such healing power in nature and mortals, and it can be strengthened by mental acts. In a non-depreciating sense one could speak of the use of magic power; and certainly there is healing magic in human relationships as well as in the relation to oneself. It is a daily experience and sometimes one that is astonishing in its intensity and success. However, one should not use the word faith for it, and one should not confuse it with the integrating power of an ultimate concern. The integrating power of faith in a concrete situation is dependent on the subjective and objective factors. The subjective factor is the degree to which a person is open for the power of faith, and how strong and passionate is his ultimate concern. Such openness is what religion calls grace. It is given and cannot be produced intentionally. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The objective factor is the degree to which a faith has conquered its idolatrous elements and is directed toward the really ultimate. Idolatrous faith has a definite dynamic: it can be extremely passionate and exercise a preliminary integrating power. It can heal and unite the personality, including its soul and body. The gods of polytheism have shown healing power, not only in a magic way but also in terms of genuine reintegration. The objects of modern secular idolatry, such as nation and success, have shown healing power, not only by the magic fascination of a leader, a slogan or a promise but also by the fulfillment of otherwise unfulfilled strivings for a meaningful life. However, the basis of the integration is too narrow. Idolatrous faith breaks down sooner or later and the disease is worse than before. The one limited element which has been elevated to ultimacy is attacked by other limited elements. The mind is split, even if each of these elements represents a high value. The fulfillment of the unconscious drives does not last; they are repressed or explode chaotically. The concentration of the mind vanishes because the object of concentration has lost its convincing character. Spiritual creativity shows an increasingly shallow and empty character, because no infinite meaning gives depth to it. The passion of faith is transformed into the suffering of unconquered doubt and despair, and in many cases into an escape to neurosis and psychosis. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Idolatrous faith has more disintegrating power than indifference, just because it is fait and produces a transitory integration. This is the extreme danger of misguided, idolatrous faith, and the reason why the prophetic Spirit is above all the Spirit which fights against the idolatrous distortion of faith. The healing power of faith raises the question of its relation to other agencies of healing. We have already referred to an element of magic influence from mind to mind without referring to the medical art, its scientific presuppositions and its technical methods. There is an overlapping of all agencies of healing and none of them should claim exclusive validity. Nevertheless, it is possible conceptually to limit each of them to a special function. Perhaps one can say that the healing power of faith is related to the whole personality, independent of any special disease of body or mind, and effective positively or negatively in every moment of one’s life. It precedes, accompanies and follows all other activities of healing. However, it does not suffice alone in the development of the personality. In finitude and estrangement mortals are not a whole, but are disrupted into different elements. Each of these elements can disintegrate independently of other elements. Parts of the body can become sick, without producing mental disease; and the mind can become sick without visible bodily failures. In some forms of mental sickness, especially neurosis, and in almost all forms of bodily disease the spiritual life can remain completely healthy and even gain in strength. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Therefore, medical art must be used wherever such separated elements of the whole of the personality are disintegrating for external or internal reasons. This is true of mental as well as bodily medicine. And there is no conflict between them and the healing power of the state of ultimate concern. It is also clear that medical activities, including mental healing, cannot produce a reintegration of the personality as a whole. Only faith can do this. The tension between the two agencies of health would disappear if both sides knew their special functions and their special limits. Then they would not be worried about the third agency, the healing by magic concentration on the powers of healing. They would accept its help while revealing at the same time its great limitations. There are as many types of integrated personalities as there are types of faith. There is also the type of integration which unites many characteristics of the different types of personal integration. It was this kind of personality which was created by early Christianity, and missed again and again in the history of the Church. Its character cannot be described from the point of view of faith alone; it leads to the questions of faith and love, and of faith and action. “And because of the intercession for all, all mortals come unto God; wherefore, they stand in the presence of him, to be judged of him according to the truth and holiness which is in him. I leave unto you a blessing, yea, even my first blessing,” reports 2 Nephi 2.9 and 10 and 2 Nephi 1. 28. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Having a family who want the worse for you and that you cannot trust is the biggest cruse in the World, worse than death. Count your blessings. Even if they are not the richest people, be happy they love and protect you. Eventually the tables turn, even in corruption, destiny has to take place, there is a wheel and sometimes you are low and other times you are high, hopefully you get a nice long spin on the high road to balance it out. Do not bother telling people the painful things you feel towards them, just hold on to it and release it in constructive ways. Talk to a friend or something. When people do bad things, especially to good people, it eventually has to reflect on their sou and one day they will know they need to seek forgiveness. All the money and possessions in the World cannot replace love and chances are bad people are not well loved anyway. They are all drying out from all of their emotions.  As long as you try as hard as you can to be a good person and do the right thing is what matters. And stay sober. Like First Lady Nancy Reagan preached in the 1980s, “Just say no to drugs.” Enjoying reality with a clear mind is the best thing. We need to see things as they are and find safe ways to deal with things that can be unpleasant. “The is the work and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20