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These People Who are so Significant in My Life Love Me and Consider Me to be of Value
It was peaceful here as we went through the purification. All was beauty around me. Looking at an amazing Sunset, the sky was luminous with two long streaks of light yellow clouds, lending a radiance against which the Sun sank toward the sea. The great red-orange ball, getting larger as it neared the horizon, seemed to reach out too eagerly to make passionate contact with the houses located at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. Just as the Sun seemed ready to dip below the horizon, it hesitated a moment and spread out its radiance as though to remind us of its mastery of our Universe. Then suddenly it was gone, leaving behind a sky and a sea painted with every kind of riotous red and lustrous yellow in every combination. Yes, it is a palace fit for an Emperor. When the Lord made the World, was it not Wisdom who said the new humanity will be universal, and it will have the artist’s attitude; that is, it will recognize that the immense value and beauty of the human being is possessed precisely in the fact that one belongs to the two kingdoms of nature and the spirit. A well-dressed man stood next to me at the rail watching the Sunset. From his tiny tailored moustache and his dark complexion I imagined that he was Turkish. He said something to me I did not understand, and we both smiled a little apologetically because I could speak no Turkish and he apparently knew no English. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Nonetheless, we immediately recovered our dignity nodding toward the same Sunset which captivated us both, a bond between us as we watched nature’s brilliance overflow on to the profligate sea. On the other side of me stood a blondish woman, perhaps in her early twenties, with deep grey eyes and smooth features. I imagined her to be Scandinavian. However, when she also smiled at me and murmured, “Schon, schon,” I knew she was German. It was only later that I began to realize that these two persons, my companions in watching nature’s magnificence, knew that the quest was the most important adventure in the human experience. The strange thing about beauty is that it wipes away all boundaries and inspires us to realize our common humanity. Our destiny interweaves us with each other, and our arts make every war nowadays a civil war, a war against our brothers and sister and cousins no matter what nation they happen to belong to. Beauty overcomes distinctions between all people on this planet. In beauty we have a language common to all of us despite racial or cultural differences—and even despite national and historical enmities. For this very Egypt, to which I was then traveling, later shared with us in America the art objects found in King Tut’s tomb, and crowds of people stood in our twenty first century lines for hours for the privilege of seeing the statues in bronze and gold which had been buried with this king in ancient Egypt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The colorful Turkish and Persian rugs virtually all over the World, came from the same part of the World as the man standing beside me. And when we think of the contribution of German-speaking peoples—from Boehme to Beethoven to Goethe to Hegel, et al.—our words may not be fully understood. All these are our common heritage of beauty, and never has there been any doubt that they belong to all civilized people. No matter how archaic, the things of beauty from African to Alaska, from China to Australia, from New York to India are the language of all beings who call themselves human. One who stands on the threshold of this Pat is about to commence the last and greatest journey of all, one which one will continue until returning to the presence of God. Once begun, there is no turning back or deserting it, except temporarily. And since it is the most important and most glorious activity ever undertaken, its rewards are commensurate. One cannot stake too much on the outcome of such exalted strivings. Even all that the World can offer falls far below what the quest can offer. If outer sacrifices and inner renunciations are called for, the compensation will be more than just. In the end one gains immensely more than one loses. So, if the quest bids one to do so why not let go freely? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The meaning and the end of all such work is to arouse mortals to see certain truths: that the intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual yet just as cultivable if pursued through meditation, that the mystical experience is the most valuable of all experience, and that the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions. If there is anything worth studying by a human being, after the necessary preliminary studies of how to exist and survive in this World healthily and wisely, it is the study of mortal’s own consciousness—not a cataloguing of the numerous thoughts that play within it, but a deep investigation of its nature in itself, its own unadulterated pure self. This is the higher cause that is really worth working for, the spiritual purpose that makes life worth living. The discovery of the Overself, the surrender to it, mortals fulfills the highest purpose of one’s life on this Earth. Each mortal has only a limited fund of life-force, time, and ability. One may squander it on Worldly pleasures or spend it on Worldly ambitions. However, if without neglecting the duties of one’s particular situation, one realizes that these are changing and transient satisfactions and turns instead to the quest of the Overself, one begins to justify one’s incarnation. In our discussion up to now we have taken some long, hard looks at the negative aspects of family relationships and their effects on our children’s lives. We might almost despair of the possibility of having healthy families. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
And it is important to recognize that these emotionally damaging qualities are and always will be to some extent present in our families, for we are all caught up in the dilemma of our human imperfections. The business person who does not know that the true business for which one was put on Earth is to find the Overself, may make a fortune but will also squander away a lifetime. One’s work and mind have been left separate from one’s Overself’s when they might have been kept in satisfying harmony with them. Every mortal has another veiled identity. Until one finds out this mystical self of one’s essence, one has failed to fulfil the higher mission of one’s existence. However, the picture is not totally dismal by any means. Children do grow up in out families learning something about how to experience and express love, and the degree to which this occurs is not immutably fixed. It is possible to become more effective in our ability to love in spite of our fear and also possible to help our children become loving. The New Testament contains a profound psychological insight into the process by which children learn to love. The words are: “We love, because God first loved us,” reports I John 4.19. God is the first cause of love. If we pause to read: “We love, because we first experienced love,” the psychological impact becomes clear. And whether faith leads us to attribute the origin of love to God or not, we can agree that our experience of love comes to us through the imperfect channel of other persons. And the most significant persons for children are usually parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This experience of learning to love by being loved is much more profound than simply seeing and imitating the behavior of loving persons. It has much more to do with the children’s emerging ideas and feelings about one’s self, which tend either to free one or inhibit one in one’s ability to experience and express love. In the discussion of the rejection cycle it was emphasized that all people experience feelings of rejection that lead to feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. The experience varies greatly in the degree of feelings of rejection, but it is universal. Now, as we look at the beneficial side of the picture, it can be shown that a cycle of acceptance is taking place in children’s lives during the same years the rejection cycle is establishing personality difficulty. The acceptance cycle, too, is a universal experience. Again it is a matter of degree. The acceptance cycle begins with the child’s earliest experiences of love and acceptance. This process, too, beings long before the child can form thoughts. In fact it probably begins within the first few hours of life. The sensation of touch plays a very important role. The gentle, loving, stroking touches of the mother when she is enjoying the baby are undoubtedly enjoyable to the baby. And when the infant, as it nurses from the nourishment of the mother or feeds from the bottle, is cuddled and cooed over, the physical and emotional warmth communicates itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
When these experiences are contrast with those that sometimes occur when the woman is very frightened of emotional closeness, it becomes very apparent that even these early experiences tend toward a sense of acceptance or rejection. Consider the effect on the child, for example, of the mother who is in strong conflict about her feminine roles, who forces herself to naturally nourish her child because she feels she should do so, although doing it makes experience unpleasant feelings because of her conflicting emotions about it. Her feelings are certain to be reflected in the way she handles the child. Or another woman may be so frightened of the emotional involvement that she cannot permit herself to satisfy her own desires to cuddle the child. So she tends to withdraw and handle the child as little as possible. Still another woman may have a great deal of psychological conflict with eliminative functions and communicate her disgust in the way she changes and cleans the baby. As the child grows older the avenues by which one senses acceptance and love (or rejection) from one’s parents become more numerous and more subtle. When parents enjoy the child, trust the child, and listen to the child, respond to the youth as a human being worthy of respect, and encourages the child to accept increasing responsibly for one’s self without pushing one, one feels acceptance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The sense of touch remains important. And sometimes it becomes more difficult. Some parents who found it relatively easy to enjoy expressing physical affection to their babies find themselves becoming less spontaneously affectionate to them as they grow older. The most important reason for this is probably the growing sense of vulnerability. The risk of being hurt by a baby seems rather remote, apart from the chance passing or catastrophic infirmary. However, as the child grows older and is able to express harsh feelings, we are put on notice in a multitude of ways that the age of innocence is past and that the possibility of emotional hurt is ever present. It is then that physical affection may not seem as natural. One mother, Alice reported it was difficult for her to express affection for her tends by directly hugging them. It is easy for her to smile at them and say nice words. This was probably because it was a relatively safe was of expressing affection. Because of her fears of being hurt and rejected by anyone she feels close, Alice finds this type of contact with her children more comfortable. She satisfies her need for closeness by saying, “I love you,” or “Have a great day.” And if Alice were more free to express affection directly, while it would be more helpful, the nice comments communicates some acceptance to the children and some desire to maintain their well being. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
To the degree that the child experiences the security of parents who are able to communicate their love and acceptance in a relatively open and direct manner, one is likely to react with beneficial feelings towards oneself. The emotional logic of the child must be something like this: “These people who are so significant in my life love me and consider me to be of value. Therefore I must be worthwhile.” The beauty of the World is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. This perfecting is the creation of beauty; God created the Universe, and his son, our first-born brother, created the beauty of its for us. The beauty of the World is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the Universe. It also is like a sacrament. This is true only of universal beauty. With the exception of God, nothing short of the Universe as a whole can with complete accuracy be called beautiful. All that is in the Universe and is less than the Universe can be called beautiful only if we extend the word beyond its strict limits and apply it to things that share indirectly in beauty, things that are imitations of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty. However, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt. They all have in them more or less of this temptation, but in very different degrees. There are also a number of seductive factors which have nothing whatever to do with beauty but which cause the things in which they are preset to be called beautiful through lack of discernment; for these things attract love by fraud, and all mortals, even the most ignorant, even the vilest of them, know that beauty alone has a right to our love. The most truly great know it too. No mortal is below or above beauty. The words which express beauty come to the lips as soon as they want to praise what they love. Only some are more and some less able to discern it. Beauty is the only finality here below. It is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing wat to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, and enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing and titillating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
We should like to feed upon beauty, but it is merely something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. When they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it, children feel this trouble already. It may be that nice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating it, should be what is required to save it. Two winged companions, to Angels are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it. These two Angels are the two parts of our soul. A great light will shine to the ends of the Earth, and many nations will come to you from afar, the peoples of all the Earth, to dwell near to the name of the Lord, bearing in their hands gifts for the King of Heaven. I saw the light in my mind, and I grew sleepy in a beautiful soft sleep in which I could hear the words of the prayer as I lay on my bed, with my arm under my pillow. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
No one is in Eden. There is no one there. No one is in Eden writing down the deeds of the World. However, some people say it is Enoch, but Eden is empty until the Lord should say that all the World will be Eden once again. The Lord does not break his covenants. God will come and his house will last forever. It is because beauty has no end in view that it constitutes the only finality here below. For here below there are no ends. All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth. Money is the means of buying, power is the means of commanding. It is more or less the same for all the things that we call good. Only beauty is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. However, beauty only gives itself; it never gives anything else. Nevertheless, as it is the only finality, it is present in all human pursuits. Although they are all concerned with means, for everything that exists here below is only a means, beauty sheds a luster upon them which colors them with finality. Otherwise there could neither be desire, nor, in consequence, energy in the pursuit. For a miser after the style of Harpagon (a character in Moliere’s L’Avare), all the beauty of the World is enshrined in gold. And it is true that gold, as a pure and shinning substance, has something beautiful about it. The disappearance of gold from our currency seems to have made this form of avarice disappear too. Today those who heap up money without spending it are desirous of power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The same crisis of freedom is present in psychotherapy, this curious profession which burgeoned so fantastically in American during the past century. The crisis can best be seen when we ask: What is the purpose of therapy? To be sure, to help people. And the specific purpose differs with the particular condition with which the person is suffering. However, what is the overall purpose that underlies the development of this profession of psychological helpers? Several decades ago, the purpose of the mental-health movement was clear: mental health is living free from anxiety. However, this motto son became suspect. Living free from anxiety in a World of hydrogen bombs and nuclear radiation and food and water shortages, housing crises, lack of funding for education, and rapidly decreasing numbers of high pay jobs? Without anxiety in a World in which death may strike at any moment you cross the street? Without anxiety in a World in which two-thirds of the people are malnourished or starving? The mental health movement, in promising a freedom from anxiety that is not possible, may have had a significant role in the current belief that it is a right to feel good, thus contributing to the burgeoning consumption of alcohol and the and the almost universal prescription of the tranquilizer by physicians. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The mental health movement has emphasized freedom from anxiety as the definition of health. However, finding that is not possible in the general run of life, people have assumed that the quickest way to achieve the freedom is through alcohol and tranquilizing drugs. Furthermore, if we did achieve freedom from all anxiety, we would find ourselves robbed of the most constructive stimulant for life and for simple survival. After many a therapeutic hour which I would call successful, the client leaves with more anxiety than one had when one came in; only now the anxiety is conscious rather than unconscious, constructive rather than destructive. The definition of mental healthy needs to be changed to living without paralyzing anxiety, but living with normal anxiety as a stimulant to a vital existence, as a source of energy, and as life enhancing. Is adjustment the purpose of therapy—that is, should therapy help people adjust to their society? Many people wonder who the psychotic is—the persons to whom the title is given or the society itself? Is the purpose of the therapist to give people relief and comfort? If so, this can also be done more efficiently and economically by drugs. Is the purpose of the therapist to help people to be happy? Happy in a World in which unemployment and inflation burgeon at the same time? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Such happiness can be purchased only at the price of repressing and denying too many of the facts of life, a denial that works directly against what most of us believe is the optimum state of mental health. I propose that the purpose of the psychotherapy is to set people free. Free, as far as possible, from symptoms, whether they be psychosomatic symptoms like ulcers or psychological symptoms like acute shyness. Free from compulsions, again as far as possible, to be workaholics, compulsions to repeat self-defeating habits they have learned in early childhood, or compulsions perpetually to choose partners of the opposite gender who cause continual unhappiness and continual punishment. However, most of all, I believe that the therapist’s function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities. A psychological problem, I have pointed out elsewhere, is like fever; it indicates that something is wrong with the structure of the person and that struggles is going on for survival. This, in turn, is a proof to us that some other way of behaving is possible. Our old way of thinking—that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible—overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal aspect of living and are basic to human creativity. This is true whether one is constructing things or reconstructing oneself. Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
People rightly come to the therapist because they have become inwardly enslaved and they yearn to be set free. The crucial question is: how is that freedom to be attained? Surely not by a miraculous charming away of all conflicts. The soul that is prevented by circumstances from feeling anything of the beauty of the World, even confusedly, even through what is false, is invaded to its very center by a kind of horror. If you want to know the purpose of life, read Acts 17.2: “God made man [and women] to the end that one should seek the Lord.” It comes to this: Are we to worship mortals or God? Life offers mortals a variety of meanings, but in the end one meaning comes to the top of all the others and that is the meaning which shall reveal the truth about one’s relation to God. When one sees life whole and therefore sees it right, one will understand why Jesus declared, “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and why, if one is to insist upon any single renovation in human life, it must be its own self-spiritualization. If one is to put emphasis anywhere, it must be upon the rediscovery of the divine purpose of one’s Earthly life. If mortals only knew how glorious, how rich, how satisfying this inner life really is, they would not hesitate for a moment to forsake all those things which car their way to it. “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the Earth shall see the salvation of God,” reports 2 Nephi 16.20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Destiny Will Return to Haunt Us as Long as it is Not Acknowledged—Destiny is Eternally Present to Remind Us that We Exist as Part of a Community
Sorry to disappoint you, but since you do go and comes as you will, it seems I must get used to you. Almost all of us who are involved in families desire to create a family environment in which each member will grow in the ability to experience and express love. We want our children to learn how to love. We want them to develop a minimum of the fear of love that would cripple them in their ability to establish increasingly deep and meaningful relationships as they grow to maturity. We want them in adulthood to be able to look back at their homes as places where they felt secure and loved and at the same time felt encouraged to plunge into the mainstream of life. We are not particularly confused about what we want in our family life. We are, however, very likely confused about how to accomplish what we want. One of the reasons for our confusion is that we parents often tend to think in terms of techniques, a tendency that is encouraged by many writings on the rearing of children. We feel if we can just find the right way of handling situations as they arise in the family and avoid the wrong ways, we will be successful. One purpose of art, and the beauty which is its inspiration, is to counteract this experience of insignificance. People have to have a sense of transcendence of their boring, day-to-day existence, and to live with some adventure, joy, zest, and a sense of meaning and purpose in their existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Family life is much more complex (and in some ways perhaps more deceptively simple) than that. If it were totally a matter of right and wrong techniques, these skills would long ago have been scientifically fretted out, written down, and we could all be successful Betty Crocker cookbook parents, measuring out just the right amounts of the appropriate reactions to our children. However, the quality of our family relationships counts much more than the techniques we use. And while it is certainly true that many worthwhile things can be, and have been, said about particular ways of handling family problems, it is also true that parents who are full of fears often subtly adapt the best techniques in the direction of unhealthy results. Family councils not infrequently provide an example of this. The council is formed for the expressed purpose of allowing the total family to have a voice in decisions that effect all the members. Very often the democratic nature of such councils is more apparent than real. The parents may in reality be afraid to turn any genuine decision-making power over to the children and yet at the same time they are uncomfortable with making arbitrary decisions. So they kid themselves into thinking they are being democratic by seeming to give the children a voice in family affairs while they subtly manipulate the family into doing what they wanted all along. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
If the children are fooled at all by this sham of democracy, so much the worse. If parents simply announced their decisions and dealt directly with any protests that arose, it would certainly be more honest and much less confusing to the children; yet a genuinely democratic family council might be a great thing. Another technique that may be good in theory but which is often abused is the idea that parents ought to be permissive in allowing the child a great deal of freedom and a wide range of activities unhindered by adult interruption. It is not unusual for parents who are afraid of deep emotional involvement to use this approach as a subtle excuse to withdraw from their children. Probably without being fully aware of what they are doing, they develop a relationship that to the children must appear to be of disinterest. When Jillian takes two-year-old son, Leo Pete, to visit Aunt Tori and Leo Pete starts cheering at the top of his lungs because he is so excited, Jillian may be a little embarrassed that he is not using his inside voice but may say nothing for fear of wounding the little tyke’s delicate feelings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Sometimes mothers want the father to give orders, which are stern because the male figure is usually known for being a little more direct, so the child’s feelings are less likely to be hurt. However, Jillian will also deprive, her son, Leo Pete of a genuine response. Even if it is given forcibly on the seat of his pants, it is that honest reaction that will be most helpful to Leo Pete’s ego. So the quality of our parenthood depends not so much on our skills but rather on our maturity and our emotional openness and freedom to be real people to our children. And this, of course, depends upon the total fabric of our life and experience. And improvement as parents will come not so much through acquiring new skills as in gaining a deeper understanding and acceptance of ourselves. Art is an antidote for aggression. It gives the ecstasy, the self-transcendence that could otherwise take the form of drug addiction, extremism, self-harm, or warfare. We have seen that both aggression and art—and the beauty which is the center of art—yield the experience of ecstasy and self-transcendence. However, art and aggression are directly opposite in their effects. We find, strangely enough, that the pursuit of art and beauty are what we have long sought, namely, the antidote to violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
I propose that this is the function of beauty and art in human experience. I do not overlook the pressing need to correct the faults of our society—our gross nationalism, our making human beings subordinate to technology, our failure to value human rights above property rights, our racial and gender injustice. However, I wish to go below these considerations, to a universal level where the sense of significance will be recognized as every person’s right because he or she is part of a Universe of beauty. First, art has the capacity to prevent violence in such a way that venom is taken out of the violence. This mysterious power is shown in its capacity to portray violence in forms that are a catharsis. Take, for example, Casper David Friedrich’s Woman in Morning Light (1818), the woman looking out at the rising Sun is literally larger than the mountains in the distance, and she blocks out our view of the Sun, overlapping it. However, we do not think of her as a giant. We simply recognize that she is closer than the mountain to the surface of the painting, which is called the picture place. Her position is, in fact, similar to our own as viewers, and together, we look out on the new day with all its possibility and promise. It presents humanity and beauty of the World to mortals more vividly than the reams of printed paper can do, and it presents the simply beauty which allows humans to reflect that even alone, we can enjoy this Universe of beauty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Art is catharsis. So Aristotle argued centuries ago. And so it is in our day and as long as human beings remain human. Whether we survive as human or we start over on our primordial trek; whether it is on our planet or one of the other billions in the Heavens, the regeneration goes on. It may be that the legend of Genesis will have to be re-enacted. However, faith is that renewal, which goes on eternally. This is precisely the thing which gives us consciousness in the first place. For art—and beauty the contemplation of which leads to art—is an inseparable part of our precious capacity to be conscious, to think. Art was invented out of the necessity of those original men and women to regenerate, to propagate, to renew the race of humankind. Our dimensions of hope we now need to extend to include the other solar bodies; the hope that springs eternal in the human heart can include other planets and Worlds. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there had been the beginning of a Renaissance which would have been the real one if it had been able to bear fruit; it began to germinate notably in Languedoc. Some of the Troubadour poems on spring led one to think that perhaps Christian inspiration and the beauty of the World would not have been separated had it developed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Moreover the spirit of Languedoc left its mark on Italy and was perhaps not unrelated to the Franciscan inspiration. However, whether it be coincidence or more probably the connection of cause and effect, these germs did not survive the war of the Albigenses and only traces of the movement were found after that. Today one might think that the developed World has almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the World, and that they have taken upon them the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade, and their religion. As Christ said to the Pharisees: “Woe to you, for ye have taken away the key of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves and them that were entering in ye hindered.” And yet at the present time, in the developed nations, the beauty of the World is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us, for we still farther removed from the other two. Real love and respect for religious practices are rare even among those who are most assiduous in observing them, and are practically never to be found in others. Most people do not even conceive them to be possible. As regards the supernatural purpose of affliction, compassion and gratitude are not only rare but have become almost unintelligible for almost everyone today. They very idea of them has almost disappeared; the very meaning of the words has been debased. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
On the other hand a sense of beauty, although it is sometimes mutilated, distorted, and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of mortals as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure, it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God; it would make the total incarnation of the faith possible. Moreover, speaking generally, the beauty of the World is the commonest, easiest, and most natural way of approach. Just as God hastens into every soul, and immediately it opens, even a little, in order through it to love and serve the afflicted, so he descends in all haste to love and admire the tangible beauty of his own creation through the soul that opens to him. However, the contrary is still more true. The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high. This was the trap which enticed Cora. All the Heavens above were smiling at the scent of the narcissus; so was the entire Earth and all the swelling ocean. Hardly had the poor girl stretched out her hand before she was caught in the trap. She fell into the hands of the living God. When she escaped she had eaten the seed of the pomegranate which bound her forever. She was no longer a virgin; she was the spouse of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The beauty of the World is the manifestation of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. However, this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening. The beauty of the World is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relationship of the World to our sensibility, the sensibility that depends upon the structure of our body and our soul. The Micromegas of Voltaire, a thinking infusorian organism, could have had no access to the beauty on which we live in the Universe. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We must have faith that, supposing such creatures were to exit, the World would be beautiful for them too; but it would be beautiful in another way. Anyhow we must have faith that the Universe is beautiful on all levels, and more generally that is has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of each of the thinking beings that actually do exist and of all those that are possible It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the World. Nevertheless the part of this beauty we experience is designed and destined for our human sensibility. In our Declaration of Independence, there is a joyful enthusiasm for the self evident and inalienable right of individual freedom, which most of us lapped up with our mother’s milk. However, we find even there a pronounced lack of awareness of the social problems of responsibility and community—that is, a lack of realization of what I call destiny. True, there is the reference to the Creator and the phrase in this declaration “we acquiesce in the necessity” after the long list of the oppressions of the British king. True, also, that in our Constitution the Supreme Court is charged with providing the necessary limits. However, dictation is not enough. The British historian Macaulay wrote to President Madison half a century after the Declaration was adopted that he was worried about the American Constitution because it was “all sail and no rudder.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Thus, we have, marking the birth of our nation, the cheering for full speed ahead but with a lack of guiding limits. In the condition of all sail and no rudder freedom is in continual crisis; the boat may easily capsize. Freedom has lost its solid foundation because we have seen it without its necessary opposite, which gives it viability—namely, destiny. People in America imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. The woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of mortal is confined to those in close propinquity to one’s self. I know no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In European nations like France, where the monarchy stood against the legislature, one could exercise freedom of mind since if one power sides against the individual, the other sides with one. However, in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those in the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it. There is tyranny of the majority in America, which I call conformism of mind and spirit. We have recently seen this exhibited in the last election in California in the power of what is called the moral majority. There the body is left free and the soul enslaved. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The master no longer says, “You shall think as I do, or you shall die”; but he says, “You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You will retain your civil right, but they will be useless to you.” Other people “will affect to scorn you.” The person who thinks freely is ostracized, and the mass of people cannot stand such alienation. Have we not too easily and readily seized upon freedom as our birthright and forgotten that each of us must rediscover if for ourselves? Have we forgotten Goethe’s words: “He only earns his freedom and existence/Who daily conquers them anew”? Yet destiny will return to haunt us as long as it is not acknowledged. We cannot afford to ignore those who went before, and those who will come after. If we are ever to understand what Milton meant when he cried “Ah, Sweet Liberty,” or what the Pilgrims sought in landing at Plymouth rock in search of religious freedom, or any one of the other million and one evidences of freedom, we must confront this paradox directly. The paradox is that freedom owes its vitality to destiny, and destiny owes its significance to freedom. Our talents, our gifts, are on loan, to be called in at any moment by death, by illness, or by any one of the countless other happenings over which we have no direct control. Freedom is that essential to our lives, but it is also that precarious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It may help, for example, if we can become aware of and accept the fact that as parents we are frightened. One reason we are afraid is that we live in rapidly changing times. We may feel the changes are for the better or for the worse, or, more likely, we will feel that some of the change represents improvement while some represents backward steps. However, in any case we are frightened, because changes from old patterns of life in which we felt relatively secure and comfortable are always frightening. This is not new, of course. Every generation has its tensions with the preceding and succeeding generations. However, the rapidity of technological change in these days probably increases the problem. We who grew up without the television, for example, are frightened about the effect of this instrument on the lives of our children. We may feel that there are ways in which it is potentially harmful, and we may feel guilty that we are not doing more about it, and yet we do not know just what to do. We are confused and frightened. Another reason we are likely to be frightened as parents is that we are afraid our children are like us and have the same feelings and desires within themselves that we find unacceptable in ourselves. So if we have not learned to accept anger within ourselves, our fear may lead us to squelch our children’s expression of anger even when it may be natural and appropriate. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In all probability we are also frightened that our children will not accept us as we are. Many words are written about children’s feelings of rejection by their parents. Little is said about our feelings that we may not be accepted by our children. And yet this fear is probably a strong force operating in parent-child relationships. As parents we often wear masks that prevent our children from seeing us as we really are. Often it becomes increasingly difficult as the children grow older for us to be open and genuine with them. For example, many young adults report that their most basic fear is probably their fear of love and the vulnerability that love involves. We have discovered through many experiences that it is risky to love deeply and openly, and we find ways of withdrawing from our children. One mother in her twenties whose children are still under school ages says, “I find myself holding back some of my feelings of love for my children. I do not want them to become too important to me. All around me I see children growing up and leaving their parents alone with nobody to care about them. I do not want that to happen to me.” So her conscious resolution to this problem of eventual separation s to cheat herself out of eighteen to twenty years of the emotional enjoyment of love so that the shock of parting will be cushioned by her studied indifference! #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Although most of us are not so aware of needing to withdraw, we probably find many ways to just avoid simply relaxing and enjoying our kids just as they are here now. We pick and nag about relatively unimportant bits of behavior, or we become so preoccupied with their future and their scholastic achievement that we continually hound them. It is likely that it all stems from our fear of letting ourselves and them know how much we really care for them and how vulnerable our love makes us. This tormenting feeling of the lack of a spiritual state in one’s own experience, will drive one to continual search for it. However, one’s whole life must constitute the search and one’s whole being must engage in it. If you take the widest possible view, all the different sections of one’s action and thought are inseparable from the amount of spirituality is in a mortal. The truth must pass from one’s lips to one’s life. And this passage will only become possible when life itself without the quest will become meaningless. It is only the beginner who needs to think of the quest as separate from the common life, something special, aloof, apart. The more proficient knows that it must become the very channel for that life. The Quest is not anything apart from Life itself. We cannot dispense with common sense and balance in relation to it. No single element in life can be take too solemnly, as if it constituted the whole of life itself, without upsetting balance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
I Was Caught Up in Something Above Human Desires–Dream the Impossible Dream, Conquer the Unbeatable Foe, and Be Better Far than You Are!
You do right by me, now, or I will shout you down. Truth is I cannot recollect what happened. A serious cultural block to self-realization is the prejudice against races, religions, sexes, and various other categories of people. Attempts to overcome prejudice have been prominent down through the ages. Success has been spotty but few promising directions have emerged. One is that the problem of overcoming prejudice allows for no simple solution. It is compounded of politics, economics, housing, labor, and interpersonal relations. Its solution must lie in the intensive work at all levels. When people do not get along well together, one method is to arrive at a civilized solution to the problem. Individuals can treat each other very politely and try to have as little contact as possible. One of the cornerstone institutions of our society is the family. Its importance in molding the individuals in the society can hardly be overestimated, but only recently had that importance been converted into a practical human technology. In the psychiatric realm, the recent emphasis on community and social psychiatry reflects the importance being placed on the family with mental illness. What good does it do to treat a patient and then send him or her back to the same home situation that got the individual in trouble? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
So family therapy has developed. Skilled practitioners are now trained to deal with the family as a unit and to do therapy in the entire family social system. Changes may be needed in the whole family arrangement. Sometimes the improvement of the patient leads to a breakdown of the mother, or of a sibling. So all are dealt with together. Gradually, examination of this area develops into an exploration of the whole field of marital relation. The institution of marriage is questioned. It is successful? Is it the best pattern of intimate relations for everyone? What about close relations with people for short periods? Or are relations that are renewed periodically? How can one learn to enjoy brief relations? They are far more frequent than lifelong relations, and yet there is little social support for learning to profit much from these contacts. Groups that enter into this kind of thinking open up areas of vital importance to everyone. For some this is thinking the unthinkable. For many more it is exciting to be able to ventilate and explore these feelings instead of hiding them and accumulating guilt. It is freeing. It is examining a social institution that can greatly enhance a person’s self-realization, or that can—and perhaps this is more frequently—greatly inhibit one’s development. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
First of all, to follow our notion that joy derives from realizing potential, what potential is it that these methods help the individual to realize? Perhaps it is the potential for being more of a person than I thought I could be; for being more significant, competent, and lovable; for being a more meaningful individua, capable of coping more effectively with the World and better able to give and receive love. This possibility leads to a somewhat different emphasis in analyzing the requirements for growth than is usual in traditional psychotherapy. The problems that a person develops in growing up, that blunt the realization of one’s full potential, are not so much the objective events of one’s life as the feeling one gets about oneself as an individual as a result of these events. For example, it is not so much a broken home that leaves its mark on a child, but one’s perception of one’s role in causing the situation, and of one’s ability to deal with it. If one is left feeling guilty, worthless, and helpless, these are the feelings which debilitate one. However, if one can feel guiltless, capable of functioning within the situation, improving it, compensating for its lacks, then the situation may induce a feeling of strength and confidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
When the early childhood stories of severely disturbed psychotics are compared with those of successful business executives, this notion takes on some credibility. In encounter groups I am frequently startled at the similarity of some of these childhood situations. Certainly they are not the same, but there are so many cases of successful executives whose father or mother experienced death by suicide, who cannot remember a happy moment in all their early years, whose parents were divorced or died very early, who were shifted from one orphanage to another throughout their entire childhood, who can never remember being kissed or even held by their parents, and so on. If these events occur in the lives of successful men and women, then there must be something more tan traumatic childhood events that determine the direction of a child’s evolution into an adult. Such analysis suggests that the place to concentrate for making useful changes in people is not so much on the traumatic historical events as on the individual’s perception of one’s self. Perhaps this gives a clue to the effectiveness of fantasy, dramatic, and other methods. Therefore, dream the impossible dream, conquer the unbeatable foe, and be better far than you are. When you can perceive that your potential for being more is far greater than you had originally thought, this will lead to feelings of exhilaration, strength, and contentment. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Joy is burgeoning. Methods for attaining more joy are growing and becoming more effective. We are developing ways to make our bodies more alive, healthier, lighter, more flexible, stronger, less tired, more graceful, more integrated. We have ways for using our bodies better, for sensing more, for functioning more effectively, for developing skills and sensitivity, for being more imaginative and creative, and for feeling more and holding the feelings longer. More and more we can enjoy other people, learn to work and play with them, to love and discuss thing with them, to give and take with them, to be with them contentedly or to be happily alone, to lead or to follow them, to create with them. Leo Pete seems were absorbed sitting there by the window looking out at the night sky. He is reaching out. Does Leo Pete not know that the stars are unreachable? No, I guess he does not. Wait—he seems very joyful. What is that in Leo Pete’s hand? Could it be…? One can understand why some people yearn to remain in the state of ecstasy and self-transcendence all the time. The delicious feeling of self-transcendence are set loose in different ways by music which we love, by poetry which activates long thoughts and deep feelings, as well as in painting and the other arts. If such ecstasy is as joyful, as reassuring, as soul cleansing as I have indicated, why not live with the Absolute all the time? #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Why not stay on the level of ecstasy and beauty and self-transcendence perpetually and forever? This self that seems at times to be the repository of all the garbage that goes on in one’s mine, this ego which seems to be the root of anxiety and guilt feeling and despair—why not stay always on the level where these undesirable and unpleasant centers of feeling are wiped away? Why not transcend one’s less attractive self all the time? The answer is simple. Because ecstasy and self-transcendence are also the source of violence, destruction, wars, and hatred as well as these noble things I have mentioned. The transcendence of the self gives us not only the delicious feelings, but also sadness, yearning, anger and all other emotions. We know how Hitler was able to set loose through martial music the emotions which led to the most violent of World Wars. The emotions are stimulated for good or evil, and we are loosed from our customary banality. We have only to call to mind the great communal ecstasy shared by over a hundred thousand young person in Woodstock, New York in the Summer of 1969, the ongoing Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held at Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, or A State of Trance, which will touch down in Oakland, California on 29 June 2019. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Let us take from psychotherapy a more systematic example of self-transcendence leading to violence. The following case, referred to occurred in the early 1970s in New York City. A patient who was a doctoral student at a university participated in a march on Wall Street to protest the Vietnam War. This march was attacked not only by the police but also by construction workers employed on a new building. In his subsequent therapy hour, he described the experience as follows: I had a spontaneous feeling, I was caught up in something above human desires. We all were together in a great cause. Business as usual was thrown aside. You forget your bodily needs and cares, you channel everything though the group, the group becomes the most important thing. However, the group was leaderless, it was milling aimlessly about. I saw the construction workers down one street getting prepared to throw bricks at us. I tired to cry out to the group, “Go down this other street instead!” (A little later in that hour) When someone shouted, “Let’s get the computer!” the group was milling aimlessly about. All my life I have wanted to smash a computer. Now someone else was doing it—that made it great, it was justifiable. (Later) It is hard to talk in here about personal problems at a time like this. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Quite apart from the right or wrong of this movement or its success or failure, or the Luddite uselessness of smashing computers, it is clear that this young man was caught up in self-transcendence that each of us can identify with. He felt the cause was greater than his usual self, something he could surrender to; and he got a strong sense of unity or bonding with his fellows; he no longer needed to take responsibility for himself. During those days in therapy he was the healthiest, most normal (if I may use these threadbare words) of any time until then. His feeling of wanting to do violence was justified by the group; it was a time like war, when all the primitive desires of being human come out and are justified and rationalized by patriotism, the self-transcendence of the whole group. Thus self-transcendence is neither good nor evil in itself. It is an experience beyond good and evil. War itself, the most destructive form of mortal violence is also a time of ecstasy and self-transcendence. The families in war-ravaged countries as France miss the sense of adventure, the banding together against a common enemy, the sense of being caught up in something above human desire. They miss the challenge of being devoted to a cause great than themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
A French woman living in France in her comfortable bourgeois home with her husband and son, confessed earnestly and somewhat apologetically, “My life is so utterly boring nowadays! Anything is better than to have nothing at all happening day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. However, at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since.” Of course, this is prior to the recent attacks that have been happening in France. I am sure people enjoy peace, but miss the feeling of pride in their country that people display. As time goes on and we have peace, people become fragmented and the sense of fraternity tends to die down. The people who serve in the wars never seem to have peace, however. While they are serving, being attacked constantly and defending their homes, they cannot just quit their jobs and walk away, they are constantly shivering and hungry and harried with anxieties about their wife and child. They realize their days of being at home and living a leisure life was happier times. While peace can expose a void in some that war’s excitement enables one to cover up, others do not want the ecstasy and self-transcendence, which war has given them. There are other ways to foster national pride. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Still there are other perspectives. A veteran of the Vietnam War, William Broyles, wrote in Esquire (November, 1984) an article entitled “Why Men Love War.” In it, Broyles quotes his fellow soldiers whom he met at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, “What people cannot understand is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I cannot tell anybody.” Broyles is describing again the adventure, the sense of community, the intense bonding with fellow mortals, the zest of risking everything—all experiences of ecstasy and self-transcendence. The banding together into a great unity, the sense of transcending individual desires, the freedom from personal responsibility—all these aspects of war are clearly conductive to ecstasy and self-transcendence. No wonder William James wrote in his classic essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” that in our anti-war campaigns we are self-defeating in emphasizing the horror of war; for the horror is part of the fascination. We who are opposed to war need a new approach, James went on, that will set up beneficial ideals that bring the sense of adventure, the attraction, the sense of giving one’s self to a cause more than business as usual, if we are to succeed in our prevention of war. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
A captain who was one of the teachers in the ROTC which I was required to take during my two years at Michigan State College once remarked in his lectures to the class, “You are told war is hell. I never had such a good time in my life as I did in France during the last war.” I looked at the man as though the were a pariah; but since then I have realized that he was saying something much more important than he knew. As long as this captain had to arise every morning and get dressed and shaved and drag himself over to the campus to drum some army tactics into the heads of five hundred students who did not want to hear, he—and the millions of people who likewise have no sense of zest in life—will dream about the adventure and excitement of this most destructive form of human violence. War, the epitome of destruction as it is, and the threat to our total planet that it is in our day of nuclear war, nevertheless gives a sense of ecstasy and self-transcendence that is prized by millions of people. For people cannot stand to be of no significance. And ecstasy and the self-transcendence which goes with war and violence lift one out of the feeling of insignificance. Psychotics show this need for significance in such obvious thins as insisting they are Napoleon, Lestat de Lioncourt or Christ, or that they have a special relationship with Jupiter or other constellations in the Heavens. Neurotics show in a less obvious way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
But there is, however it is shown, still the powerful drive to demonstrate “I amount to something, I will be missed if I experience death by suicide. I will take drugs to be whisked into a state where I have no more guilt and despair, and I feel only own significance.” Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter. John Wilkes Booth would be a name long since erased in history, but he shot Lincoln and therefore he will be known as long as anyone can read a history book. One of my college professors is actually related to him and teaches African American history, but appears to be European America, and does an excellent job with the subject. If Hinckley had succeeded in assassinating Reagan, he would indeed have proved to his imagined sweetheart that he was a man of consequences, someone to be reckoned with. There can be no freedom which does not begin with the freedom to eat and the right to work. Freedom involves the economic conditions of action, and in the struggle for democracy economic security has only late last been recognized as a political condition of personal freedom. However, there has been hypocrisy and moral confusion about freedom with the abuse of privacy and the misuse of political freedom in present and past few years in this country. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the good Germans, we [in America] continue to think we are free, while the walls of dossiers, the machinery of repression, the weapons of political assassination pile up around us. Where is the movement to restore our freedom? Who are the leaders prepared to insist that it would not happen here? We hear the haunting final chorus of the movie Nashville: “It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me. You say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.” Is this to be the final epitaph of American liberty? Is Freedom dying? We are losing our freedom. Already freedom has lost it exalted place in philosophy and policy. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. There is little vigilance in our country at present. The main cases of this demise of freedom are the widespread growth of materialism and hedonism in American. I believe that the materialism and hedonism, so often decried are themselves symptoms of an underlying, endemic anxiety. When they cannot get gratification from anything else, men and women devote themselves to making money. It is above all a personal dilemma, whatever its economic repercussions. Couples develop sexual hedonism as an end in itself because pleasures of the flesh allays anxiety and because they find authentic love so rarely available in our alienated and narcissistic culture. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
At present in our country there is a general experience of suppressed panic: anxiety not only about the hydrogen bomb, space wars and the prospect of atomic way, but about uncontrolled inflation, unemployment, anxiety that our old values have deteriorated as our religious have eroded, about our disintegrating family structure, concern about pollution of the air, the oil crises, and infinitum. The mass of citizens react as a neurotic would react: we hasten to conceal the frightening facts with the handiest substitutes, which dull our anxiety and enable us temporarily forget. The price surrounding our freedom is much greater than most people are away. For freedom is a necessity for progress, and a necessity for survival. If we lose our inner freedom, we lose with it our self-direction and autonomy, the qualities that distinguish human beings from robots and computers. The attack on freedom, and the mockery of it, is the predictable mythoclasm which always occurs when a great truth goes bankrupt. In mythoclasm people attack and mock the thing they used to venerate. In the vehemence of the attack we hear the silent unexpressed cries “Our belief in freedom should have saved us—it let us down just when we needed it most!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The attack is based on resentment and rage that our freedom does not turn out to be the noble thing inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty or that Abraham Lincoln’s new birth of freedom has never occurred. In all such periods of mythoclasm, the great truths yield the greatest bootlegged power to their attackers. Thus, the attack on freedom—especially by those so called journalist and psychologist who use their freedom to stump the nation, arguing that freedom is an illusion—gets its power precisely from what it denies. However, the period of mythoclasm soon becomes empty and unrewarding, and we must then engage in the long and lonely search for inner integrity. The constructive way is to look within ourselves to discover again the reborn truth, the phoenix quality of freedom now so needed, and to integrate in anew into our being. This is the deepest meaning of Lincoln’s new birth of freedom. For is not the central reason for the near bankruptcy of a once glorious concept that we have grossly oversimplified freedom? We have assumed it was an easy acquisition which we inherited simply by being born in the land of the free. Did we not let the paradox of freedom become encrusted until freedom itself became identified with organizational and racial conflicts, or with religious, or with economic systems, and ultimately with one’s own personal idiosyncrasies? Thus the decline and fall of a great concept! #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Perhaps the central question should not be can religion help? Rather, what kind of religion can help? What type of religious belief and what kind of community of believers would be consistently helpful in a thoroughgoing way in assisting people to experience love? The God of such a faith would love each of us unconditionally in the sense that nothing that we could do would destroy that love. If we ascribe other humanlike emotions to him, we might envision him becoming angry, hurt, or sad about what we do; but the basic underlying love would be constant. He would not be interested in punishing us, instead his focus of attention would be on loving us and being loved by us. He would, of course, be concerned for our welfare and happiness. God would see existence clearly. The fact we develop very destructive ways of dealing with each other would not be hidden or glossed over by him. God would not condemn us for the awful messes we get ourselves into, but would understand that they occur because of our self-hate and our fear of being hurt if we allow ourselves to show that we love and desire love in return. The religious community would exemplify these same attitudes toward themselves, each other, and those outside the community insofar as humanly possible. They would recognize that they, too, are caught in the same dilemmas as all of humankind and would acknowledge the fear of love within themselves, which would limit freedom to be loving. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The religious community would be concerned primarily with creating a climate in which people could experience the love and acceptance that would break through self-hate, thereby freeing them to experience and express love. It would be likely that these experiences would take place most effectively in small, potentially intimate groups. In these groups honesty and genuiness would be the keynote. When individual felt angry with each other, they would be encouraged to express their anger in whatever words might seem most appropriate without concern about whether they were proper or not. They would be encouraged to experience and express all their feelings: anger, hurt, jealousy, whatever. And out of it all might come a feeling of their mutuality as human beings and the awareness that they do not need to hide from each other and experience only some pale substitute for love. They might discover the intense sense of loving and being loved for which we long but which is so frightening to us. Doe such a God exist? This is a question each person must decide one oneself. It is a matter of faith. If the encrustations of centuries of legalizing tendencies of the church can be scraped away, perhaps it is not so far removed as we may imagine from the God Jesus followed. Apparently some Christian leaders feel this way, for they have moved in the direction of such a faith. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Can such a religious community exist? It remains a question whether such honesty could be tolerated within the established churches. Some movement in that direction has take place, but it is scattered and meets with opposition. However, if the church is to retain any relevance whatsoever to life, something of the sort must occur. Perhaps some appropriation of ideas form other faiths or other ways of life could infuse new life. Or perhaps religion must find a new life outside the organized church with new beginnings by those who are able to see and dare to try that which the established church could not tolerate. The belief that the neglect of actual life is the beginning of spiritual life, and that the failure to use clear thought is the beginning of guidance from God, belongs to mysticism in its most rudimentary stages—and has no truth in it. The World will come to believe in God because there is no alternative, and it will do so inspire of religion’s historical weaknesses and intellectual defects. However, if those weaknesses and defects were self-eliminated, how much better it would be for everyone. The art of living that the experiences of everyday life yield up their meaning to us, and the reflections of daily prayer endow us with wisdom. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
If God and the Church Love Me So Much, I Must Be Worthwhile
The Sun was setting and the snow-covered range reflected and radiated its color from the rays of the Sun behind us. It was so breath-taking that we stopped our car to gaze at it for a while; we felt as though we were bathing in a Sky turned into sheer brilliance. The next morning, I sat in the windowsill of the large picture window of our hotel room, and for half an hour intensely concentrating on the mountain peak. I cleared my mind of everything and held my gaze for the first part of the half hour, Mt. Blanc remained a realistic mountain, pure ivory white, incredibly beautiful against the deep blue of the morning sky. Then, as I continued to concentrate on it, the mountain gradually changed before my eyes into another form. It became abstract. It was now, as the underlying form emerged, composed of disembodied squares and circles and planes. I loved it still, as I love the cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque. The mountain form seemed to be painted on canvas, it was disembodied, pure form with no weight or movement. Or one could as easily say, the mountain form was all weight and all movement; with living form it does not matter, as Brancusi illustrates in his sculptures of golden line soaring up from its base which he rightly calls “Bird in Flight.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
However, as I continued to concentrate steadily on it, this weightless form gradually changed again. The vast mountain took on a body, now organic, three-dimensional. It became a new being on a new level. Now I saw it in a living depth. The glowing ivory forms had come together again into an organism, not personal but neither was it impersonal. It seemed to be pure form. I felt more tan saw an embodied structure, now an ultimate form, part of the Universe as I was also. The mountain, like myself looking at it, embodied a Universe of beauty and meaning. Since that day, this experience of my concentration on Mt. Blanc has remained vivid in my mind. Leaving the Swiss border town and driving up through the foothills of the French Alps toward Chamonix and Mt. Blanc was a blessed experience. Back in New York, later, when I looked out the window of my office on the 25th floor high above the Riverside Drive, I saw in the delicate skyline of New York also a pure form—now pure lace. The clouds above the city likewise assumed the forms I had seen in Chamonix, and as I walked home at night the giant elm trees on Riverside Drive took on this same significant form, all part of the same Universe. This experience of living forms, this embodied being, took me out of myself. Whenever I called it out of the past into my mind again, it gave me a new experienced which was beyond living our dying. The feeling was oceanic; it was my participation in the Being of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Such an experience cannot be said to exist only in my imagination, nor is it solely a kind of telepathy emerging from Mt. Blanc. The experience is both inner and outer, both subjective and objective. It is a fusion of my imagination and the emanating form of the mountain. This is an illustration of ecstasy. The word comes from the Greek ex-stasis, meaning to stand outside of, or above. It is also self-transcendent. It gives one the experience of going beyond, or absorbing the old self, and a new self, or more accurately an enlarged self, takes its place. O put it in psychoanalytic language, my ego was not denied but absorbed. My self was enlarged by participation in a new being which happened in this case to be the form of Mt. Blanc. My letting go of my ordinary awareness, which I call my banal consciousness, permitted a new consciousness to be born in me. Eastern religion and philosophy speak of this as the experience of the Absolute, or cosmic experiences, a participation in a Universal awareness. One participates in a greater consciousness, temporarily as it may be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
It may be clear that artists share this consciousness. Artists are the ones who are particularly sensitive to experiencing scenes in new forms. They have the capacity to look at a scene until it is born in their inner minds and imagination, born in their total consciousness. This may occur immediately, as the artists look at a scene for the first time, or it may be a new experience of a scene they have already seen many times, like Monet’s waterlilies. When they say, “I have looked at this many times, but this is the first time I have really seen it,” this is what people mean. I have looked at many trees in my life, but I never really saw one until I had seen Cezanne’s paintings of trees. Through participating in the Cezanne’s imagination, which so unforgettably finds the ground forms of trees, I was enabled to experience and create for myself the form of trees in a new and completely different way. This is one of the contributions artists make to the World: they experience these living forms, and through their art they enable the rest of us to see them—or better to experience them in our lives. The artist, including any and all of us who choose to create, to make imaginatively, as the ones who care themselves to this experience of essence. They are the ones who are caught up in greater or lesser ecstasy, and they hasten then to reproduce it on paper or on canvas or in music. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The artists vocation is to communicate that experience of ecstasy to others. Not to communicate it is to surrender the vision to atrophy; the artist must paint, or write, or sculpt—else the vision withers away and he or she is less apt to have it again. There is also another accompaniment to this experience of ecstasy, and that is gratitude. I think I have never painted a watercolor, sketchy as it might have been, without feeling a strange gratification afterwards. I sometimes feel I have been invited in where Angels fear to tread, and for that would not be grateful? The wonder of being human is that any part of us who so choose may be privileged to participate in this experience of ecstasy, with its accompanying gratitude. Before beauty liberates one from free pleasure, and the serenity of forms tames down the savageness of life, what are mortals before beauty? It is not a subject for academic students of technical metaphysics or for professional followers of institutional religion—although they are welcome to all that it has to give them, to the richer form and the inspired understanding of their own doctrine. No—it is primarily for the ordinary person who is willing to heed to one’s intuitive feeling or who is willing to use one’s independent thinking power. It escapes pushing into recognizable and separate divisions, definitions, or groups. Let it be stated clearly that mysticism is an a-rational type of experience, and in some degree common to all mortals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
It is an intuitive, self-evident, self-recognized knowledge which comes fitfully to mortals. It should not be confounded with the instinctive and immediate knowledge possessed by animals and used by them in their adaptations to environment. The average mortal seldom pays enough attention to one’s slight mystical experiences to profit or learn from them. Yet one’s need for them is evidenced by one’s incessant seeking for the thrills, sensations, uplifts, and so on, which one organizes for oneself in so many ways—the religious way being only one of them. In fact, the failure of religion—in the West, at any rate—to each true mysticism, and its overlaying of the deeply mystic nature of its teachings with a pseudo-rationalism and an unsound historicity may be the root cause for driving people to seek for things greater than they feel their individual selves to be in the many sensation-giving activities in the World today. Mysticism is not a by-product of imagination or uncontrolled emotion; it is a range of knowledge and experience natural to mortals but not yet encompassed by one’s rational mind. The function of philosophy is to bring these experiences under control and to offer ways of arriving at interpretations and explanations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Mysticism not so controlled and interpreted is full of pitfalls, one of which is the acceptance of confusion, sentimentality, cloudiness, illusion, and aimlessness as integral qualities of the mystical life—states of mind which go far to justify opponents of mysticism in their estimate of it as foolish and superstitious. The mystic should recognize one’s own limitations. One should not refuse the proffered hand of philosophy which will help one’s understanding and train one’s intuition. One should recognize that it is essential to know how to interpret the material which reaches one from one’s higher self, and how to receive it in all its purity. One of the realities of every historical era is that several generations coexist and inevitably find areas of conflict. Failure to resolve these conflicts may have a far-reaching and damaging effect on attempts to develop human potential beyond the level of the earlier generation. We must encourage people to take the time necessary to discover what it is like to be alive and human. By learning to really communicate with myself and other people, I have found that life has become much more worthwhile. I have emerged with the insight that life does not always have to remain a painful struggle. When an organization includes as part of its ongoing activities the quest to be better far than you are, and combines it with the knowledge of how to use the latest techniques for such growth, the organization is indeed facilitating and enhancing joy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
What happens when significant personality changes do occur within the context of our religious communities? There is no question that remarkable changes in life occur in many individuals who pass through a crisis type experience, which the church may call a conversion or simply a religious experience. Perhaps it will be instructive to view such an experience through the eyes of William, a man now in his forties whose conversion occurred when he was in high school. William was the son of a small-town minister of one of the larger Protestant denominations in America. The father was by no means a fire and brimstone preacher. He was, in fact, a rather warm, gentle, and shy man who lacked the aggressiveness to attract the attention of larger congregations. Though reserved, one probably expressed one’s affection to William and his other children, especially when they were small. That he loved them and took pride in them there is no doubt. There was never any severe physical punishment in the family. He was, however, much concerned that his children behave properly. William recalls one incident in particular that illustrates this: “I was quite small at the time—maybe for our five. I was playing outside and was so engrossed in what I was doing that I did not want to stop and go inside when I needed to urinate. Besides, the idea of doing it outside as Dad and I did when we were on fishing trips appealed to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
“So I did it right there, which happened to be alongside the church and somewhat protected from view, so I thought. However, I was not safe at all! Dad came along just then and spotted me. I am sure no punishment was meted out, and I cannot remember what he said, but I do remember feeling I have done a pretty horrible thing by urinating outside!” William’s mother was very affectionate, as he remembers it. She appeared to enjoy cuddling her children, and especially him. However, she, too, was very concerned about matters of behavior. When he was no older than eight or nine, she extracted a promise from him that he would never smoke. The degree to which her own fears about herself were involved in her attitudes are revealed by something se said to him later as a teenager. At a moment when they were alone together she said, “Son, you and I are very sensitive people. We do not go in for thing halfway. Keep this in mind when you are an adult, as it can be an asset for your career aspirations.” When he was around twelve, the question of church membership arose. William’s parents did not tell him he had to join. They simply told him if he wanted to, he was old enough to join. William felt, however, that there was an expectation on their part and the congregation’s part that the minister’s son would become a church member. Yet he had many doubts and questions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
William was not sure that God existed; and furthermore he was aware of anger and resentment that he did not think Christians should feel Furthermore, he was becoming more and more aware of the feelings of pleasures of the flesh, which were at the same time exciting and frightening. These, too, he felt were feelings that a Christian should not have. He felt very guilty about these doubts and feelings, but unfortunately he did not feel free to discuss them with his parents or anyone else. So he joined the church and felt guilty about that, too! Four or five year later William’s father become the minister of a struggling neighborhood church. The church was torn by internal struggles and the father, probably in an effort to unify the congregation, agreed to suggestions by the more conservative members that an evangelist be engaged. For William it was an emotional week of nightly meetings. The music was joyful and contagious, but he could enter in only half-heartedly, burdened down by the knowledge that he was not really a Christian. He wanted desperately to confess his hypocrisy, but could bring himself to do so. On the final evening of meeting and during the last call for those who want to accept the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior to hold up their hands whole every head is bowed, he held up his hand. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Relief was not immediate. He went home and spent a restless night. The next morning, a Sunday, he sought out the evangelist at church and asked to speak to him. They went to a private room where he told the evangelist of his doubts and his feeling of sin. They prayed together, and the evangelist assured him of God’s love and desire to forgive him. It was then that William suddenly felt loved and accepted. A great sense of being right with God and humankind swept over him. He felt twelve feet high and the World suddenly seemed a wonderful place in which to be alive! William really felt like he was, as the evangelist might have put it, a new man in Christ Jesus. The congregation soon became aware of what has happened. And although William’s mother at first expressed some bewilderment that such an experience should have been necessary, family and congregation expressed their delight and approval at his new and wonderful awareness of the Christian faith. And William himself was filled with feelings of good will and love for all humankind. From a psychological standpoint, it would appear that this experience in William’s life could be described as an interruption in the rejection cycle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Having been filled with feelings of self-hate, guilt, and self-condemnation, he suddenly felt worthwhile and loved by God and the Christian community. He felt cleansed of sin, and born again, no longer an object of self-hatred but of God by adoption. Had William at the time been able to put his beliefs into words, William might have said something like this: “I now know that God loves me and forgives me for having been and for being the terrible person that I am. Therefore, I am released from the terrible burden of self-hate and guilt that has plagued me and am free to be more creative and more loving. In terms of the rejection cycle, what happened might look like this: Feelings of rejection by parents, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, confession and conversion, overwhelming feeling of acceptance by God and the Christian community, new feelings of worth (“If God and the church love me so much, I must be worthwhile.”). However, prior to conversion there is a need to escape by attempting to please by joining the church. Unsuccessful attempts to suppress anger, pleasures of the flesh, doubt and so forth, which lead to feelings of further rejection (“God condemns me, and parents and the church people would if they knew me.”), producing feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
There is no denying that a remarkable change occurred in William’s life. Change in behavior may not have been particularly noticeable, since he had always done pretty much what was expected of him. However, one cannot listen to him describe the experience without being aware that a dramatic change did occur in his feeling of being condemned by God, a change that had significant effect on many of his attitudes. Many members of religious communities live of their lives at this level of understanding whether they reach it by a conversion experience, as William did, or by a gradual growth process in a religious home. And many people seem relatively happy in this life. It costs them something in spontaneity, for they go to considerable psychological effort to keep many of their feelings suppressed. And when they slip back and do things they should not do, say things they should not say, or feel things they should not feel, they again feel guilty, confess, and feel forgiven again for their sins. They rejoice in the amount of love they feel for others, although the sensitive outsider may feel they are more condemning than loving. The catch in William’s adjustment to his kind of religious community is that it is based on a view that regards mortals as inherently evil. And William’s conversation bear much resemblance to the escape hatch in which the person tries to escape feelings of self-hate by attempts to please. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
By saying in effect, “I have been an unworthy sinner who should be condemned, but I intend henceforth to lead a life of faith and dedication to the service of God, the individual often does win a favorable response from family, the religious community, and, he believes, from God. However, the hazards that go along with attempts to please are potentially attendant here also. The individual is likely to come to feel that the love he experiences is conditional upon one’s performance and therefore is not really directed toward one as a person. And, too, although he may keep his feelings of self-hate largely repressed, they are potentially increased, for in becoming a convent he had given up much of his freedom to be an individual in his own right. He is dedicated to hating and eradicating feelings that are an important part of oneself, particularly one’s anger and many of one’s feelings for pleasures of the flesh. To accomplish this one becomes more repressed and less spontaneous in one’s behavior. William eventually came to this conclusion: he entered seminary and followed his father into the ministry, but he found that he was not successful in suppressing the feelings he felt were wrong and for which he had sought forgiveness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
William married while he was in college, but he fond that he felt attraction for pleasure of the flesh towards women other than his wife. This was sinful, so he felt guilt, embarrassed, and inept around women. There were many times when he felt depressed our sullen toward other people and helpless to do anything about it, for to be aware of anger would be a sin in itself. To express it directly would be unthinkable. He also found himself tending to be critical and condemning people for doing things he later realized were things he wanted to do but did not feel free to do. Eventually William found his way into a therapeutic program where he discovered he could be loved for himself as a person—not for what he presented to be. In this secular setting what might be described as an even more basic conversion occurred. In a process that will be descried more fully later, he experienced much more fundamental feelings of self-worth than he had ever experienced before. Was William religious conversation as a high school boy a negative experience in his life? He does not feel that it was. He says, “Although I no longer accept the view of mortals or God on which that experience was founded, nevertheless it was a turning point in my life. At a time when I needed it most, it gave me a feeling of being worth something, however shaky that feeling may have proved later. It is certainly not the route to self-acceptance that I would choose for others to follow. However, for me, at that time and in that environment, it may well have been the only way that held any hope for me.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
So for William it might be fair to say that religion was both a hinderance and a help. The belief that the neglect of actual life is the beginning of spiritual life, and that the failure to use clear thought is the beginning of guidance from God, belongs to mysticism in the most rudimentary stages—and had no truth in it. The World will come to believe in mysticism because there is no alternative, and it will do so in spite of mysticism’s historical weaknesses and intellectual defects. However, if those weaknesses and defects were self-eliminated, how much better it would be for everyone. He has also learned the art of living that the experiences of everyday life yield up their meaning to him, and the reflections of daily meditation endow him with wisdom. If it be asked, “What is the nature of mystical experience?” the answer given very tersely is, “It is experience which gives to the individual a slant on the universal, like the heart’s delight in the brightness of a May morning in England, or the joy of a mother in her newborn child, in the sweetness of deep friendship, in the lilt of great poetry. It is the language of the arts, which if approached only by intellectual ways yields only half its content. Whoever comes eventually to mystical experience of the reality of one’s own Higher Self will recognize the infinite number of ways in which nature throughout life is beckoning one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The higher mystical experience is not a sport of nature, a freak phenomenon. It is the continuation of a sequence the beginning and end which are as vast as the beginning and end of the great cycle of life in all the Worlds. No mortal can measure it. It is truth that there is little mention of the beauty of the World in the Gospel. However, in so short a text, which, as Saint John says, is very far from containing all that Christ taught, the disciples no doubt thought it unnecessary to put anything so generally accepted. It does, however, come up on two occasions. Once Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate and imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and Sunlight. The Renaissance thought to renew its spiritual links with antiquity by passing over Christianity, but it hardly took anything but the secondary products of ancient civilization—art, science, and curiosity regarding human things. It scarcely touched the fringe of the central inspiration. It failed to rediscover any link with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Become Better than You Are and Live More Beautifully than You Do!
We do not come into the World knowing how to build a house or speak a formal language. However, a bird is hardwired to build its nest. A cat is hardwired to hunt for food, and care for kitten. Therefore, it is essential for our fully realize mortal to have a well balanced and fully functioning body, to develop one’s creative abilities and personal functioning, and to learn to experience rich satisfying relations with others. However, one lives in a cultural context. One lives within a family, one works, one belongs to certain racial and religious groups, one is a member of a particular generation, and one functions within a political structure. Each of these memberships can inhibit or facilitate the human potential. The past few decades have been an upsurge of interest in using such organizational contexts for the greater development of individual personalities. Methods of handling conflict and encouraging understanding are being used and evolved in many context. One lives within a family, one is a member of a particular generation, and one functions within a political structure. Each of these memberships can inhibit or facilitate the human potential. The past few decades have seen an upsurge of interest development of individual personalities. Methods of handling conflict and encouraging understanding are being used and evolved in many context. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Freedom is now in a crisis so serious that its meaning is obscured, and those who use the word are called, often justifiably, hypocritical. In our day freedom is beset by paradoxes, many of which we find surfacing on all sides. Total war was being waged in the name of freedom and democracy. We were all mobilized to fight for the American Way of Life. Yet in the glare of the conflagration overseas we could see clearly how much unfreedom and inequality went into that way of life. Many victims of the Depression were still hungry and terrified; labor all over the country was bound to long hours and low wages. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” demonstrates that multitudes of people whose convictions are expressed by such music believe that the word “freedom” is used as bait to entice them down Heaven knows what primrose path. These people see the hypocrisies, the false dilemmas, the artificial decorations and gimmicks that now make this once noble word almost unusable. From its position as the most treasured word in our language, the most precious experience of humankind, freedom has now been reduced in many quarters to a synonym for mockery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Like other erstwhile get words—truth, beauty, God—the word freedom may soon be usable only in irony, as the poet W. H. Auden illustrates in “The Unknown Citizen.” Auden describes a man against whom there can be no official complaint, who “held the proper opinions for the time of year; when there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.” And he concludes this picture of this completely conforming, normal man with: “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. The great danger of freedom is its susceptibility to hypocrisy, especially screwed information and blatant lies from the media, for under the guise of saving our liberty, the greatest suppression of our freedom can be perpetrated. How many tyrants throughout history have rallied their supporters under the banner of freedom! Much like freedom of the press. The press is supposed to be a tool used to bring us information, facts, and make the World a better place. However, lately they have been using their power to keep people in the dark about illegal antics used by one political power in particular to stay in power and they preach restricting our rights, as a way of protecting the people. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
We are reminded of Jacques Ellul’s statement about a humanity, “One is most enslaved when one thinks one is comfortably settled in freedom.” Many Americans believe in manifest destiny, especially presidential candidate in the 1980s election, Eugene McCarthy, he stated his religious belief in manifest destiny when he said, “United States was strategically placed by God as an island of freedom between two continents in which freedom was either denied or un-recognized.” Some might say this is a holier-than-thou claim that seems a mockery of freedom, but others believe it because it is the reason they live in and migrate to the United States of America. This quest of the soul is ageless. Never has the human race been without it, never could it be without it. It is not a new thing in human experience, but rather one of the oldest. Its long history in many lands makes impressive reading. It is a method, a teaching, an ideal combined for those who seek a genuine inner life of the spirit. The quest means disciplined emotions and disciplined living, sustained aspiration and nurtured intuition. It is not an ideal so far off that those who have realized it have no human links left with us. On the contrary, because it is truly philosophic, it skillfully blends life in the kingdoms of this World with life in the kingdom of Heaven. The quest is an adventure as well as a journey: a work to be done and a study to be made, a blessing which gives hope and a burden of discipline which cannot be shirked. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
There is another kind of exploration than that which traverses deserts, penetrates jungles, climbs mountains, and crosses continents. It seeks out the mysterious hinterlands of the human mind, scales the highest reaches of human consciousness, and then returns to report routes and discoveries, describe the goals to others so that they also may find their way thereto if they wish. The spiritual quest is not a romantic or dramatic adventure, but a stern self-discipline. Nevertheless there is an element of mystery in it which at times can be quite thrilling. The quest is spiritual mountaineering. It is not a path of anaemic joylessness for lean cadaverous votaries, as some think. It is a path of radiant happiness for keen optimistic individuals. Its ideals offer an invitation to nobility and refinement. “Become better than you are!” is its preachment. “Live more beautifully than you do!” is its commandment. It is an uncontentious teaching, knowing that it is, in practice, only palatable to those who come readily equipped for it. It is not a doctrine of life only for ageing hermits, but quite as much for young keen mortal who wish to do something in the World. If only they would accept and act on the psychological truth that thinking makes it so, it is a practical goal which could also be practicable one for millions who now think it beyond their reach. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
This sort of mind over matter is the strengthening reassurance to minds awakening from the slavish dreams of lust that they need not stay slaves forever. It is not an asceticism that is happy only in making itself miserable, but a comprehension that weighs values and abides by the result. The quest is a continual effort of self-release from inward oppressions and self-deliverance from emotional obstructions. This quest is really a system of therapeutic training devised to cure evil feelings, ignorant attitudes, and wrong thinking. The high teachers of the human race have given us goals and taught us ways to approach them. It is true that there is little mention of the beauty of the World in the Gospel. However, in short a text, which, as Saint John says, is very far from containing all that Christ taught, the disciples no doubt thought it unnecessary to put anything to generally accepted. It does, however, come up on two occasions. Once Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate an imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and Sunlight. “Fools mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness,” reports Ether 12.26. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Focus on the Imaginative Part of the Soul and Awaken What is Real and Eternal to See the True Light and Hear the True Silence
Very well. I am going to lay down the law to you. If I am to remain with you, I am the Master here. And I refuse to prove myself to you. I will not spend my tenure with you being constantly questioned as to the virtue of my authority! For most people giving affection and receiving affection are very difficult matters. Many people feel that they are unlovable and that any gestures of affection or admiration are extremely hard for them to accept. If a person knows one is unlovable, how can one believe it when someone professes love? Well, many people have deep within themselves a special significant sense of deprivation of affection and the consequent feelings make them feel unlovable. When they are able to go inside of themselves and reflect on this strong need for affection, it will help the individual readjust. One will begin to turn away from the inability to feel affection—there will actually be a massive escape from one’s longing—and one will gradually look toward the problem itself. Most of the times, the issue is an unresolved problem with one’s parental situation and once that is identified, an individual can work toward a resolution of those feelings with a possible increase in self-esteem. Sometimes it is important to figure out what each person wants and what you want to give. This will allow one to understand better some difficulties one has to on one’s life where people tend not to treat one as a sufficiently significant individual. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Other people are here to teach us lessons, and sometimes people have pseudo personalities, which become unmasked later in life, especially after changes in the family dynamics. However, as you are maturing, you can see where people are coming from, so it is no big surprise when they show you who they really are. Some people are so busy trying to gratify others regardless of one’s own wishes. The important thing to remember is no matter how good you are or how much you try to please and impress others, in many cases it is a failed effort because they do not care. The central issues of affection is trusting the feelings of others. The other side of this trust is the ability to gratify and give pleasure to someone who trusts. As the brain matures, the feelings of trust of distrust are usually felt very clearly in any situation. Successful experiences can greatly restructure a person’s self-concept in the direction of helping one feel more loving and loveable. Even in your family or people you grew up with, you may find later in life that you have different values than them and that is why they do not totally accept you, and that is find. Unfortunately, cultural and organizational forces are often powerful deterrents to joyful feelings. It is always good to see where people are coming from and you do not have to express any feelings of hurt or anger toward them, just be civil, but understand they may not have your best interests at heart. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We have already seen how the tendencies to condemn, so prevalent in the church, are frequently incorporated into the life of religious families. To the child of such a family, religion often becomes a strong additional force in one’s feeling of rejection and one’s increasing hatred of oneself. One is taught that one is inherently evil and that it is only through God’s gracious mercy that one can be saved from oneself. And although it made clear to one that god behavior will not be of sufficient merit to win God’s acceptance of a naturally sinful person like oneself, one is nevertheless subjected to strong emphasis on various rules of conduct. It is no surprise that one feels that one is under constant surveillance by one’s family, one’s religious group, and God, and that they are all judging one’s worth by one’s actions. Feeling condemned on all sides, one attempts some form of escape from one’s growing self-hate. However, as we have seen, such efforts lead only to further feelings of rejection. Many people whose lives are deeply intertwined with a religious group find it difficult to experience and express love because they have a tendency to suppress or repress many of their feelings. It is within many of these groups that people are most forcefully confronted with the idea that they are committing a sin if they feel angry, covetous, jealous, or are involved in pleasures of the flesh with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Many churches are so condemning toward these feelings that their members are likely to avoid expressing them and may deny even to themselves that they exist. And as we have seen in the discussions of anger and pleasures of the flesh, when we are full of unexpressed and unrecognized feelings that create barriers between ourselves and others, it is difficult to experience our love. In this context of life, as in others where we are so adept at creating barriers to love, it begins to look as though we are so frightened of love that we need the hindrances we create. No doubt it would be an oversimplification to see fear of love as the only factor in churches’ apparent need to codify behavior and judge people accordingly, but it is at least one very important underlying factor. Religious groups, like people in general, have not understood their fear of intimacy. Without realizing it, they have encouraged emotional distance between people rather than the experience of love they professed to promote. For example, churches often substitute apparent expressions of love for the experience of intimacy. A good illustration of this exists in those thousands of congregations (not al by any means) in our society who willingly give money to missionary enterprises throughout the World, including Africa, proclaiming their love of all humankind but who would be very upset and uncomfortable if someone from a culture different from theirs braved the evident fear, suspicion, and hostility and attempted to worship wit them and become active in their congregation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In an effort to promote fellowship many congregations have coffee hours after church services. The typical remoteness and lack of self-revelation that usually marks these functions makes them even less productive of the experience of love than the average cocktail party, where people sometimes feel relatively free to be themselves and express some of their genuine feelings. Churches from study groups, women’s groups, men’s clubs, and couples’ organizations. Although these groups talk about love and fellowship, they usually speak in very rational and impersonal ways. If anyone begins to express deeply personal feelings about the subject of discussion, such groups tend to become very uncomfortable and quickly change subject. If intimate relationships between members of these groups, as they undoubtedly sometimes do, it is accomplished outside of the group and almost in spite of it, for there is little or nothing within it to encourage the experience of love. During church services the minister often talks about the feeling of love and communion, which he presumes the worshipers feel with God and with each other as they worship. If he were sufficiently self-aware, it might be more helpful if the minister could tell his people that he, like the, is aware of an awful loneliness and longing for love that is almost too frightening to act upon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Another way in which the church often promotes emotional distance is that it discourages honesty within its community. This happens because if they are themselves, the church’s preoccupation with behavior fosters the impression among its adherents that they will be condemned rather than accepted and loved. So the church becomes a place where people do not say things many of them often say in other life situations. It becomes a place where people pretend they do not do things which they sometimes do: drink, smoke, act primarily in terms of the profit motive in their business, fornicate, get angry with their children—whatever their particular congregation would disapprove of. And it becomes a place where people pretend they do not feel things that they really do feel: anger, lust, prejudice, fear of love. We all wear masks, of course, to protect us from the self-revelation that would make us feel exposed and vulnerable to those around us, and we will never discard them entirely, but the atmosphere that most churches create, in which members feel they will be condemned if they say or do the wrong thing, makes the possibility of genuineness and the experience of love within the religious community even more difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We live in a World of unreality and dreams. Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of my thesis is that our age is witnessing the diminishing of the teaching of humanities in our high schools and our colleges. After an intensive study of the humanities over the last six years, the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington reported that these subjects are progressively being erased from college curricula. The humanities were originally the soul of educational institutions of human life through the great work of history, literate, philosophy and art. However now, students can graduate from seventy-two percent of the colleges in the country without even taking modern or ancient history, that is, without any understanding of Greece and Rome, where our civilization came from, or our struggles since the Renaissance, or the wars that have put us in the present predicament of having our very existence threatened by nuclear war. When we entered college, it used to be pointed out that to learn a foreign language was to go into the heart of another people’s culture, and understand its art and psyche. Now a student in the majority of colleges can go through without understanding any other people’s culture, or any profession except one’s own. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way: To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the World in imagination, to discern that all points in the World are equally centers and that the true center if outside the World, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the World, or love of the beauty of the World which is the same thing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
I recall that I stumbled into a class in the ancient Greek language in Oberlin College and, in spite of being a country boy who scarcely knew Greece had ever existed, I remained in class. It turned out to be the richest, most valuable class I ever took. Nowadays there are very few such classes that one can eve stumble into. Literature, which is the language which crosses all borders—the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the French Proust, the German Goethe, the English Shakespeare, the Americans Emerson and Whitman—all these are now scantily studied, or not at all in the hurry to get on to the study of computers, economics and business. And as far as the classic go—these great ancient Greek dramas and myths which are buried in our souls, along with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus—these classics are not read at all by the majority of the graduates. The understanding of the psyche of modern Americans requires knowing the self-interpretation of human beings in symbols and myths down through the ages; yet I rarely meet in my teaching graduate students who are planning to become psychotherapists, any who has even read the great classics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The purpose of the humanities is to make us more human, to enrich our lives, to develop our imaginations, and to make life worth living. And it is a saddening thing that these subjects are being dismissed. We need have no prejudice against engineering, business studies, accounting, techniques of all sorts including the use of computers, when we point out that these are studies of the how of life, to the neglect of what life is about. This is reflected in the fact that a professor of literature, so I am told by a professor-friend at one of our most distinguished universities, receives about $70,643.60 and a professor of business receives about $188,382.93. Philosophy, which used to be concerned with understanding the meaning of life, is now defunct on most campuses or, where it still exists, it has capitulated to the technical trends by becoming analytical philosophy. These studies of techniques are concerned with quantities, with exchange of goods, money, and even auctioning off of great pictures. However, the humanities are concerned with the quality, the what of life, the painting of the pictures or the composing and playing of music. The humanities are concerned, as I have said, with the questions of meaning. When, during the last century, they put on a great celebration in Boston at the completion of the stringing of telephone wires from Maine to Texas, Thoreau said, “Nobody asks the real question, Do the people of Maine have anything to say to the people in Texas?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Our age is replete with techniques for mass communication, but what is the content of what we communicate beyond business and money matters? Barbara Tuchman wrote a penetrating article in the New York Times two years ago entitled, “The Decline of Quality.” When I had it xeroxed and passed around, a number of people were offended: how dare she criticize our great age of mass communication, our new techniques for everything from TV to dish-washing? This, of course, was exactly what she meant: the quality of life diminishes as the concern with quantity burgeons. This of course has a great deal to do with modern art and the future. Art—in which we include along with painting and sculpture, the dance, architecture, literate, poetry, music—is devoted to the quality of human life. Hence the great confusion in art in our time: it is as though art is lost, it has no central soul or direction in which to go. However, we note at the same time the poignant hunger of people for great art as shown in the crowds that line up to see the exhibitions of the artifacts of King Tut, or the works of Picasso or Van Gogh. Of course one can argue that this is conformism; people crowd in because that is the thing to do. However, I do not believe such arguments exhaust the motives. Even if cake with a hundred flavors is added, Men and women do not live by bread alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
It is a genuine hunger, a starvation for what people’s own intuition tell them is great. It is the artists, the musicians, the poets, the dramatists that remind us that life is worth living. Especially is we are talking about life abundant, some of us can say with truth that beauty has saved our lives. In ancient times the love of the beauty of the World had a very important place in mortal’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with marvelous poetry. This was the case in every nation—in China, in India and in Greece. The Stoicism of the Greeks, which was very wonderful and to which primitive Christianity was infinitely close, especially in the writings of Saint John, was almost exclusively the love of the beauty of the World. As for Israel, certain parts of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Book of Job, Isaiah, and the Book of Wisdom, contain an incomparable expression of the beauty of the World. The example of Saint Francis shows how great a place the beauty of the World can have in Christian thought. Not only is his actual poem perfect poetry, but all his life was perfect poetry in action. His very choice of places for solitary retreats or the foundations of his convents was in itself the most beautiful poetry in action. Vagabondage and poverty were poetry within him; he stripped himself to his birthday suit in order to have immediate contact with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Saint John of the Cross also has some beautiful lines about the beauty of the World. However, in general, making suitable reservations for the treasures that are unknown, little known, or perhaps buried among the forgotten remains of the Middles Ages, we might say that the beauty of the World is almost absent from the Christian tradition. This is strange. It is difficult to understand. It leaves a terrible gap. If the Universe itself is left out, how can Christianity call itself Catholic? In transitional ages there is bound to be some kind of cultural breakdown. The whole society becomes disoriented and negates itself. When we fail to see this from a historical viewpoint, then we do get hopeless, pessimistic, and lose our sense of balance—for we know only the present that will be destroyed in the cultural change. This illustrates again the dangers we face in dropping history—along with the other humanities—from college curricula. We can, however, experience ourselves as part of a culture that is dying in order that a new society may be born. This dying period is certainly no picnic for any sensitive person. Psychological breakdowns are almost the normal thing in our day; we have psychotherapists of all kinds trying to meet this need. However, for the most part therapists are equipped only to patch people up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The breakdowns of morals and family life—all these are part of the radical change. If we can see it that way, then we can move ahead with courage. We can realize that we are building a future, trying to produce some context, some art, some drama, some music that will communicate something to future ages. That I would like to be a part of. And I am sure all of us would. Therefore, find the ground form. Get below the surface, below all your superficial whims and find the reality, the foundation. Find the structure on which your life is built. One Summer on the coast of Maine, John Marin made several of his watercolors. These paintings were done with Marin’s character style—a dash across the sky for clouds, a jagged blue and brown expressing the ocean, strong vertical lines of green for spruce tress and the curves of brownish-red showing the unpredictable might of this rugged, rock-bound coast. Each stroke of Marin’s brush is made with profound emotion. When he had completed these particular paintings, he took them to the drug store in the little town and stood them against the wall. He then asked the pharmacist, whom we all knew as a typical “Down Easterner,” how he liked them. The druggist answered, “They will be fine when they are finished.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
What the druggist called unfinished was really the genius of Marin; he looked on beauty bare. In ever transitional age one must let go the finishing, and look on beauty care. The incompleteness, the groping, fits our age. Our beauty is not at all pretty or charming—it may be the bare rock, the skeleton watercolors of Marin, the silence of John Cage sitting at his piano without a note, the discord and sounds of cultures grinding together. If you are not prepared, it is dangerous to look. Hence Plato, as Greece began its deterioration, write of the terror of beauty, and Rilke wrote these enigmatic lines: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” We have in music, especially in the giants like Beethoven and Schonberg, Aaliyah Haughton and The Beatles, the same sense of terror. And even Dostoyevsky, who certainly knew what beauty was, has Dmitri, one of his characters in the Brothers Karamazov, cry out, “The awful thing that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of mortals.” Yes, this is what modern art is all about. It has little or nothing to do with prettiness or niceness or sweetness. It its beauty there is the terror of the ground forms, and the contemporary artists are our distant early warning. They tell us of the fundamentals of love and the terror of life and death. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
In the Middle Ages we have art for God’s sake, in the Renaissance we have art for mortal’s sake, in the nineteenth century we have art for art’s sake, in the twentieth century we have no art for God’s sake, and in the twenty-first century we have art to remind us we have a soul. The good way must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is clear, it is too easy to reject. What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. However, if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate mortals. Since it clearly should be chosen, nothing would remain but to proceed on it. There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about. The World extracts a price of calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few mortals follow them. The wise give mortals endless opportunities to discuss what is good. Mortal’s attitude are manifold. Some live in a strange World bounded by a path from which countless ways lead inside. If there were roads signs, all of them might bear the same inscription: I-I. Those who dwell inside have no consuming interest. They are not devoted to possession, even if they prize some; not to people, even if they like some; not to any project, even if they have some. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Things are something that they speak of; persons have the great advantage that one cannot only talk of them but also to, or rather at them; but the Lord of every sentence is no man but I. Projects can be entertained without complete devotion, spoken of, and put on like a suit or a dress before a mirror. When you speak to mortals of this type, they quite often do not heart you, and they never hear you as another I. You are not an object for mortals like this, not a thing to be used or experienced, nor an object of interest or fascination. The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than as a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the Lord of every story will be I. Some come to the truth in a roundabout way. The Quest is direct. The quest is governed by its own inherent laws, some easily ascertainable but others darkly obscure. It is a search for meaning in the meaningless flow of events. It is response to the impulsion to look beyond the ever-passing show of Earthly life for some sign, value, or state of mind that shall confer hope, supply justification, gain insight. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
My Business is to Think About God—It is for God to Think About Me!
You do me a bitter injustice. You cannot know my accomplishments. And only very few of my descendants know them either. Now let us get back to your present obligation. Since affection is based on the building of emotional bonds, it is usually the last phase to emerge in the development of human relations, following inclusion and control. In the inclusion phase, people must encounter each other and decide to continue their relation; control issues require them to confront one another and work out how they will be related; then, to continue the relation, affection ties must form and people must embrace each other to form a lasting bond. The person with too little affection the underpersonal, tends to avoid close, personal ties with others. One maintains one’s two-person relations on a superficial, distant level and is most comfortable when others do the same with one. Consciously, one wishes to maintain this emotional distance, and frequently expresses a desire not to get emotionally involved, while unconsciously one seeks a satisfactory affectional relation. One’s fear is that no one loves one. In a group situation one is afraid one will not be liked. One has great difficulty genuinely liking people, and distrusts their feelings toward one. One’s attitude could be summarized by this statement, “since I have been rejected, I find the affection area very painful; therefore, I shall avoid close personal relations in the future.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
The direct technique for maintaining emotional distance is to reject and avoid people in order to actively prevent emotional closeness or involvement, even to the point of being antagonistic. The subtle technique is to be superficially friendly to everyone. This behavior acts as a safeguard against having to get close to, or become personal with, any one person. The deepest anxiety for the underpersonal, that regarding the self, is that one is unlovable. If people got to know the individual well, one believes, they would discover the traits that make one so unlovable. As opposed to the inclusion anxiety that the self is of no value, worthless, and empty, and the control anxiety that the self is not smart and irresponsible, or has a defect that they want to hide, the affection anxiety is that the self is undesirable and unlovable. However, maybe these types of individual view themselves this way because they think they would not be able to love someone they deemed as defective, so they believe others will feel the same way about them. In contrast, the overpersonal type attempts to become extremely close to others. One definitely wants others to treat one in a very close, personal way. The unconscious feeling on which one is operating is, “My first experience with affection were painful, but perhaps if I try again they will turn out to be better.” Being liked is extremely important to one in one’s attempt to relieve one’s anxiety about always being rejected and unlovable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
The direct technique for being liked by a person who is overpersonal is an overt attempt to gain approval, be extremely person, ingratiating, intimate, and confiding. The subtle technique is more manipulative, to devour friends and subtly punish any attempts by them to establish other friendships, and to be possessive. The underlying feelings are the same as those for the underpersonal. Both the overpersonal and the underpersonal reposes are extreme, both are motivated by a strong need for affection, both are accompanied by a strong anxiety about ever being loved (and basically about being unlovable), and both have considerable hostility behind them stemming from the anticipation of rejection. For the individual who successfully resolved one’s affectional relations with others in childhood, close emotional relations with others in childhood, close emotional relations with one other person present no problem. One is comfortable in such a personal relation, and one can also relate comfortably in a situation requiring emotional distance. It is important for one to be liked, but if one is not like one can accept the fact that the dislike is the result of the relation between oneself and one other person—in other words, the dislike does not mean that one is unlovable. Unconsciously, one feels that one is a loveable person who is loveable even to people who know one well. And one is capable of giving genuine affection. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
The primary interaction of the affection area is that of embrace, either literal or symbolic. The expression of the appropriate deeper feelings is the major issue. In most groups a paradox arises around this issue. At the beginning of the group there are many expressions as to how difficult it is to express hostility to people. It often later develops that there is only one thing more difficult—expressing warm, optimistic feelings. Affection problems, both giving and taking, are usually very profound. There are affectional elements in many of the foregoing techniques, especially the encounter and the two-person group fantasy. The question of whether religion can help us experience and express love is not simple. Either a “Yes!” or a “No!” answer would find many outspoken adherents. Much can be said on both sides. On one hand it seems undeniable that much of our idealism about love has had its origin and perpetuation in the Jewish and Christian traditions in our culture. In principle, at least, most of us value love and long for the satisfaction that experiencing and expressing love might bring in our personal, family, community, and national lives. The presence of this longing undoubted is related to our religious heritage, perhaps particularly to the New Testament and such passages as the following: If I speak in tongues of mortals and Angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am noting. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
And when we do achieve some degree of emotional intimacy, if we disclaim the influences of our religious heritage on these experiences, in what may appear to be a nonreligious or even an irreligious setting, we are probably deceiving ourselves. However, the church has a rather poor record in helping people experience the love of which so much is spoken. Despite lip service to the primacy of love in human relationships, the church, by and large, tends in practice to see moral value primarily in terms of external behavior rather than in terms of the experience of love. As a result of this approach, religious groups often appear to be concerned primarily with judging people. They judge some people acceptable and stamp them with their good behavior seal of approval and make them feel welcome as long as their behavior remains acceptable. They judge others unacceptable and make them feel unwelcome, or at least uncomfortable, unless they repent and change their behavior to meet the group’s standards. As a result, the experience of being accepted, loved, and enjoyed as a person, irrespective of externals, is probably a rare experience in the church. And so the doors to the experience and expression of love are often rather effectively shut. And they are pushed shut under the guise of being lovingly concerned for the welfare and happiness, both present and eternal, of the individual! #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Many of the people in the World want to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for truth is an acquired taste that few acquire. Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are to easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat. On a higher level we find fictions that mortals eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish. Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community. We cannot, on the face of it, be wholly true, although it is plain that there is some truth in it, evokes more discussion and dispute, divergent exegeses and attempts at emendations than what has been stated very carefully, without exaggeration or onesidedness. The Book of Proverbs is boring compared to the Sermon on the Mount. In our trying to find meaning in such a transitional age, let us also refer to music. John Cage, the composer who has been very much in the forefront of modern music, was advertised as giving a concern in New York. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
There was an expectant crowd which filled the auditorium, but John Cage ascended the platform and sat down at the piano for an hour, not lifting a finger. I think it tremendously important here is a musician who thinks art is so crucial, and his music so significant, that he believes that before anyone can really hear it, they have to learn to listen to the silence. What does this have to do with modern art and life? We have to realize that what people are trying to express often is a great emptiness, or sorrow and despair as in Picasso’s Guernica. When you see a picture entitled “White on White,” there is nothing on the canvas as far as you can discern. It was painted in two kinds of white and then framed. I am told that the modern artist Duchamp framed a toilet seat and hung it up as a picture. Like “White on White,” there are other offerings which consist of paintings with a little dot here and there, or a couple of lines in the corner, and then framed. When I go into the National Gallery in Washington, I see several great Leonardo da Vincis and Rembrandts and a number of other works for all time. Then I come to the contemporary artists, and I have a feeling of coldness. Their paintings contain nothing about human beings that we can recognize. What these contemporary artists are basically trying to say is that one must look, and often times we see a very bleak future. Their prediction is not about the lovely country of America where everyone is going to get rich. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
It is a country that is becoming more and more mechanical, computerized, more and more money-occupied, directed by the Dow Jones Index—more and more humanly empty. Many of these artists, like the ones who draped cow’s intestines and blood over a rusty automobile as a still life in front of my office building in New York a few years ago, are trying to say people “Look! Really look, See what is happening, Take it in!” Mark Rothko, whose Chapel is in Huston, was one of the great figures in modern art. He committed suicide, but before he died he wrote a letter explaining his sadness at the reception of his works. He felt that people could not understand what he was trying to do, that any rich man could buy up all his paintings, dig a whole in his back yard, and dump his canvases in to bury them from the World. Now to somebody who had had a passion all his life to communicate by way of art, to say something important to his fellow human beings, this prospect was a great tragedy indeed. Where there is in Rothko is color after color—red, black, then perhaps brilliant gold and then a coast of black and another brown. Your initial feeling in that chapel might be dismal. Your second thought might be that to understand it requires a great deal of looking. Then you might sit on one of the benches in the chapel (which Rothko also designed) and you too would look. After a while you would being to feel that here is someone speaking to you out of subterranean levels, speaking out of his depths to those who will listen; he is the psalmist crying, “Out of the depths I call unto Thee.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
In a biographical film about Rothko, he is quoted as saying that when people look at his pictures, he hopes “They will laugh or cry or maybe pray.” These words are very relevant. People sometimes laugh and walk our again, and they sometimes cry. When they begin to take in what goes on with an artist like Rothko, then perhaps they pray. That is very fitting for this chapel. Perhaps people become unpersonal because they are not in their proper environment, they had in the past tried to reach out or get people interested in their work, but many are more interested in being side show clowns. Particular artist, Jules Olitski, has a Summer studio on an island, where he has built a great barn. There are canvases all over the floor. Olitski paints with a mop and spray gun. The mop has a white flap at the end like the kind one uses in mopping a bank floor. He dips the mop into big pails of paint and then spreads it on the canvases. There are a number of levels in each painting; it is a mirage of many different colors. When you look at it you not only feel those basic patterns of curving physical forms, but you also begin to see the many different hues shining through. The more you look at it, the more colors you see which were covered up and are now reflected through the painting. As you let yourself gaze upon these canvases, you are rewarded with a rich visual experience and with the ecstasy which accompanies such an experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
What these artists are trying to tell us, what they are predicting, it seems to me, is that we are at the end of an age. I am not a great lover of our present hedonistic age and our materialistic society, where necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, as Auden puts it: “This stupid World where gadgets are gods and we go on talking, many about much, but remain alone, alive but alone, belonging—where?—Unattached as tumble weed.” I think our society is radically faulty in a number of ways—such as our amoral economic system, our loss of values, our vulnerability to nuclear war, the millions starving while wheat rots in our storage bins, the Sacramento Unified School District getting ready to be take over by the state of California, the dramatic increase of homelessness in Sacramento, with the sky high rents, and how the Oroville dam broke, meanwhile the city invested nearly $300 million taxpayer dollars into a sports arena. The results are that the quality of human relationships has diminished. It is difficult for people in our day to see beyond the glamour, the sensational advances in science and medicine, the technological ease with computers, the fata morgana appearances of progress on all sides—yes, it is indeed difficult to see the reality underneath. In contrast, freedom is possibility. The word possibility comes from the Latin posse, “to be able,” which is also the original root of our word power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
Thus beings that long and tortuous relationship, interminably debated in the parliaments of the World and fought and bled over on countless battlefields, of the relationship between freedom and power. Powerlessness, we know, is tantamount to slavery. It is a truism that, if people are to have freedom, they must have the equivalent personal power in the form of autonomy and responsibility. The women’s liberation movement, which Reese Witherspoon is part of with her legal defense group to help working women gain equality called Time’s Up, has argued this point wit cogency. To be sure, one has to discriminate between possibilities: hectic acting, because it is more comfortable to act than not to, is a misuse of freedom. President Nixon is guilty of this, as illustrated in his own writings about “the unbearable tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. Not knowing how to act or not being able to act is what tears your insides out.” This compulsion to act in any extreme form is what is meant by “acting out” in therapy and is often symptomatic of the psychopathic personality. Personal freedom, on the contrary, entails being able to harbor different possibilities in one’s mind even though it is not clear at the moment which way one must act. The possibilities must be there to begin with, otherwise one’s life is banal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
The psychologically healthy person is able to confront and manage the anxiety directly in such situations, in contrast to the neurotic, in whom anxiety sooner or later blocks off his consciousness of freedom and one feels as if one is in a strait jacket. Freedom always deals with the possible; this gives freedom its great flexibility, its fascination and its dangers. The very idea of a quest involves a passage, a definite movement from one place to another. Here, of course, the passage is really from one state to another. It is a holy journey, so one who is engaged on it is truly a pilgrim. And as on many journeys, difficulties, fatigues, obstacles, delays, and allurements may be encountered on the way, yes! And here there will certainly be dangers, pitfalls, oppositions, and enmities too. One’s intuition and reason, one’s books and friends, one’s experience and earnestness will constitute themselves as one’s guide upon it. There is another special feature to be noted about it. It is a homeward journey. The Father is waiting for his child. The Father will receive, feed, and bless one. It is a movement from the outward to the inward but it is effected only with much labor, though much despondency, and after must time. “My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken,” Psalm 62.1-2. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Have You Found Your Soul—It is the Quest to become Conscious of Consciousness and Penetrate the Mystery of its Knowing Power
You must trust in my principles. That is our paradox. We do not leave behind the Natural Law when we receive grace. We are principled beings. I never stopped loving you, not for an instant. Whatever I felt for you are the Bryant family gathering in no way affected my feelings for you. How could it? I warned you twice to be patient with your family because I knew it was right for you to do so. Then the third time, all right, I went too far with a little mockery. However, I was trying to curb your insults, and your abuse of those you loved! But you would not listen to me. Affairs are not always tragic. If the basic relationship with the spouse is not too hopelessly unsatisfying and if the principles do not react precipitously, a marriage often survives extramarital affairs. In fact, it may be strengthened as the result of a new-found ability to be open to the experience and expression of love. However, society’s attitude about extramarital affairs often operates against the survival of a marriage. The experience of Fallon, a young wife, is probably not too exceptional. Her husband, Blake, an attorney, became involved with another woman-a divorcee—within their social group. Blake was sufficiently indiscreet about his affair that a good many members of the community, including relatives, became aware of the situation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Fallon sought the help of a psychotherapist, who Blake also saw on a sporadic basis. As soon as others became aware that an affair was taking place, Fallon was besieged with pressure to seek a divorce. Both his parents and her parents urged it. Other friends and relatives said or implied if she did not see a lawyer and force him to move out, she was a fool. Her physician gave her similar advice. The force and the vehemence with which many of these people spoke seemed to indicate that they themselves felt threatened by the situation. It was almost as if they were saying to Alice, “If you let him get away with this without being punished for it, what is going to happen to society. We cannot afford to tolerate this kind of behavior.” Fortunately, Fallon had a mind of her own, although the constant pressure caused her many bad moments in which she asked herself if she were some kind of weakling for not seeking a divorce. However, when she did not immediately seek a divorce, things began to happen that made her happy she had not yielded to pressure. For one thing, she began to discover, through therapy, that she was very frightened of love and had never been free to express the love and affection of which she was capable. Fallon realized she had been difficult to live with throughout her marriage. She had been overly sensitive, constantly feeling hurt about something Blake had done. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Because she had hurt feelings that she felt were caused by her husband, in retaliation Fallon would either withdraw from behind a wall of hurt silence or complaint at Blake about little things that has no connection with her deeper feelings. As She became aware that she acted this way because of her fear of love, Fallon began to become much more capable of experiencing intimacy, including the expression of love to Blake. She also discovered that he, too, was changing. Having known the love of the other woman seemed to affect Blake’s view of himself. He felt more lovable and developed more confidence in his ability to express love. And even while he continued to see his lover, he became more able to express love openly to Fallon than he had ever been before. And she, through her new self-discovery—which might have never happened if Blake had not had an affair—was much more able to respond with deep-felt love and was able to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh experience of their relationship as never before. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
So eventually, while Blake was still having his affair, she could send her advice-giving friends away muttering and shaking their heads, by saying in all honesty, “I do not want a divorce! I feel more love for my husband than I was ever able to feel in the past, and we both find much more satisfaction in our relationship than we ever did before! Why would I want to get a divorce now?” Since Blake now found many satisfactions in his marriage that neither he nor Fallon had been capable of experiencing with each other before, and since he deeply valued his home and desired to be with his children, he, too had every reason to continue the marriage rather than to seek a permanent alliance wit another woman. This is not to say that life for the couple was tranquil during these times. Not at all. Both of them, and perhaps particularly Fallon, went through great upheavals of feelings. There were moments of torrid anger and times of anguished hurt. Most of all, there were times of fear. Fallon would become terrified after expressing her love in openness during their expression of pleasures of the flesh. It was apparent that the fear that Blake would abandon her was most acute at those times, because it was then that she was most aware of how much she cared. However, the point if that growth occurred in both Fallon and Blake as they learned to deal more honestly and openly with themselves and their emotions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Society frowns strongly on their expressions with the result that people devise a variety of techniques to hide these feelings from others as well as from themselves. It is often more effective to express hostility in safe atmosphere. Then, direct ways of dealing with the feeling can be explored. Too often, the usual efforts to suppress these negative feelings lead to the suppression of the whole self. If Fallon and Blake had automatically sought divorce as it was automatically suggested, this experience of revelations would have been short-circuited. However, it is not being claimed here that every affair will have salutary effect. Yet, it is important that society take its head out of the sand, so they do not ignore or hide from obvious signs of danger, to be aware that extramarital affairs are not always the disasters we like to assume and that it is not unusual for marriages to be strengthened and married love to be deepened by the forces that extrametrical affairs sometimes set in motion. When a person begins to seek out one’s real nature, to find the truth of one’s real being, one begins to follow their quest in life. It is a call to those who want inner nourishment from real sources, not from fanciful or speculative ones. It calls them away from things, appearances, shows, and externals to their inward being, toward reality. After such considerations, we are led to wonder what constitutes the reality behind the Universe. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
This is a quest which takes us into religion, mysticism, and philosophy and the great mysteries of life, a quest which eventually confirms the celebrated words of Francis Bacon: “A little thinking may incline the mind toward atheism, but greatness of study bringeth the mind back to God.” We are now in a transitional period similar to that of the end of Hellenism and the birth of Roman arts and culture. It is a period also like the demise of medieval art and the Renaissance. In all transitional periods there is a confusion as to what the new meaning of art if going to be. Since we are in the very midst of that confusion, our period is especially. The confusion in physics, just as before the Einsteinian and Quantum theories were born to throw light on the whole of physics, is like the present confusion in art, which is a reflection of life. The artist is the predictor of what happens in science rather than the reverse. When any new culture is established, the art gives the people their language. In the Middle Ages all the less affluent knew the meaning of the figures in the stained glass of the windows of Chartres; this was their language. Chartres consist of a vast library of dazzling symbols and myths, and these constituted the life of the less affluent. It was literally true that no sculptor or painter of fainted glass needed to sign one’s work—God could see all and he would know all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Similarly in the Renaissance, the new humanism made the new humanistic art recognizable to all. At this moment, we are in the midst of a new cultural transition with its attendant difficulties and confusion. When giving the inaugural address at the opening of a new wing in the Modern Museum in New York, Paul Tillich spoke on the topic, “The Art of No Art.” Though we can surely understand what Chesterton and Tillich meant, the problem, strictly speaking, is not no art. It is rather a confusion in our day of many different forms of art. In the Metropolitan Museum, for example, we pass through the rooms of the Renaissance art and see a similarity in colors and in forms. In the seventeenth century we see portraits, like those by Van Dyck, running the whole length of the hall. In the early nineteenth century we see many landscapes and seascapes, which became art of the kind taught in academia. At the end of the nineteenth century we see protests against academic art Van Gogh, in Gauguin, in Cezanne and in Picasso. By the art we can recognize the period it comes from. However, it our contemporary age we have every kind of art—Wyeth and his realism, de Kooning and his jagged strokes which show great vitality and color with contorted figures, Motherwell and Franz Kline who reveal the great tensions in modern times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
There is Tobey with his calligraphy, Picasso who seemed to change his style every decade, Pollock who painted with surprisingly harmonious colors the abstract forms by means of his drip school, Olitski with his subconscious forms expressed in coat after coat of different colors with the underlying pinks and lavenders showing through to produce a captivating charm, Rothko with his profundity in which the deepest abstract forms of reality are available for those willing to meditate in the presence of his paintings. There is Hans Hofmann with his energetic and bright colors which seem to cry out with the vitality and strength of the Earth, O’Keefee with her abstractions from nature. And so on and on. The modern age reveals many different kinds of art with the basic form, the soul of modernity if I may say so, still undiscovered. Take Picasso. In his youth his draftsmanship was fantastically accurate in his paintings of the less affluent in Spain. Then in 1907 broke forth cubism with his painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a classic picture of the natural form in a harlotry environment. Just after the First World War he was painting figures of bathers that showed what The Great Gatsby meant, namely, we play, we have beautiful bodies, but it is going to amount a meaningless tragedy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Then in the 1930s and early 1940s, Picasso painted pictures of machines. These were portraits not of persons but of the human being as a machine, with wheels, spokes, and so on; everyone seemed cold and made of steel. He did not give these pictures names but rather numbers. Here is an artist predicting a century in which people will be taken over by computers, which is just what has actually happened. The quest we teach is no less than a quest for knowledge in completeness and a search for awareness of the Universal Self, a vast undertaking to which all mortals are committed whether they are aware of it or not. The great central questions of life for the thinking mortal are: What am I? What is my relation to, and how shall I deal with, my surroundings? What is God, and can I form any connection with God? Every puzzle which fascinates innumerable persons and induces them to attempt its solution—be it mathematical and profound or ordinary and simple—is an echo on a lower level of the Supreme Enigma that is forever accompanying mortals and demanding an answer: What is one, whence and whither? The questers puts the problem into one’s conscious mind and keeps in there. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It is a quest to make life of better quality, both inside and outside the self, in the thoughts moving in the brain, in the body holding that brain, and in the environment were that body moves. It is a clarion call to mortals to seek one’s true self, a voice that asks one, “Have you found your soul?” The quest is simply the attempt of a few pioneer mortals to become aware of their spiritual selves as all mortals are already aware of their physical selves. It is a quest to become conscious of Consciousness, to explore the “I” and penetrate the mystery of its knowing power. The secret path is an attempt to establish a perfect and conscious relation between the human mind and that divinity which is its source. When a mortal passes from the self-seeking aspiration of the Quest, one passes to conscious cooperation with the Divine World-Idea. It is, from another standpoint, a quest for one’s own centre. It is the opening up of one’s inner being. The love of the order and beauty of the World is thus the complement of the love of our neighbor. It proceeds from the same renunciation, the renunciation that is an image of the creative renunciation of God. God causes this Universe to exist, but h consents not to command it, although he has the power to do so. Instead he leaves two other forces to rule in his place. On the one hand there is blind necessity attaching to matter, including the psychic matter of the soul, and on the other the autonomy essential to thinking persons. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
By loving our neighbor we imitate the divine love which created us and all our fellows. By loving the order of the World we imitate the divine love which created this Universe of which we are part. Mortals do not have to renounce the command of matter and of souls, since one does not possess the power to command them. However, God has conferred upon one an imaginary likeness of this power, an imaginary divinity, so that one also, although a creature, may empty oneself of one’s divinity. Just as God, being outside the Universe, is at the same time the center, so each mortal imagines one is situated in the center of the World. The illusion of perspective places one at the center of space; an illusion of the same kind falsifies one’s idea of time; and yet another kindred illusion arranges a whole hierarchy of values around one. This illusion is extended even to our sense of existence, on account of the intimate connection between our sense of value and our sense of being; being seems to us less and less concentrated the farther it is removed from us. We relegate the spatial form of this illusion to the place where it belongs, the realm of the imagination. We are obliged to do so; otherwise we should not perceive a single object; we should not even be able to direct ourselves enough to take a single step consciously. God thus provides us with a model of the operation which should transform all our soul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
In the same way as in our infancy we learn to control and check it in our sense of time, values, and being, freedom endlessly re-creates itself, gives birth to itself. Otherwise from every point of view except that of space we shall be incapable of discerning a single object or directing a single step. Freedom is capacity, we have seen, to transcend its own nature—an occurrence in which that overused word transcend really fits: We begin to appreciate the great fascination that freedom, phoenixlike in its capacity to rise from its own ashes, exercised on our ancestors. We begin also to experience the dangers in freedom. People will cling to freedom, treasure it, and if necessary they will die for it, or continually yearn and fight others for it if they do not now enjoy it. And it is still true, according to the statistical studies of Milton Rokeach, that the majority of people place freedom highest on their list in the ranking of values. Freedom is not only basic to being human, but also freedom and being human are identical. This identity of freedom and being is demonstrated by the fact that each of us experiences oneself as real in the moment of choice. When one asserts “I can” or “I choose” or “I will,” one feels one’s own significance, since it is not possible for the enslaved person to assert these things. In the act of choice, in the original spontaneity of my freedom, I recognize myself for the first time as my own true self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Existence is real only as freedom. Freedom is the being of existence. When I exercise my freedom, only in those moments am I fully myself. To be free means to be one’s self. The possibility of changing, which we have said is freedom, includes also the capacity to remain as one is—but the person is different from having considered and rejected changing. This change, furthermore, is not to be confused with changing for its own sake, as we shall see presently, or changing for escapist reasons. Hence, the gross confusion of license, so often pointed at in American youth, with genuine freedom is that they are exercising their freedom when they immerse themselves in invigorating tasks and spiritual growth, as it keeps healthy young adults from living at the expense of society. Freedom consists of how you confront your limits, how you engage your destiny in day-to-day living. The Lord our God is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Praise the Lord, who covered the Heavens with clouds, who prepared the rain for the Earth, who made the grass grow upon the mountains. And may our souls be together in the bundle of life in the light of out Lord. May the Lord bless you, and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you; and be gracious to you; the Lord life up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. #RandolpHarris 13 of 13
The Kingdom of Heaven is within You–Wisdom Penetrates Everywhere on Account of its Perfect Purity
There will come a time, a time to tell you everything slowly so that you understand. However, now is not that time. Something is stirring in me, knowledge as clear as if a voice is speaking: this is not the most difficult part. Often two people will try to express their feelings toward each other verbally, or will try to explain themselves or some situation, and they simply cannot understand each other. This occurs when people are inarticulate, when conflicts about their feelings are prominent and they try to hide it, when they are not really familiar with what their feeling is, or when they are very intellectualized and the words are used defensively to obfuscate the situation. Especially with intellectual people, words paradoxically can be the largest obstacle to communication because people often spend a great deal of time and word trying not to say something or avoiding the central point, which is often known to themselves. If we are able to have a satisfying and fulfilling sense of completion in our lives insofar as meaningful relationships are concerned that we need to experience emotional intimacy beyond our immediate families, it seems an inescapable conclusion. And not to have these wider experiences both raises questions about the nature of our family relationships and threatens them. For to expect that all of one’s needs for emotion intimacy with adults can be satisfied by one person is to put an almost unbearable burden on any association. And to attempt to do so suggests an immaturity and overdependency that is detrimental to the experience and expression of love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If we are two independent individuals who recognize that we are essentially alone and do not fool ourselves into believing that we do not in the last analysis live essentially separate lives, even in marriage we are most happy and fulfilled. To attempt to avoid our essential loneliness and isolation through neurotic dependence on each other is a pseudo escape from an important reality. Let there be spaces in your togetherness for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. Although our increased mobility and decreased clan experiences have tended to brings us face to face with our loneliness and isolation, the net results may not be negative. If we can develop close tires with others in spite of the fears of love that deter us, we may discover there are better reasons for intimacy than those created by the happenstance of being related by common ancestry. Three married couples formed a very close and loving relations that has existed over a period of seven or eight years. They have probably been together on an average of two times a month during that times. Since some members of the group had a professional interest in psychotherapy, it was not unnatural that the group frequently explored their feelings about each other and other relationships in their lives, often talking long into the night. Sometimes violent feelings came to the surface that seemed likely to split the couples apart. The strength of these feelings should put a red flag on some of one’s interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
If an individual finds oneself verbally going in and hurting other people quite viciously and unintentionally or unconsciously, it is important to be able to better understand that one is somehow responding to an internal force rather than the situation he or she is involved in. Sometimes when a person feels another individual pulling away from them, the response to their living one psychologically is for the individual who feels they may be abandoned to go after that individual even more strongly, which is self-defeating since all they do is withdraw even more rapidly. Many individuals respond to abandonment by giving full vent to the hostility and anger that they are experiencing and blame it complete on the person with him they are involved with. However, it is best to stop whatever it is that one is doing and try, as honestly as one possibly can, to say to the other person: I do not feel I am being very fair with you,” or something to that effect, which lets him or her know that a bit of irrationality has exhibited itself and it has really confused the issues that we were discussing. Another important lesson is not to fear that irrational side. Know that it is there and know that there is enough sanity to not be afraid to give full vent to that irrational part of oneself, since it does two things: it can give an individual clearer handles as to where it came from, as well as giving the other person an opportunity to be more able to cope with one more as a total person in a more beneficial way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Each time people are honest, individuals can emerge from these experiences with deeper feelings of love for each other. Sometimes, in conflicts, what is actually going on is people are acting out a lot of the hostility that they have towards one of their parents, and it takes some insight into one’s own soul to understand the emotion that is influencing one’s response to another individual on what they thought were non-emotional issues. At times people feel defensiveness about reflecting on their own emotions, as they do not know what they will reveal about themselves. These feelings can be compounded by normal conflicts that happen during the day, which could lead to a blow on, when that is not a rational response. People who have unresolved issues are often emotionally dangling on the edge of a cliff with almost no way of rescue. If people realize they have problems, then they can do something about them by facing them. Those who get help have a desire not to let destructive impulses take over their lives. By revealing what the underlying situation involves, it leaves one to have more optimistic experiences with others and can lead to an increase in one’s feeling of personal significance, and in confidence regarding one’s ability to succeed at making connections with people. One can then proceed to enjoy more the human encounter. It is interesting that one of the most empathic themes of the New Testament is the importance attached to the experience of love among the early Christians as expressed in such phrases as, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
One reason for this emphasis on love, in addition to the teachings of Jesus, may have been the fact that in some instances conversion to Christianity meant complete spitting up of families who were hostile to the new sect and its members. With such isolation and loneliness thrust upon them, the new converts would naturally seek to satisfy their need for intimacy with each other. They did, no doubt, have the same fear of love that hinders us, for the record shows they bickered among themselves and found many ways to deprive themselves of experiencing and expressing the love they longed for. Can the expression of pleasures of the flesh can be exclusive? Certainly, if we choose to, we can limit expression of pleasures of the flesh to one person. There are any ways of expressing love to others in addition to expressing it through pleasures of the flesh. We are free to choose whatever way or ways we wish. From a mental health standpoint it is important to make this choice a conscious decision. A great many men and women expend a great deal of emotional energy attempting to avoid awareness of pleasures of the flesh for anyone other than a spouse. When awareness of desire does creep in they feel guilty and frightened because they do not trust themselves we the power of a conscious choice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We have already examined the damage to emotional and physical health that such dulling of awareness can bring about. If we can recognize and accept within ourselves that we do—in common with most of humanity—have such desires for pleasures of the flesh, it will be much more healthy. However, also keep in mind some people choose to abstain. Nonetheless, for those who choose to have adult relationships with passionate intimacy, they can enjoy the delicious feelings and decide on a conscious level what, if anything, they want to do about them. It is surprising how many people imagine they are somewhat unusual in having strong desires for pleasures of the flesh for more than one person. This is probably particularly true with women, for whom it is not culturally acceptable to have such feelings. However, women who are alive to their feelings do have these desires, and it is often a great relief to a woman to find she is not unique in this respect. As a culture we are quite reluctant to openly examine the fact that large numbers of married persons do not choose to be exclusive in their relationships. We are probably particularly afraid to recognize that any possible good could result from extramarital affairs. To do so might seem to condone or even encourage such behavior and perhaps lead to the collapse of our monogamous system, at least as we know it. However, if that system is of value and if it is not already a fiction, then the open examination of all relevant questions certainly should not destroy it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
On the one hand it is undoubtedly true that many extramarital relationships are destructive events in which the individual is using a conquest as another way of avoiding intimacy, while on the other hand there are other instances where individuals appear to be open up to the experience and expression of love in an affair in a way in which they have not been able to do with a spouse. One of these aspects of marriage that we do not like to admit is the fact that it may not be most conducive to the experience of love. There are many reasons a married person can find for not feeling close to a spouse. There may be unspoken resentments about any number of things that have been built up over a period of time. The relationship may be experienced primarily in terms of obligation and duty so that the experience of freedom so conducive to love has evaporated in that trapped feeling. It is probably true that these are ways in which we avoid experiencing the love that is there because of our fear of love. However, be that as it may, it is not surprising that some people find they experience love more freely outside of marriage. Some people have an uncommon personal warmth, gentility, and graciousness. We often find the minds of others to be highly developed faculties of critical observation joined with an innate reverence for the sacred to explore the fundamental issues of the human heart: knowledge of its present state, of its higher potentials, of the nature of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Being intellectually stimulated is a very important quality in any relationship. Many people have a sincere inner aspiration for deeper knowledge and experience of the inviolable spirit within their own hearts. We are simply human beings exploring ever more profound truths with increasing depth and concentration. Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of disintegration of concern for pubic weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of our values, our recovery—if we are to achieve it—must be cased on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom. This is why freedom is so important as a goal of psychotherapy, for whatever values the client develops will be based upon one’s experience of autonomy, sense of personal power and possibilities, all of which are based on the freedom one hopes to achieve in therapy. “And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had on done so many,” The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). What followed the publication of Eliot’s poem, and what I believe Eliot was predicting, was the waste land of our culture, the disintegration of the World we all had know and counted on, The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II and the Savings and Loan Crises. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Nobody knew it would happen then—except the artists. Even if T.S. Eliot would have known it consciously, I doubt it. However, when he wrote that poem, he knew it unconsciously with the genius of the poet. It is woven around the medieval myth of the wasteland and its impotent king. Eliot pictures our age as a wasteland in which the king has lost his potency and hence cannot procreate, a land in which no crops can grow, a land that is wasting away. The king is powerless to do anything about it. The whole poem is a fantastic prophecy—by common consent one of the great classic. In the same year, 1922, The Great Gatsby by F, Scott Fitzgerald appeared. Several films were made of this novel which I think were travesties; they missed the whole point of the story. Actually The Great Gatsby is a prediction of the demise of the American Dream, the dream that everybody can get rich like Horatio Alger. In this novel Fitzgerald draws the picture of a man who believes he can make himself over into anything he wishes: he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He had a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself. At one point Gatsby cries incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” He believed he could do anything, he worshipped change, with no regard for destiny or society. Here is a man who believed in optimistic thinking with a vengeance. He lived by the belief that destiny and determinism had no place in this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The novel ends in a crashing tragedy—a tragedy which the human potential movement the New Age people have not yet appreciated, even in the early 2000’s. If it does not give it some kind of religious meaning, if it does not make of it the analogy of a sacrament, the legal character of punishment has no true significance; and therefore all penal offices, from that of the judge to that of the executioner and the prison guard, should in some sort share in the priestly office. Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in one the faculty of free consent. When they are really despising the weakness of affliction, mortals think they are despising crime. One is thus the object of the greatest contempt. Contempt is the contrary of attention. There are exceptions only where there is a crime which for some reason has prestige, as is often the case with murder on account of the fleeting moment of power which it implies, or where the crime does not make a very vivid impression upon those who assess it culpability. Stealing is the crime most devoid of prestige, and it causes most indignation because property is the thing to which people are most generally and powerfully attached. Even in the penal code, that is apparent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
No state is beneath that of a human being enveloped in cloud of guilt, be it true or false, and entirely in the power of a few mortals who are to decide one’s fate with a mortal who are to decide one’s fate with a word. These mortals do not pay any attention to one. Moreover, from the moment when anyone falls into the hands of the law with all its penal machinery until the moment one is free again—and those known as hardened criminals are like Neil Caffery in the TV Series White Collar, in that they hardly ever do get free until the day of their death—such a one is never an object of attention. Everything combines, down to the smallest details, down even to the inflections of people’s voices, to make one seem vile and outcast in all mortal’s eyes including one’s own. The brutality and flippancy, the terms of scorn and the jokes, the way of speaking, the way of listening and of not listening, all these things are equally effective. There is no intentional unkindness in it all. It is the automatic effect of a professional life which has as its object crime seen in the form of affliction, that is to day in the form of horror and defilement are exposed in their starkness. Such contact, being uninterrupted, necessarily contaminates, and the form this contamination takes is contempt. It is this contempt which is reflected on every prisoner at the bar. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The penal apparatus is like a transmitter which turns the whole volume of defilement contained in all the circles where the miserable crime is to be found upon each accused person. The mere contact with this penal apparatus causes a kind of horror in part of the soul remaining intact, and the horror is in exact proportion to the innocence. Those who are completely rotten receive no injury and do not suffer. If there is not something between the penal apparatus and the crime capable of cleansing defilement, it cannot be otherwise. This can only be God. Infinite purity alone is not contaminated by contact with evil. All finite purity becomes defilement itself through prolonged contact. However, the code may be reformed, punishment cannot be human unless it passes through Christ. The severity of the sentence is not the most important thing. Under present conditions, a condemned mortal, although guilty and given a punishment which is relatively light in view of one’s offense, can more often than not be rightly considered as having been the victim of cruel injustice. What is important is that the punishment should be legitimate, that is to say that is should be recognized as having a divine character, not because of its content but because it is the law. It is important that the whole organization of penal justice should be directed toward obtaining from the magistrates and their assistants the attention and respect for the accused that is due from every mortal to any person who may be in one’s power and from the accused one’s consent to the punishment inflicted, a consent of which the innocent Christ has given us the perfect model. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
A death sentence for a slight offense, pronounced in such a way, would be less horrible than a sentence of six months in prison given as it is at the present day. Nothing is more frightful than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides one with nothing to fall back on, but one’s own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of one’s social origin and lack of culture, as one stands broken down by guilt, affliction, and fears, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt one in tones of ostentatious refinement. For as long as affliction is to be found in society, for as long as legal or private almsgiving and punishment are inevitable, the separation between civil institutions and religious life will be a crime. The lay conception considered alone is completely false. It only has some excuse as a reaction against a totalitarian religion. In that respect, it must be admitted, it is partly justifiable. In order to be present everywhere, as it should, religion must not only not be totalitarian, but it must limit itself strictly to the plane of supernatural love which alone is suitable for it. If it did so it would penetrate everywhere. The Bible says: “Wisdom penetrates everywhere on account of its perfect purity.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Through the absence of Christ, mendicity, in the widest sense of the word, and penal action are perhaps the most frightful things on the Earth—two things that are almost infernal. They have the very color of hell. Prostitution might be added to them, for it is to real marriage what almsgiving and punishment without charity are to almsgiving and punishment which are just. Mortals have received the power to do good or harm not only to body but to the souls of their fellows, to the whole soul of those in whom God is not present and to all that part of the soul uninhabited by God of the others. A mortal may be indwelt by God, by the power of evil or merely by the mechanism of the flesh. When one gives or punishes, what one bears within one enters the soul of the other through the bread of the sword. The substance of the bread and the sword are virgin, empty of good and of evil, equally capable of conveying one or the other. One who is forced by affliction to receive bread or to suffer chastisement as one’s could exposed in starkness and defenseless both to evil and to good. There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that mortals who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the World, like inert matter. After that we see that everything comes directly from God, either through the love of a mortal, or through the lifelessness of matter, whether it be tangible or psychic, through spirit or water. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
All that increases the vital energy in us is like the bread for which Christ thanks the just. All the blows, the wounds, and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ. Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may skin as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away. Our World is manifold, and our attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Mortal prefer to forget how many possibilities are often to them. They like to be told that there are two World and two ways. This is comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be common and the other one is celebrated as superior. Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save mortals from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. Not all simplicity is wide. However, a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Hence, those who speak of many possibilities speak of the few and are of help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good, and thus help many. We are to enter a new and different rhythm and tell such as will listen that they need not be forlorn, lost, or without hope because they find one to appeal to their hearts or mind. They are asked to follow the God within themselves, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Those who feel alone in this matter or who can only walk outside the groups on an independent path should be reminded that there is a God within them who can guide and help them if they turn to him. The Quest not only begins in the heart but also ends there too. It is an endeavour to lift to a higher plane, and expand to a larger measure, the whole of one’s identity. It brings in the most important part of oneself—being, essence, consciousness. One know thyself! There is a whole philosophy distilled into the single and simple statement. Between the ordinary mortal who takes oneself is one is, and the philosopher who does exactly the same, there stands the Quester. In the first case, outlook is narrow, being limited by attending to the inescapable necessities and demands of day-to-day living. In other case, peace of mind has been established, the thirst for knowledge fulfilled, the discipline of self realized. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In between these two, the Questers is not satisfied with oneself, has a strong wish to become a better and more enlightened mortal. One tires to exercise one’s will in the struggle for realization of one’s ideal. It lifts human consciousness vertically and enlarges human experience spiritually. If the Infinite Being is trying to express its own nature within the limitations of this Earth—and therefore trying to express itself through us, too—it is our highest duty to search for and cultivate our diviner attributes. Only in this way do we really fulfill ourselves. This search and this cultivation constitute the Quest. It offers a conception of life which originates on a higher level. The Quest is both a search for truth and dedication to the Overself. By “Quest” I mean the deliberate and conscious dedication to the search for spiritual truth, freedom, or awareness. The inner meaning of life does not readily reveal itself; it must be searched for. Such a search is the Quest. “Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant? Let one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on one’s God,” reports Isaiah 50.10-11. It is the Lord who gives salvation even unto Kings, it is the Lord who delivered even David from the hateful sword; let our sons grow as plants grow, and let our daughters be cornerstones, polished as if they were the cornerstones of the palace…happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I am Speaking My Feelings of Love to You Because it Pleasures Me, Not Because I am Trying to Please You!
Deeply felt love gives a relationship uniqueness—a uniqueness that helps give the love an intensity not usually experienced in other associations. However, compulsive pleasures of the flesh is like to be self-defeating; for after an attractive individual is found, we are likely to have the feeling “He [or she] does not really care for me. I am just somebody to have fun with.” And even if genuine caring does develop, these doubts are likely to continue, since we are full of self-doubts and may continue to assume we have been successful only in seducing the other person, not in winning the individual’s love. Handsome people, especially beautiful women, often have such a problem. They make maximum use of their physical attributes to attract the interest of others. Their beauty wins so much praise and attention from people, sometimes to the exclusion of other qualities, they then conclude they are valued for nothing else. When people are viewed as only being attractive, one is likely to say within, “It is not really me that is being loved. It is my beauty, which is not my full essence.” Pleasures of the flesh is sometimes used more as a way of manipulating others than as an expression of affection. Those who use pleasures of the flesh as a weapon of control probably feel inadequate to fight their battles on more open grounds. Fear of anger is often involved, and resentments are expressed in this covert way. Because of how transitory modern relationships have become, both individuals may fail to recognize or admit their feelings of caring. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
One of the most interesting but often unrecognized facets of the relationship of pleasures of the flesh and love is that physical intimacy is often used a way of avoiding emotional intimacy. Since we long for love but are afraid to express caring, we often use pleasures of the flesh in relationships as a substitute or counterfeit for the experience of love. Or we may use pleasures of the flesh as a means of driving those away to whom we are potentially emotionally close. Some people are frightened by the opposite gender, and although they may want to be emotionally close, they fear the potential hurt they may feel in a genuine relationship. Without consciously trying to, some have developed a means whereby they can tell themselves one is asking for love and affection while in fact one is constantly pushing potential mates away with their overly aggressive desires for pleasures of that flesh that successfully conceal one’s real warmth. When it comes to pleasure of the flesh, in addition to other motives that may exist in those who are very aggressive (such as the attempt to prove one’s worth), there may be an unrecognized need to alienate people while seeming to be open, frank, and warm that is probably frequently present. If on a very short acquaintance a mortal approaches another person with an invitation dealing with pleasures of the flesh and is refused, one can then say to one’s self something like this: “I offered this individual my love, and he or she was too square [ or frightened, or antiquated, or proud] to accept it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
When such a proposition is accepted, on those occasions the chances of a genuinely satisfying experience of closeness is often extremely remote, as remote as reaching the peak of Mount Himalayas. For both persons are in a good position to have the feeling “I do not really know this person. This individual must be interested in me only for pleasures of the flesh. Therefore, I have got to protect myself by not getting emotionally involved.” And sometimes this can be a subconscious decision where a person may be rendered unattracted to someone they randomly had a casual and intimate encounter with and may not even realize why. In reality, however, they both may be longing for an experience of love, but the way in which the alliance began, coupled with the fear of love they both have, makes the possibility of fulfillment of their desire for love harder to get into than a Beatles concert (nearly impossible). At the end of the evening they are likely to exchange phone numbers, which they are likely never to use. One problem of many engagements is that the couple mistakes physical intimacy for emotional closeness. Many couple become enthralled with the excitement that goes along with the physical closeness that they love each other. Often their feeling for each other is based on only the vaguest knowledge of one another. Sometimes one or both of them may have the feeling “If this individual really knew me, one would not care for me.” Thus the amount of self-revelation may have been consciously limited. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
For others the revelation of the self may be thwarted without any particular awareness of the fact that it is happening. And the handy substitute of physical intimacy may successfully conceal the fact even from the participants themselves that they are afraid of love. It is not being suggested that physical intimacy (whether it includes pleasures of the flesh or not) inevitably limits self-revelation and emotional intimacy. It need not be so at all. However, when individuals are so afraid of the vulnerability of love that they are reluctant (consciously or not) to enable another to see themselves as they are, physical intimacy provides a handy way of seeming to be free and open while revealing very little of one’s self. And although physical closeness can be used as a way of avoiding emotional closeness, emotional closeness cannot usually be experienced to it fullest without it. If you want to test this idea, try sitting ten or twelve feet across a room from a person you love and expressing your love from that distance. You will probably feel awkward and embarrassed. When a person is sitting next you in your arms, how much more natural it seems. Absence makes the heart grow founder, but too much absence makes the heart wonder. In fact, 42 percent of long-distance relationships have a chance of not working out because many couples find it difficult to deal directly and verbally with the tensions that arise in their contacts with each other because of their self-doubts and the doubts of each other’s love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Many couples use satisfying pleasures of the flesh as a form of unspoken communication, reassuring each other of their love. The ideal, of course, would be to have both the spoken and the unspoken ways of expressing love and working through conflicting feelings. It follows naturally from what has been said that a person’s ability to experience emotional freedom and express themselves in a productive manner is part of the freedom to love. Since all of us have some fear of love, we will from time to time have issues in our relationships. It is a matter of degree. The fear of love is expressed in many different ways and some who are quite frightened of love may be relatively free to experience pleasures of the flesh, as already suggested, and use it as a way of avoiding the experience of love. What seems to be missing is the rich texture and three-dimensional quality that would be present if individuals were secure enough within one’s self so that one can reveal one’s self and experience and express one’s love to another person. One’s fear of being hurt makes this an impossibility for some at present. Many people have the difficult task of becoming aware of their self-hatred and discovering that they are worthy of love from themselves and others. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Peter has been badly emotionally damaged in his ability to love and his ability to experience and express his sexuality. He does not allow people to get close to him. He is uncomfortable around all people, particularly women; and he tend to be a loner insofar as any meaningful relationships are concerned. He is frightened of pleasures of the flesh and his fantasies that he will be castrated or maimed in some way upon experiencing pleasures of the flesh. Peter says there is a complete lack of feeling on his part—even physical sensation appears to have been largely missing. Peter will probably have a long and difficult tie achieving any kind of pleasures of the flesh or a loving relationship, even with professional help, since his fears are crippling. Our disgust with pleasures of the flesh are often potential doorways to greater enjoyment because they often mask appetites that are unacceptable to us because of fears and inhibitions we have learned sometime during out lives. However, as we gradually learn that it is worth the risk to open up to the experience of love, and as we gain confidence in our ability to handle whatever hurts may occur, our growing freedom to love will also probably be expressed in a growing freedom to be open to a healthy relationship. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
One of the most widespread human problems of modern society is making contact with other humans. Painfully few methods for meeting are socially acceptable, a condition that makes for much human heartbreak. Furthermore, the discomfort in actually verbally engaging another person, in knowing what to say, or what to do prolong and develop the association, is a serious problem for far too many. The agony of this situation is underscored in the extremes found in psychotic patients, many of whom simply have not learned how to enter the human race, how to make contact with another person. When the issue is one of learning how to join with others, there are methods to work around this. Myth is a narration which assumes an art form and thus becomes universalized. Myth has the symbolic power of art, and like any work of art, myths help us to make sense of our World. Like other forms of art, myths relieve our excessive anxiety and guilt feeling and enable us to live in times of turmoil with some inner balance and peace. Myth enables us to experience the universal meaning—say of love, of death, of joy, and even of adversity. More specifically, myth as an art form enables us to confront the events that would be the most hideous, such as the crucifixion of Christ, and to make of that hideousness a form of beauty and meaning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
The Son of Man and the Son of God lives out the grand scenario of the suffering servant and then dies that all of us may be saved. How powerful this scenario is! It makes one understand (though not necessarily agree with) the fundamentalist ministers who say “We preach Christ crucified and risen from the dead.” Consider how many thousands of paintings have been made of the crucifixion through western history, from Cimabue’s through El Greco’s to the most insignificant canvas in the Vatican. This myth has inspired almost every painter in Christendom to give his or her version of the heroic happening. And consider how many statues have universalized Christ’s sufferings, from the countless mosaics to Michelangelo’s Pieta down to the crucifixes on the walls of hundreds of thousands of churches. The great beauty that such a cruel scene calls forth is astonishing indeed. Seeing Queen of the Damned, for example, as mythic, we are freed from excessive anxiety in strange ways. We see the dynamics of a savior and loving relationship, treachery, deception, and the war in perspective; we see it externalized, made universal. We conceive of the war as part of the long path down through the ages of mortal’s inhumanity to mortal. This relieves us of excessive guilt: it is not just ourselves who case this choreography of horror; war is a human paradox. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Many people still assume that they are their country’s people and should be ready to die for freedom. This feeling typically takes the form of patriotism. Other persons who would not agree that political freedom is dying for would nevertheless state the same thing about psychological and spiritual freedom—the right to think and to command one’s own attitude from the 1984 type of spiritual surveillance. For reasons that are endless in their variety and that are demonstrated from the beginning of history down to the freedom marches and freedom rides of this century, the principle of freedom is considered more precious than life itself. We have only to glance at the long line of illustrious person to see that, in the past at least freedom, was our finest treasure. People will endure hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve only their independence. Human beings sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power and life itself for the preservation of this sole good. To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one’s control and that one has a right to refuse it to them forever, is an infringement of the rights of God himself, who has created mortals to be free. If it is not supported by something which maintains itself by its own power, and this is nothing but freedom, the whole of knowledge has no status. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
The first postulate of all philosophy, to act freely in its own terms, seems as necessary as the first postulate of geometry, to draw a straight line. Just as little as the geometrician proves the line, should the philosopher prove freedom. The truth of freedom is self-evident; that is an inalienable right. Freedom is axiomatic, even to think and talk presupposed freedom, means no proof is necessary. The capacity to experience awe and wonder, to imagine and to write poetry, to conceive of scientific theories and great works of art presupposes freedom. All of these are essential to the human capacity to reflect. Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Why these unending and extravagant panegyrics? Why should freedom be so venerated, especially in a World where practically nothing else is granted that devotion? The expressions such as to love our neighbor in God, or for God, are misleading and equivocal. A mortal has all one can do, even if one concentrates all the attention of which one is capable, to look at this small inert thing of flesh, lying stripped of clothing by the roadside. It is not the time to turn one’s thoughts toward God. Just as there are times when we must think of God and forget all creatures without exception, there are times when, as we look at creatures, we do not have to think explicitly of God. At such times, the presence of God in us has as its condition a secret so deep that it is even a secret from us. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
There are times when thinking of God separates us from him. Modesty is the condition of nuptial union. In true love it is not we who love the afflicted in God; it is God in us who loves them. When we are in affliction, it is God in us who loves those who wish us well. Compassion and gratitude come down from God, and when they are exchanged in a glance, God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and those who receive meet. The sufferer and the other love each other, starting from God, through God, but not for the love of God; they loved each other for the love of the one for the other. This is an impossibility. That is why it come about only through the agency of God. One who gives bread to the famished sufferer for the love of God will not be thanked by Christ. One has already had one’s reward in this thought itself. Christ thanks those who do not know to whom they are giving food. Moreover, giving is only one of the two possible forms love for the afflicted may take. Power always means power to do good or to hurt. In a relationship where the strength is very unequally divided, the superior can be just toward the subordinate either in doing one good with justice or in hurting one with justice. In the first case we have almsgiving; in the second, punishment. If one wants to become a World-famous theologian, it seems on various problems of, one should speak profoundly to both mind and heart. life#RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Randolph Harris II International Institute 