Humans do not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes they have to eat them. I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. The greatest compliment that was ever paid to me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said. In the Autumn of 1964, I was invited to be a speaker in a lecture series at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the leading scientific institutions in the World. Most of the speakers were from the physical sciences. The audience attracted by the series was known to be a highly educated and sophisticated group. The speakers were encouraged to put on demonstrations, if possible, of their subjects, whether astronomy, microbiology, or theoretical physics. I was asked to speak on the subject of communication. As I started collecting references and jotting down ideas for the talk, I became very dissatisfied with what I was doing. The thought of a demonstration kept running through my mind, and then being dismissed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The speech that follows shows how I resolved the problem of endeavouring to communicate, rather than just to speak about the subject of communication. I have some knowledge about communication and could assemble more. When I first agreed to give this talk, I planned to gather such knowledge and organize it into a lecture. The more I thought over this plan, the less satisfied I was with it. Knowledge about is not the most important thing in the behavioural sciences today. There is a decided surge of experiential knowing, or knowing at a gut level, which has to do with the human being. At this level of knowing, we are in a realm where we are not simply talking of cognitive and intellectual learnings, which can nearly always be rather readily communicated in verbal terms. Instead we are speaking of something more experiential, something having to with the whole person, visceral reactions and feelings as well as thoughts and words. Consequently, I decided I would like, rather than talking about communication, to communicate with you at a feeling level. This is not easy. I think it is usually possible only in small groups where one feels genuinely accepted. I have been frightened at the thought of attempting it with a large group. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Indeed when I learned how large the group was to be, I gave up the whole idea. Since then, with encouragement from my wife, I have returned to I and decided to make such an attempt. One of the things which strengthened me in my decision is the knowledge that these Caltech lectures have a long tradition of being given as demonstrations. In any of the usual senses what follows is not a demonstration. Yet I hope that in some sense this may be a demonstration of communication which is given, and also received, primarily at a feeling and experiential level. What I would like to do is very simple indeed. I would like to share with you some of the things I have learned for myself in regard to communication. These are personal learnings growing out of my own experience. I am not attempting at all to say that you should learn or do these same things but I feel that if I can report my own experience honestly enough, perhaps you can check what I say against your own experience and decide as to its truth of falsity for you. In my own two-way communication with others there have been experiences that have made me feel pleased and warm and good and satisfied. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

There have been other experiences that to some extent at the time, and even more so afterward, have made me feel dissatisfied and displeased and more distant and less contented with myself. I would like to convey some of these things. Another way of putting this is that some of my experiences in communicating with others have made me feel expanded, larger, enriched, and have accelerated my growth. Very often in these experiences I feel that the other person has had similar reactions and that one too has been enriched, that one’s development and one’s functioning have moved forward. Then there have been other occasions in which the growth or development of each of us has been diminished or stopped or even reversed. I am sure it will be clear in what I have to say that I would prefer my experiences in communication to have a growth-promoting effect, both on me and on the other, and that I should like to avoid those communication experiences in which both I and the other person feel diminished. “It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give a human a few lines of verse and one thinks one is the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the World can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you, in slime up to your lip,” (pages 111-112 of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury). #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

“Well, that is one way to get an audience. Hold a gun on a man and force him to listen to your speech. Speech away. What will it be this time? Why do not you belch Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob? ‘There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am arm’s so strong in honesty that they pass by me as an idle wind, which I respect not!’ How is that? Go ahead now, you second-hand litterateur, pull the trigger.” The first simple feeling I want to share with you is my enjoyment when I can really hear someone. I think perhaps this has been a long-standing characteristic of mine. I can remember this in my early grammar school days. A child would ask the teacher a question and the teacher would give a perfectly good answer to a completely different question. A feeling of pain and distress would always strike me. My reaction was, “But you did not hear him!” I felt a sort of childish despair at the lack of communication which was (and is) so common. “Even if the street were entirely empty, of course, you could not be sure of a safe crossing, for a car could appear suddenly over the rise four blocks further on and be on and past you before you had taken a dozen breaths,” (page 120 of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury). I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone, it puts me in touch with one; it enriches my life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

When we are affectively communicating, it is through hearing people that I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships. There is another peculiar satisfaction in really hearing someone: It is like listening to the music of the spheres, because beyond the immediate message of the person, no matter what that might be, there is the universal. Hidden in all of the personal communications which I really hear there seem to be orderly psychological laws, aspects of the same order we find in the Universe as a whole. So there is both the satisfaction of feeling one’s self in touch with what is universally true. You cannot bark at a person like a mechanical hound with a breath of neon vapour. When I say that I enjoy hearing someone, I mean, of course, hearing deeply. I mean that I hear the words the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that is possessed buried and unknow far below the surface of the person. So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person’s inner World? #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Can I resonate to what one is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings one is afraid of yet would like to communicate, as well as those one knows? I think, for example, of an interview I had with an adolescent boy. Like many an adolescent today he was saying at the outset of the interview that he had no goals. When I questioned him on this, he insisted even more strongly that he had no goals whatsoever, not even one. I said, “There is not anything you want to do?” “Nothing…Well, yeah, I want to keep on living.” I remember distinctly my feeling at that moment. I resonated very deeply to this phrase. He might simply be telling me that, like everyone else, he wanted to live. On the other hand, he might be telling me—and this seemed to be a definite possibility—that at some point the question of whether or not to live had been a real issue with him. So I tried to resonate to hum at all levels. I did not know for certain what the message was. I simply wanted to be open to any of the meanings that he might at one time have considered suicide. My being willing and able to listen to him at all levels is perhaps one of the things that made it possible for him to tell me, before the end of the interview, that not long before he had been on the point of blowing his brains out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

 This little episode is an example of what I mean by wanting to really hear someone at all levels at which he is endeavouring to communicate. “If not, we will just have to wait. We will pass the books onto our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. However, you cannot make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the World blew up under them. It cannot last. They were not at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncunt, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers. (pages 146 and 148 of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Let me give another brief example. Not long ago a friend called me long distance about a certain matter. We concluded the conversation and I hung up the phone. Then, and only then, did his tone of voice really hit me. I said to myself that behind the subject matter we were discussing there seemed to be a note of distress, discouragement, even despair, which had nothing to do with the matter at hand. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

I felt this so sharply that I wrote him a letter saying something to this effect: “I may be all wrong in what I am going to say and if so, you can toss this in the wastebasket, but I realize after I hung up the phone that you sounded as though you were in real distress and pain, perhaps in real despair.” Then I attempted to share with him some of my own feelings about him and his situation in ways that I hoped might be helpful. I sent off the letter with some qualms, thinking that I might have been ridiculously mistaken. I very quickly received a reply. He was extremely grateful that someone had heard him. I had been quite correct in hearing his tone of voice and I felt very pleased that I had been able to hear him and hence make possible a real communication. So often, as in this instance, the words convey one message and the tone of voice a sharply different one. I find, both in therapeutic interviews and in the intensive group experiences which have meant a great deal to me, that hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to one at that moment, hearing not simply one’s words, but one, and when I let one know that I have heard one’s own private personal meanings, many things happened. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

There is first of all a grateful look. One feels released. One wants to tell me more about one’s World. One surges forth in a new sense of freedom. One becomes more open to the process of change. I have often noticed that the more deeply I hear the meanings of this person, the more there is that happens. Almost always, when a person realizes one has been deeply heard, one’s eyes moisten. I think in some real sense one is weeping for joy. It is as though one were saying, “Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it is like to be me.” In such moments I have had the fantasy of a prisoner in a dungeon, tapping out day after day a Morse code message, “Does anybody hear me? Is anybody there?” And finally one day he hears some faint tappings which spell out “Yes.” By that one simple response he is released from his loneliness; he has become a human being again. There are many, many people living in private dungeons today, people who give no evidence of it whatsoever on the outside, where you have to listen very sharply to hear the faint messages from the dungeon. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the World, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I was not crying for him at all but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I have never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the World, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the World. He did things to the World. They World was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on. Every one must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you are there. It does not matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that is like you after you take your hands away. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

“The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that some day our cities would open up more and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we are allotted a little space on Earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be. Grandfather has been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you would find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said, earlier, he was a sculptor. ‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’ he said to me. ‘Stuffy your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you will drop dead in ten seconds. See the World. It is more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.’” (pages 146, 148-150 of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury) #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

We are dealing with a power that find sense material more congenial than abstract notions. In general, emblem—by which we mean any sensible object—reduces the intellectual conceptions to sensible images…an object of sense always strikes the memory more forcibly and is more easily impressed upon it than an object of the intellect. You will more easily remember the image of a hunter pursuing a hare, of an apothecary arranging one’s boxes, of a pedant making a speech, of a boy repeating verses from memory, of a player acting on the stage, than the mere notions of invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and actions. Places also make for concreteness rather than abstractions. Places are not only concrete in themselves but they point specifically to the object of recall. Many veteran speakers believe that they have learned to control the processes of recollection. The classical practice of orators was to settle upon some object, such as an animal, a house, or a church, and to divine it up spatially and temporally into definite parts or places. A house might be readily arranged into the porch, front entry, first room on the right, second room, back exit, and so on, around the building. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

The places might be prominent features of such, as, for example, doors, windows, niches, and the like. With one’s place fixed, and with one’s speech composed, the orator would select objects or images with which to associate the chief parts, the main arguments, and the striking details of one’s speech. One would then locate these images or objects in the places of one’s house. Thus the memory system was one that emphasized concrete, specific objects and images and the association of these with ideals. If it were possible, the orator would actually move through one’s house as one rehearsed one’s speech. Memory could be controlled, partly because the house and its places remained essentially the same for a large number of speeches, and partly because the images and the association of these with ideas. If it were possible, the orator would actually move through one’s house as one rehearsed one’s speech. Memory could be controlled, partly because the house and its places remained essentially the same for a large number of speeches, and partly because the images and figures, though they had to be newly invented to be “comfortable” with the ideas of each speech, pinned the memory to specific details. Such artificial places help the memory wonderfully, and exalt it far above its natural powers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Perhaps because memory prefers concrete experiences to abstract ideas, it is particularly amenable to experience that strikes it intensely. So things which make their impression by way of a strong affection, as by inspiring fear, admiration, shame, delight, assist the memory. Writing also intensifies ideas and their accompanying language. In matters of much length ad accuracy, it is absolutely essential. Holding this conviction, we insist that scientific investigation must include the preparation of tables in which observations were compared, contrasted, and classified. If done properly, the making of commonplace books, despite the belief of some critics that the practice invited the memory to take holiday, promoted the retentive powers by contracting the sight of judgment to a point. Memory behaves somewhat like a sense organ, for retention seems to be particularly good when the faculty is fresh and undistracted…things which are chiefly imprinted when the mind is clear and not occupied with anything else before or after, as what is learnt in childhood, or what we think of before going to sleep, also things that happen for the first time, dwell longest in the memory. Memory likes order and organization. The effectiveness of places in recollection is due in part to order and repetition. Verse is remembered easier than prose because of its rhythm, and rhythm is a kind of order. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Furthermore, the use of topics assists the memory by cutting off an infinity of search and directing the memory to where it had been before. In mentioning topics, we again are drawing upon standard rhetorical practice and doctrine. Speakers often employ a system of topical heads to guide them in surveying the subject on which they were to speak. The heads were usually developed as an elaborate outline, and intelligent application of it frequently suggested ideas, materials, and arguments for the speech at hand. The rhetoricians thought of the process as one of invention, of finding or discovering arguments. Such a survey device is of little or no use in discovering something new, as is the object of scientific discovery, but that it is of real value in recovering things old. Invention for writing and speaking is but remembrance or suggestion, with application. It is probable, then that the functions of memory are those recording and remembering both mental and sensory experience. The organic or physical basis of memory is doubtless the spirit diffused throughout the body and extremely sensitive to stimulation from sources both without and within humans. The disciplines of devotion should culminate in sublime adoration and worship. This begins with a proper sense of awe in the presence of God we know and serve. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Reverence must always characterize our approach to God and is especially needed today in our flip-the-channel evangelical culture. Most Christians could use some of the terror that came to Luther, “the horror of Infinitude” that smote him at the altar—for our access to the awesome God of Heaven is real! Along with proper reverence, there must be concentration. Our minds must be fully engaged. Luther said, “To let your face blabber one thing while your heart dwells on another is just tempting God. Any and every thing, if it is to be well done, demands the entire human, all one’s mind and faculties.” This is why we must give the best time of our day to devotion, where we are the freshest. Reverence and concentration must be linked with a humble spirit which has worship as its conscious goal—to lift God up as worthy and to ascribe great worth to Him. “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being,” reports Revelations 4.11; cf. 5.9-13. “We will just start walking today and see the World and the way the World walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after awhile it will all gather together inside and it will be me. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

“Look at the World out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it is finally me, where it is in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I will get hold of it so it will never run off. I will hold onto the World tight some day. I have got one finger on it now; that is a beginning. There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. However, every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we are doing the same thing, over and over, but we have got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know all the damn silly things we have done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we will stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation,” (pages 154-156 of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury). Nephi slays Laban at the Lord’s command and then secures the plates of brass by stratagem—Zoram chooses to join Lehi’s family in the wilderness. About 600-592 Before Christ (BC). #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Three men named Zoram are noted in the Book of Mormon. The first Zoram was the servant of Laban, a Jewish commander in Jerusalem about 800 B.C. This Zorman gave the cleaver disguised Nephi the plates of brass thinking he was Laban. Offered freedom if he would become part of Nephi’s group in the wilderness, Zorman accepted Nephi’s offer and made an offer to stay with them from that time one. He married one of the daughters of Ishmael (the righteous friend of the prophet Lehi in Jerusalem), was a true friend to Nephi, was blessed by Nephi’s father Lehi. “And it came to pass that I spake unto my brethren, saying: Let us go up again unto Jerusalem, and let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; for behold he is mightier than all the Earth, then why not mightier than Leban and his fifty, yea, or even than his tens of thousands. Therefore let us go up; let us be strong like unto Moses; for he truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea and they divided hither and thither, and our fathers came through, out of captivity, on dry ground, and the armies of Pharaoh did follow and were drowned in the water of the Red Sea. Now behold ye know that this is true; and ye also know that an Angel hath spoken unto you; wherefore can ye doubt? Let us go up; the Lord is able to deliver us, even as our fathers, and to destroy Labhan, even as the Egyptians. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

“Now when I had spoken these words, they were yet wroth, and did still continue to murmur; nevertheless they did follow me up until we came without the walls of Jerusalem. And it was by night; and I caused that they should hide themselves without walls. And after they had hid themselves, I, Nephi, crept into the city and went forth towards the house of Laban. I was led by the spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do,” reports 1 Nephi 4.1-7. “He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great séance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new. The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills. For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great  juggernaut of stars from the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him,” (page 133 of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury). Nevertheless I went forth, and as I came near unto the house of Laban I beheld a man, and he had fallen to the Earth before me, for he was drunken with wine. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

“And when I came to him I found that it was Leban. And I behold his sword, and I drew I forth from the sheath thereof; and hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel,” reports Nephi 4.7-9. O God, Who bestowest this upon us by Thy grace, that we should be made righteous instead of ungodly, blessed instead of miserable; be present to Thine own works, be present to Thine own gifts; that they in who dwells a justifying faith may not lack a strong perseverance; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O Thou terrible meek, let not pride swell my heart. My nature is the mire beneath my feet, the dust to which I shall return. In body I surpass not the meanest reptile; whatever difference of form and intellect is mine is a free grant of Thy goodness; every faculty of mind and body is Thy undeserved gift. Low as I am as a creature, I am lower as a sinner; I have trampled Thy law times without number; sin’s deformity is stamped upon me, darkens my brow, touches me with corruption: How can I flaunt myself proudly? Lowest abasement is my due place, for I am less than nothing before thee. Help me to see myself in Thy sight, then pride must wither, decay, die, perish. Humble my heart before thee, and replenish it with Thy choicest gifts. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

As water rests not on barren hill summits, but flows down rests not on barren hills summits, but flows down to fertilize lowest vales, so make me the lowest of the lowly, that my spiritual riches may exceedingly abound. When I leave duties undone, may condemning thought strip me of pride, deepen in me devotion to Thy service, and quicken me to more watchful care. When I am tempted to think highly of myself, grant me to see the wily power of my spiritual enemy; help me to stand with wary eye on the watch-tower of faith, and to cling with determined grasp to my humble Lord; if I fall let me hide myself in my redeemer’s righteousness, and when I escape, may I ascribe all deliverance to Thy grace. Keep me humble, meek, lowly. Look upon us and hear us, O Lord our God; and assist those endeavours to please Thee which Thou Thyself hast granted to us; as Thou hast given the first act of will, so give the completion of the work; grant that we may be able to finish what Thou hast granted us to wish to begin. If we are ever to enjoy life, now is the time—not tomorrow or next year. The best preparation for a better life next year is a full, complete, harmonious, joyous life this year. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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