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All a Little too Incredible–She Was Not Altogether in Love and Looking Around for a Philosophy Which Would Bring Contentment!
She was painfully confused, trying to crush her sobs, trying to crush her rage against me. The word “crisis” is Greek in origin, and in that language its primary meaning is “decision.” In medical pathology, a crisis is that point in the course of a disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. In general, a crisis is a turning point, the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. In speaking of “the crisis in belief,” I refer to a point in the course of individual development at which the person must decide for oneself whether the picture one has been given of the nature of the World is a true one. It is the point at which one is called upon to think for oneself about the important matters of cosmology and ethics. It is time of decision about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the coerciveness of moral law, the place of mortals in nature, the freedom of the individual will, and all other great issues with which philosophy deals. Not all of us are philosophers, of course, but if we are human we must have a philosophy. Our intellect demands that experience should be accounted for; the need for things to be intelligible is a basic human need. Thus we are all, willy-nilly, philosophers of a sort, in the sense that we tell ourselves one story or another about most of the enduring issues with which systematic philosophy deals, and without which we cannot face life with any sense that it has meaning and worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The crisis in belief need not occur at any special age, and in fact it need not occur very conspicuously at all. For most people, however, it comes with adolescence, and it is ushered in partly by the challenge that the newly awakened and intense pleasures of the flesh and aggressive urges of puberty offers to morality and the civilized code of the pleasures of the flesh. It is a function as well, I think, of the growth of intelligence, which is beginning to reach full power concurrently with physiological maturation. It comes at that period when the mind, like the body, is getting ready to leave home in search of a new home of its own. Less dualistically, we may say that the maturing human form, freeing itself, under the push of natural development, of the habitat of its childhood, emerges into a new World in which it is no longer provided for and ministered to, but in which it must seek its own sustenance and meaning, and must choose anew for itself. With choices comes responsibility, self-valuation, and self-affirmation or self-rejection. The crisis in belief is often a time of categorical repudiation or total acceptance, of radical chance of rigid stasis. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a time of the greatest psychological danger, in which the integrity of the self is challenged, and in which old selves die and new selves are born. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As psychologist interested in the way in which psychological forms develop, and therefore, I shall add, intensely interested in the individual life, we assessors necessarily pay a great deal of attention to that part of the individual’s history in which one was faced with a serious crisis of development. The work of assessment requires us to understand how a person came to one’s beliefs about the nature of the World and one’s own place in it, and how solidly founded and ready for action one’s philosophy of life really is. I need hardly say that in order to arrive at such an understanding we must not only inquire deeply into one’s beliefs on great issues, but must synthesize what we know of the nature and genesis of those beliefs with what we have been able to understand about one’s entire character and life history. Moral posture and beliefs about the cosmos are themselves frequently determined at least in part by psychodynamic forces, and a complete personality formulation gives an account not only of what actions our philosophy determines, but what forces our philosophy is determined by. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The question of the existence of God is of course of central importance, in terms both of its implications for the nature of belief or disbelief in Providence, in Heavenly justice and mercy, in life after death, and in the efficacy of prayer, and hence in the dependability of a benevolent supernatural power. It is designed to elicit opinions and feelings and determinism, theism, good and evil, and the like. One problem, for example, describes events leading up to a criminal action, in which the external and internal determinants of the person’s behavior were made manifest. This problem served as the point of departure for discussion of individual responsibility in affairs in which individual appeals compelled by forces within and without to act in an apparently irresponsible way. Another problem concerned a man shipwrecked along on a desert island, with certain knowledge that he could never get off it. The question then was, could such a man, being part of no human community, do an evil action? This immediately led into the difficult problem of the locus of ethical sanctions, whether in society or in the individual, which in turn, of course, is central to the psychological problem of the internalization or externalization of the superego, with all its implications for the management of aggression and sexuality, and anarchic impulse in general. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There was this woman who was rated by the assessment staff as being exceptionally well adjusted, and indeed her life seemed agreeably proportioned with secure community position, healthy and happy children, a professionally successful husband, and constructive social service activities through which she expressed something of her individuality and in which she felt worthwhile. This woman said that she decided to drop religion early in college, having reached a conclusion that it was all a little too incredible. Chapel services were compulsory at the college at that time, and she always went to services, taking along an interesting non-religious book to read during the sermon. Shortly after graduation she married a man of exceptional eligibility in terms of the status symbols of that time and place, but with whom, she confessed she was not altogether in love. She had two children, and while they were still very young, she began to feel quite unhappy, always worn-out and cross. She began, she says, “looking around for a philosophy which would bring contentment.” She found it in Lecomte du Nouy’s book, Human Destiny, which she says enabled her to feel justified in returning to church membership and to religious belief. She now believes in a personal God, to whom she prays and in whom she finds support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Of her belief, she says, “It’s satisfactory enough, and it fills a definite need. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether I just thought it all up to fill a gap in my life.” She does not believe in the after-life. However, she says that her unbelief in this respect is not complete or final; I may some day, in the future, come to believe in an after-life as well.” The implication was that if she needed to believe it, she would believe it. That she suspects that she has perhaps made rather too much of a good thing out of the flexibility is indicated, however, in her Thematic Apperception Test (which is a psychological personality test) stories, several of which communicate a sense of shallowness (as she sees it) and a lack of profound meaning in her life. On Card 19, for example, she tells this story, which purports to deal with a single day in a girl’s life, but which suggests the emotional tone of the subject’s own life in its totality, as she perceives it: Virginia has had a thrilling say. She has had a good start on learning to ski. She emerged with no broken bones or even sprains, though she had a glorious day of climbing, sliding, leaping, staggering, and falling with her legs, skis, and ski poles all mixed up. The air was so clear, so wonderful—not as cold as all her friends had told her the horrid north would be. And how nice Johnny Evans was. So friendly, no more and no less. Everyone laughed a lot, and they the most of all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Better get ready, now! The day is by no means over. Square dancing tonight, with Johnny and all the others, then the long ride home, and serious business—job hunting in a day or two. “How silly I was,” thought Virginia, “to be so childishly frightened about my luck up north. It’s just like anywhere!” But will Virginia find her grandfather’s watch with the lost ruby of the Whitehall family? Or trace her friend Johnny’s surprising ancestry? Read the December issue of Bang to find out!!! This story, like all complex symbolic productions, may be interpreted at many levels of meaning. I find it most touching and poignant, and to interpret it is in some sense a shame. Yet: she tells us that she has emerged happily from the first years of her feared adulthood (the horrid north) with no damage done (no broken bones, or even sprains; in fact, it has been a glorious and exciting and lucky day up north). However, the day is not yet over; indeed, it is “by no means over.” There are things not yet found our; Johnny, for instance, though is so nice and friendly (no more and no less) has a surprising ancestry (where did the beasts begin?). And then there is the lost ruby which should pass on from generation to generation, encased in a patriarchal time-piece (this jewel of sexuality, agent of transmission of the matter of life through the generations). And fear with it, that true generation has not passed through her, or seized her for its fulfillment. And the final sentence: “Read the December issue of Bang to find out”: the sum of the tale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
A “bang” is, of course, what one gets out of life, and December is the last issue of the year. The final crisis of selfhood is still before her, and the very facility of her adjustment seems to represent the greatest danger to her integrity. So far as religion is concerned, I vaguely believe this woman would have evolved a very different interpretation of experience out her transitory atheism if she had had the courage to sound her own depths instead of accepting pragmatically what seemed to satisfy her immediate needs. As things stand, I believe that she perceives herself unconsciously as having forfeited profound experiences in the interests simply of facile adjustment. (Which is not to say that she is right in his self-perception; the story is a deeply experienced one.) I should perhaps pause at this point to make it plain, if it is not already so, that we are not here concerned with the validity of religious beliefs in their cognitive aspect. Rather, we are concerned with the depth of feeling with which a cognitive belief is experienced and with the question of integration or dissociation of such feelings in the structure of the self. Quite another aspect of this problem is the deepening of religious faith in persons who have not experienced doubt, but who have rather experiences semi-mystical confirmation, or even transfiguration of their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In general, however, it should be noted that I am addressing myself to these problems as a psychologist interested in inner experience, and not as a philosopher interested in discerning the truth about the outer cosmos (if there can be such a true difference). Speaking as a psychologist, then, what I find primarily in this subject in both these ways of resolving the crisis in belief (i.e., in the atheistic resolution and in the repudiation of a transitory atheism in favor of a return to religion) is an acceptance of emotional polarities as being genuine oppositions which necessitate a choice between them. This slavery to the antinomies shows itself wherever repudiation is necessary to the maintenance of some way of living, whether it be in matter of private philosophy, religious belief, ethnic group-membership, affairs of the heart, allegiances to opposed scientific theories, esthetic preferences, or psychodynamic mechanisms. Rebellion is a form of submission, suppression of impulse is a form of belief. Essentially what I think we have observed in this crisis is not resolution at all, in the sense of estrangement of a higher-level integration, but rather perpetuation of the conflict through acceptance of polarities as real, and deferment of the decision to a later point in life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Women who have indeed settled the crisis belief communicate quite a different sense of selfhood from the case we have considered, and they have much greater serenity and spontaneity, and freedom of both feeling and thought, in their make-up. I need hardly say that in the assessment of the strength of any personality it is most important to know what is settled and what is unsettled, which crises are past and which are present or still ahead. Our fear of freedom also expresses itself in other ritualistic and compulsive behavior. So, for example, when a person—like Lady Macbeth—has a compulsion to wash one’s hands many times a day, the behavior not only provides a symbolic way of dealing with guilt feelings, but is also gives the person something with which to be preoccupied. It is almost as though he has an unconsciously concluded that “idle minds [and hands] are the devil’s workshop” and has substituted a meaningless activity to keep us both busy. All of us probably do some of this sort of thing in one way or another, f it is only making a game of stepping on every crack (or avoiding stepping on any cracks) in the sidewalk. Some executives become busier and busier, having to work longer and longer hours. Although they may not be consciously aware of it, they may be doing this because they feel much more comfortable and safe at work than they do in their free time when they could be with their families or engaged in other exciting, but frightening, activities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Extreme emphasis on cleanliness and its preservation often performs similar functions. One young woman described how her mother had set aside the living room of the hose so that no member of the family entered it except on Christmas and Easter. Although there was no physical barrier to the room, even the family dog avoided it, because he somehow got the message that to enter it was to invite disaster. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “the cleaning lady was a very important part of our household because she got to go in there very week!” One wonders how the parents feel about their perfectly preserved living room with its unmarred furniture now that the children are married and gone. It certainly represents some lost opportunities in living. However, living is frightening. Fear of freedom can always be expressed in other specific fears that limit our freedom. Many such fears have been catalogued and given phobia names. There is fear of open places, closed places, high places, crowds, snakes, spiders, heart attack, death, being alone, and so forth. All of us experience some of these fears. They may be very mild or very intense. There may be considerable grounds for them in reality, or they may be quite unrealistic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Much can probably be said about the symbolic meaning and origin of these fears in our lives, but their function appears to be that of limiting our freedom. Any one of these fears, if taken seriously, can limit our activities. And even if we attempt to ignore them and act in spire of them, they are likely to enter our minds and keep us from enjoying freedom. A young married woman tells how she becomes very uneasy whenever she goes a few miles from home. And she remains anxious until she returns. It is easy to see how she might live out her life in a geographical box if she does not find relief from this fear. She might well deprive herself of a whole World of adventure. A young executive was bothered daily by the fear that his children would die. Every morning, before leaving on the long commuting trip to his office, he would have to go into each child’s room and check to make sure each was breathing. During the working day the fear would frequently recur and he would call home to check up on things. To go out of town on a business trip of several days would be almost intolerable. This he kept himself in bondage. He was too preoccupied with his fear to relax with his children or fully express his love for them or allow himself the freedom to enjoy them while he had them. Fatherhood was more frightening than it was fun. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Love and will take place within the forms of the society. These forms are the myths and symbols viable at that period. The forms are the channels through which the vitality of the society flows. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. And the present revolt against forms only proves the point in reverse: in our transitional age, we are hunting, exploring, reaching about, struggling to assert whatever we can find in the experiment for some new forms. In homely illustration, Duke Ellington recounts that when we writes music, he must keep in mind that his trumpeter cannot hot the very high notes securely, whereas the trombonist is very good at them; and writing under these impediment, he remarks, “It’s good to have limits.” Not only with strength and passion, but other forms of love as well: full satisfaction means the death of the human being; love runs itself out with the death of lovers. It is the nature of creativity to need form for its creative power; the impediment thus has a beneficial function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
These forms of the society are molded and presented first of all by the artist. It is the artists who teach us to see, who break the ground in the enlargement of our consciousness; they point the way toward the new dimensions of experience which we have, in any given period, been missing. This is why looking at a work of art gives us a sudden experience of self-recognition. Giotto, precursor to that remarkable birth of awareness known as the Renaissance, saw nature in a new perspective and for the first time painted rocks and trees in three-dimensional space. This space had been there all the time but was not seen because of medieval mortal’s preoccupation with their vertical relationship to eternity reflected in the two-dimensional mosaics. Giotto enlarged human consciousness because one’s perspective required an individual mortal standing at a certain point to see this perspective. The individual was now important; eternity was no longer the criterion, but the individual’s own experience and one’s own capacity to look. The art of Giotto was a prediction of the Renaissance individualism which was to flower a human years later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The new view of space pictures by Giotto was basic for the new geographical explorations of oceans and continents by Magellan and Columbus, which changed mortal’s relation to their World, and for the explorations in astronomy by Galileo and Copernicus, which changed mortal’s relations to the Heavens. These new discoveries in space resulted in a radical upheaval of mortal’s image of oneself. Ours is not the first age to be confronted with loneliness arising from mortal’s discovery of new dimensions of external space and similarly requiring new extensions of one’s own mind. The psychological upheaval and spiritual loneliness were shaped mainly by its consequence. On beholding the blindness and misery of mortals, on seeing all the Universe unknow, and mortals without light, left to themselves, as it were astray in this corner of the Universe, knowing not who has set one here, what one is here for, or will become of one when one dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will awake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. Just as mortals of the past were able to find the new planes of consciousness which did, to some extent, fill the new reservoirs of space, so in our day a similar shift is necessary. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have know these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
What Does Tradition Have to Teach Me About Human Life in My Particular Time and with My Problems?
In life, we have to find things we enjoy to stay happy and make things beautiful. The overall picture from the life-history interview would seem to support the generalization that aggressiveness in persons of excellent ego-strength stems from life circumstances marked by relatively greater discord in the home during childhood and by friction in significant personal relations. The first and most obvious consideration in the relationship of rebelliousness to mortality and psychological health is one which by now has passed from iconoclastic protest to virtual stereotypes. Nonetheless, it should not be disregarded. It is simply this: rebellion-resistance to acculturation, refusal to adjust, adamant insistence on the important of the self and of individuality—is very often the mark of a healthy character. If the rules deprive you of some part of yourself, then it is better to be unruly. The socially disapproved expression of this is delinquency, and most delinquency certainly is just plain confusion or blind harmful striking out at the wrong enemy; nut some delinquency has affirmation behind it, and we should not be too hasty in giving a bad name to what gives us a bad time. The givers to humanity often have profound refusal in their souls, and they are aroused to wrath at the shoddy, the meretricious, and the unjust which society seems to produce in appalling volume. Society is tough in its ways, and it is no wonder that those who fight it tooth and nail are tough people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If it recognized the potential value of the wayward characters who make its business for it, I think that much of the research and of the social action in relation to delinquency would be wiser. A person who is neither shy nor rebellious in one’s youth is not likely to be worth a farthing to oneself nor to anyone else in the years of one’s physical maturity. A second consideration which is certainly no news to most people, but which tends to get lost to psychologists who use phrases like guilt feelings, hostility, and anxiety, is that the healthy person psychologically is usually virtuous in the simple moral sense of the term. Psychologically healthy people do what they think is right, and what they think is right is that people should not lie to one another or to themselves, that they should not steal, slander, persecute, intrude, do damage willfully, go back on their word, fail a friend, or do any of the things that put them on the side of death against life. This probably sounds like old-time religion, and in fact I am willing to be straightforwardly theological about this. “It may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his work, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round,” reports Alma 37.12. #RandolpHarris 2 of 17
I think there is an objective character to guilt, and wen a person is false to one’s nature or offends against the nature of others then one is in sin and the place in which one has one’s existence is well descried by the word “hell.” I take “sin” ere to be descriptive of the state of separation from the most basic sense of selfhood, or what some existentialist philosophers have called “the grounds of being.” In whatever terms it is put, the fact is that a person is most alive and is functioning in such a way that one knows who one is and you know who one is and one knows who you are when one’s thoughts and actions are in accord with one’s moral judgment. The corollary is that when one does what one thinks is wrong one gets a feeling of being dead, and if you are steeped in such wrongful ways you feel very dead al the time, and other people know that you are dead. There is such a thing as the death of the spirit. Many of the people whom we know as patients in our mental hospitals or as prisoners in our jails are n a condition of spiritual death, and their only hope is that someone can reach out to them, break through the walls of their isolation, recognize them. I think that too much has been made of the word love in this connection, for usually it connotes a feeling on the part of the person who is to give love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The essence of the act of love as I understand it is the action of attention, and the affect that accompanies it in the person who is paying attention may be love, hate, sadness or what you have. Love pushes us toward this new dimension of consciousness because it is based on the original we experience. Contrary to the usual assumption, we all begin life not as individuals, but as we; we are created by the union of male and female, literally of one flesh. However, the individual person is a human because one can accept the crumbling of the first freedom, painful as it is, can affirm it, and can begin one’s pilgrimage toward full consciousness. A real fight is an act of attention, a genuine condemnation is an action of attention, an understanding of final defeat is an act of attention. These as well as their absolute counterparts are on the side of life, and the person who experiences them is in communication with other living beings and offers to them the possibility of community. The sort of philosophy of psychotherapy that prescribes blandness, nonjudgmentalness, and essential indifference on the part of the psychotherapist is simply a form of human debasement. Paying attention, caring, and being there yourself is all that counts. When discussing psychotherapy as relationship, recall that one of the therapists there was clearly an incompetent by all standards—AMA, APA, and probably the Bureau of Internal Revenue as well. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Everything this one therapist did was wrong. After about six months of his residency, however, it became apparent that many of his patients were unaccountably getting better. Among his aberrant behavior were such gross actions as telephoning a patient’s foreman at work and telling him to stop bullying the patient, suggesting an unusual technique in pleasures of the flesh to another patient whose wife was apparently frigid, and bluntly suggesting to a third patient that he should give up his job as an automobile repairman and get into the dispensing of food. The climax of the latter case was especially gruesome to the clinic, for the patient opened a doughnut shop of his own and on his final appointment appeared with a dozen doughnuts of his own making which he presented as a gift to the therapist, who without any insight at all offered them around to various other therapists and his supervisor, all to whom had difficulty swallowing them. Goodness knows, I am not suggesting, in recalling the case of this incompetent fellow, that all psychotherapists go forth and do likewise, for he was he and we are we. However, I will say that he was alive, even though so obviously misguided; to his patients, the only thing that was of consequence was that he cared about them and that he though there was something different they could do which would be right. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Religious ideology is needed in order to keep people from losing discipline and this threatening social coherence. Fear of freedom also expresses itself in various legalistic approaches to life. We see or perceive what we want or need to perceive, and our nervous system can come to act as if the other sensation did not exist. This phenomenon is called perceptual vigilance (or perceptual set). We are on guard, or ready, to concentrate on certain kinds of stimuli and filter out those that we do not want or need to receive. This selective perception can work for one in many cases (like looking for a particular shirt in your closet and not paying attention to the others), it can work against one when our own security needs are so strong tat they distort or limit our perceptions of the World and people around us. However, generalization is not always a bad thing to do. The ability to generalize is useful in forming concepts—a vital part of thinking and reasoning. Even though it is unscientific or silly, we generalize about people all the time. This is the cause for a lot of serious conflicts between people. When we generalize about people and then use that generalization as the image or symbol for a whole group, we are stereotyping. Stereotyping is a handy way of lumping things together for easy reference; we all do it at one time or another. Sometimes stereotypes are creations of an entire society or nation. We have a great propensity for regulating life in minute detail and insofar as possible deciding in advance what is right and what is wrong or what is socially acceptable or unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
And if we are successful in doing this, usually with the assistance of religious groups or social class, then we can know in almost every situation what we should do. Then we no longer have to think or feel. We can rather automatically do what we know is right; or, failing that, we suffer the appropriate guilt for the sin or social blunder that we have committed. This makes for a safe, regulated kind of life. However, it also tends to be a joyless life from which most of the spontaneity and creativity has been removed. Although it is often maintained that a sense of responsibility demands a clear-cut view of right and wrong, it is more likely that such legalistic approaches actually undermine personal responsibility. For there are regions of human behavior and action that may not be so clear as to what is the right decision in ethical situations. And when we ignore these unobscured areas, arbitrarily seeing all factors as absolutes, we take ourselves off the hook of wrestling with the subtleties of the situation. We are in a position where we can uphold the right and denounce the evil. Some people live up to stereotypes because it is easier or more profitable to go along with what is expected. People who are firm believers in Christ as the great lover, the self-sacrificing God, can turn this belief, in an alienated way, into the experience that it is Jesus who loves them for them. A new set of higher expectations are being created for people. These, too, are beginning to fulfill themselves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
In society, the great medieval thinkers held that all people are equal in the sight of God and that even the humblest has an infinite worth. In economics, they taught that work is a source of dignity not of degradation, that no mortal should be used for an end independent of one’s welfare, and that justice should determine wages and prices. In politics, they taught that the function of the state is moral, that law and its administration should be imbued with Christian ideas of justice, and the relations of ruler and ruled should always be founded on reciprocal obligation. The state, property, and the family are all trusts from God to those who control them, and they must be used to further divine purposes. Finally, the mediaeval ideal included the strong belief that all nations and peoples are part of one great community. Above nations is humanity. However, the concepts may differ, one belief defines any branch of Christianity: the belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior who gave his life out of love for his fellow creatures. He was the hero of love, a hero without power, who did not use force, who did not want to rule, who did not want to have anything. He was a hero of being, of giving, of sharing. These qualities deeply appealed to the Roman poor as well as to some of the rich, who choked on their selfishness. Jesus appealed to the hearts of the people, even though from an intellectual standpoint he was at best considered to be naïve. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
This belief in the hero of love won hundreds of thousands of adherents, many of whom changed their practice of life, or become martyrs themselves. The greatest achievement was to dedicate one’s life to God. Because Jesus loves us for who we are, the belief in him becomes the substitute for one’s own act of loving. In a simple, unconscious formula: Christ does all the loving for us; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are saved because the alienated faith in Christ is a substitute for the imitation of Christ. Human beings are so deeply endowed with a need to love that acting as wolves causes us necessarily to have a guilty conscience. Our professed belief in love anesthetize us to some degree against the pain of the unconscious feeling of guilt for being entirely without love. However, the soul cannot live without love and friendship. Being able to relax in the presence of the beloved and accept the other’s being as being, is simply liking to be with the other, living to rest with the other, liking the rhythm of the walk, the voice, the whole being of the other. This gives a width to the soul; it gives it time to grow; time to sink its roots down deeper. We understand that we are not required to do anything for the beloved except accept him, her, or them, and enjoy being in their company. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms. This is why religion makes so much of acceptance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
We are the independent people who, often taking our powers too seriously, continuously act and react, unaware that much of the value in life comes only if we do not press, comes in quietly when it is not pushed or required, comes not from a drive from behind or an attraction in front, but emerges silently from being together. Sometimes it seems love is honored as a kind of vestige of bygone periods when people had time for friendships. We now find ourselves so rushed, going from work to meetings to a late dinner to bed and up again the next morning, that the contribution to love to our lives is lost. Or we get it mistakenly connected with homosexuality; American men are especially afraid of male friendship lest it have in it some trace of the homosexual. However, at least, we must recall that the importance of love is very great in helping us to find ourselves and begin the developing of identity. Love, in turn, needs altruism. We have to have an esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it; disinterested love, typically, the love of God for mortals. Charity, as the word is translated in the New Testament, is a poor translation, but it does contain within it the element of selfless giving. It is an analogy—though not an identity—with the biological aspect of nature which makes a person defend their youth, and the human being love his or her own baby with a built-in mechanism without regard for what that baby can do for him or her. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We are aware that no human being’s motivations are purely disinterested, that everyone’s motivations are, at best, a blending of these different kinds of love. Just as I would not like someone to love me purely ethereally, without regard for my body and without any awareness of whether I am male or female, I also do not want to be loved only for my body. A child senses the lie when he is told that adults do something only for your good, and everyone dislikes being told he or she is loved only spiritually. Each kind of love, however, presupposes care, for it assets that something does matter. In normal human relations, each kind of love has an element of other types of love, no matter how obscured it may be. Yet, we have lost much of our creative relationship to the wisdom of the past. History is our social, communal body: in it we live, move and have our being; and to cut one’s self off from it, to hold it is inconsequential, is about as sensible as to say, “My physical body is bunk.” It shuts that person off from a creative relationship to an important segment of the wisdom of thy fathers. This situation is unfortunate not only for the society but also for the person one’s self for it robs that individual of an important part of one’s historical body, and thus contributes much to the diffuse perplexity and feelings of rootlessness of individuals of our day. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Another very common way of keeping tight reins on freedom is by overplanning and overorganizing life. Many a housewife or househusband, for example, finds it difficult—if not almost impossible—to drop everything on a moment’s notice and go on a picnic with the family. Perhaps there are dirty dishes in the sink, a roast simmering in the oven, or a pie cooling on the windowsill or a disarray in the house and she or he is certain that one could not relax and enjoy one’s self if one left these jobs undone. And there is every likelihood that one might not, for many find it difficult to enjoy the spontaneity that can enrich life. The freedom appears to be too frightening. It will come as no surprise to some to hear that family vacation are sometimes unhappy occasions despite the high hopes entertained when the family stated out, car loaded down, for distant destination. One couple who had experiences such disappointments made another attempt after some months in psychotherapy. The therapist was delighted when he received a picture postcard from Canada with a very brief message: “Having wonderful time! Why?” Well, why not? Likely there are a couple of reasons why we often manage to be miserable on vacations. For one thing the family is together—let that read TOGETHER—more than at any other time, and that physical closeness that creates the possibility of emotional closeness is probably frightening to us, with the effort to eliminate this frightening possibility, manages in one way or another to get on the nerves of everyone else. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The other reason is that we are confronted with all that freedom. We have two weeks in which we can do as we please and go where we please. No alarm clocks jangling, no school bells telling us to move from one class to another, no time clocks to punch, no precise hour when dinner must be on the table, no projects to be completed by such-and-such time. We are free, and it scares us! So how do we meet this crisis in freedom? Many of us meet it with a frenzy of planning. We go to the drawer, pull out maps, and make an itinerary. “Now let’s see, we’ll sleep here the first night, then go over there, eat lunch in this town, spend an hour on this beach, and drive on to that place before dark, and….and, oh yes, we’d better call the BMW automobile club and have them make all the reservations along the way for us so there won’t be any hitches in THE PLAN.” Planning, organization, and reducing some routine tasks in life to habit can perform the useful function of permitting the individual to live a freer and more creative life. If, for example, a housewife or househusband can sit down and plan a week’s menus for the family so that one can do one’s shopping in a single trip, a lot of time will be saved and needless last-minute worry eliminated about “What in the World are we going to eat tonight?” She or he has gained some free time by her or his planning. If one becomes a slave to one’s menus, however, it is quite another story. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
If one is no longer free to change one’s mind for a personal or family whim, one has sacrificed one of the pleasures of spontaneous living. One’s rigidity becomes one’s defense against freedom, which frightens the individual. Every home and almost every work situation provides countless opportunities to overplan and overorganize our lives. Many a businessman or businesswoman has spent one’s life tending to details without ever asking one’s self how relevant and how necessary the details are. The freedom to see creative ways of changing one’s routines and expanding one’s productivity with all of the necessary risks involved may have been too frightening. It is important, therefore, whether we are intellectuals or sophisticates or merely alert human beings seeking bearings in a confused and perplexed time, to ask “How can one relate to the inherited traditional so that one’s own freedom and personal responsibility are not sacrificed in the process? One principle, to start with, is clear: the greater a person’s awareness of one’s self, the more one can acquire the wisdom of our fathers to make it ours. It is the persons who are weak in the sense of their own personal identity who are overcome by the power of tradition, who cannot stand in its presence, and who therefore either capitulate to it, cut themselves off from it, or rebel against it. One of the distinguishing marks of strength as a self is the capacity to immerse one’s self in tradition and at the same time be one’s own unique self. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
This is what the classics, in literature or ethics or any other field, should do for one. For the essence of a classic is that it arises from such profound depths in human experience that, like the works of Isaiah, The House of Mirth, A Brave New World, it speaks to us who live centuries later in vastly different cultures as the voice of our own experience, helping us to understand ourselves better and enriching us by releasing echoes within ourselves which we may not have known were there. “Deep calleth unto deep,” as the psalmist puts it. One need not go along literally with Jung’s concept of archetypes or the collective unconscious to agree that the deeper one goes into one’s own experience (let us say in confronting death, or experiencing love, or in the elemental relations in the family), the more one’s experience has in common with similar experiences of other mortals in other ages and cultures. This is why the dramas of Sophocles, the dialogues of Plato, and the paintings of reindeer and bison on the cave walls in Southern France by anonymous Cro-Magnon mortals some twenty thousand years ago many speak more powerfully and elicit greater response in us than the bulk of the writings or pictures of five years ago. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, the more profoundly one delves into one’s own experience, the more original are one’s reactions and productions. Here is the seeming paradox, which no doubt everyone knows to be true in one’s own experience, that the more profoundly one can confront and experience the accumulated wealth in one’s tradition, the more uniquely one can at the same time know and be one’s self. The battle, therefore, is not between individual freedom and tradition as such. The issue, again, is how the tradition is used. We must ask, “What does the tradition have to teach me about human life, in my particular time and with my problems?” Then we are using the wealth of wisdom accumulated through historical tradition for our own enrichment and guidance as a freedom. For instance, when the United States of America entered World War I on 6 April 1917, baseball became the national pastime because people used it as a means to distract themselves from the war. Baseball even boosted morale of American forces overseas. The American military created 77 baseball diamonds in France, and on any given day some 200 games were played throughout the country. Many baseball fans are familiar with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Green Light” letter, in which he encouraged baseball owners and executives to keep baseball going in the states to keep Americans happy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Other efforts were made to distract Americans from the war and make them feel safe like some of the architecture in Oakland, California USA. On Picardy Drive in East Oakland, in the 1920s Storybook houses were built to make people feel like they were entering a fairytale. Picardy Drive was developed by builder Robert Cleveland Hillen and architect Walter W. Dixon, whose houses have been called modest mansions for the whimsical glory and romantic style, which made them feel like castles. To be a vital part of the marvelous work and a wonder of these days, you must submit your will to God, letting it be swallowed up in his will. As you press forward with steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and love of God and of all people feasting upon the Word of Christ. We must keep searching diligently for blessings and salvation, praying always, and believing, then as the Lord promises that all thing shall work together for your good. Let this desire inspire you to greet each new morning with enthusiasm and let it fuel your thoughts and actions throughout each day. If you do this, you will be blessed amid a World that need love and guidance, and you and your loved ones will be secure and happy. This will allow us the spiritual power to handle life with faith and trust in God. And is you are looking for more new story book houses, check out one of my favorite builders Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
God Tolerates Us–We are What We are Devoted to and What We are Devoted to is What Motivates Our Conduct
Did I really not believe in those things which I saw? Or had I simply found that cosmos to be unendurable? I did not know. I wanted to be a saint! As we grow, we learn to adapt to stress, to cope with our World and to protect the fragile parts of our psyche. The ego is the center of our conscious life and is often at odds with the show, the forbidden, unwanted, unacknowledged, unconscious aspect of the psyche. Ego-strength is, first of all, a function simply of intelligence. Since comprehension of experience depends mostly on the degree of organization in the central nervous system, the scope of the ego will vary with the quality of the brain. Scope does not depend solely upon cognition, however. Psychodynamics enter chiefly in relation to the mechanism of repression. Repression—when I do not want to face a problem situation, I may choose to deal with it through repressions—pushing it out of my mind, pretending it does not exist. Repression can help us to cope with things that otherwise would be too difficult to face. Repression operates in the service of homeostasis, and so serves an economic function that is indispensable in maintaining the organism in an integral form in its environment. However, repression may be so extensive as to become a false economy; when broad areas of experience are lost to consciousness through repression, the ego may be said to be less strong (i.e., less able to adapt) as a consequence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
To state the mater absolutely, ego-strength requires a flexible repression mechanism, so that the person may be said to be optimally open to the experience, though capable of excluding phenomena that cannot be assimilated to the structure of the self. Physiological stability and regularity of physical functioning is the biological matrix in which the ego thrives, or attains maximum strength. Generally speaking, the ego is at its strongest in the years of physical maturity, granting good bodily health. Ego-strength is increasing as the organism grows towards maturity, levels off in the prime of life, and declines thereafter with increasing age. The crucial years in determining ego-strength are the first five years of life. Severe ego-dysfunction in those years is virtually irreversible. In the normal course of development a regular sequence of ego-crises and ego-achievement may be discerned. The first achievement of the ego in relation to experience is the attainment of a stable and facile distinction is the primary mark of functional psychosis, in which the introjection and projection no longer operate under the control of the ego. Paranoias and psychotic depressions and excitements are the diagnostic syndromes consequent upon such ego failure. A strong ego, on the other hand, consistently recognizes the independent and autonomous existence of objects other than itself, and also is able to take a reflective attitude toward its own existence and the laws of its being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Building upon this basic distinction of inner and outer sources of experience, the ego gradually attains mastery of bodily functions involving intake and output, which includes experiencing the erotic component is such functions. Such later character trains as the ability to get and to give good things, to hold on to what one wants and to let go when necessary, to be able to rise to the occasion, to make things go, to build and to conserve, to understand and to predicts, all have their beginnings in the early years when the most important ego-crises occur. The later achievements of the normal ego involve primarily the synthesis of these earlier acquisitions of mastery; the most important outcomes have to do with personal identity in work and in live, and finally with the individual’s participation in community experience, which would include some understanding of mortals in relation to nature, and of nature itself. The polarity which is shown ontologically in the process of nature is also shown in the human being. The paradox of love is that it is the highest degree of awareness of the self as a person and the highest degree of absorption in the other. The fact is that love is personal. It brings a heightened consciousness of relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Love contributes to the deepening of consciousness. The care which comes out of an awareness of the other’s needs and desires and the nuances of one’s feelings. The experience of concern emerges from the fact that people are able to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, are no longer isolated. Love creates a new field of magnetic force, a new being. Another aspect of the deepened consciousness comes from the affirmation of the self in love a it provides a sound and meaningful avenue to the sense of personal identity. When we know we are loved, we experience vigor and vitality which comes not from triumph or proof of one’s strength but from the expansion of awareness. However, even in our increased self-awareness it is possible to experience a poignant reminder that none of us ever overcomes our loneliness completely, but through acceptance of the spirit, the soul is replenished and a sense of our own personal significance is fortified, then the psyche is about to accept these limitations laid upon us by our human finiteness. That is why there is an enrichment and fulfillment—so far as this is possible—of personality. Beginning with the expansion of awareness of our own selves and our feelings, this consists of experiencing our capacity to give pleasure to others, and thereby achieving an expansion of meaning in the relationship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Love carries us beyond what we were at any given moment; I become literally more than what I was. Another aspect of new consciousness is possessed in the curious phenomenon that being able to give to others affirmation that they are worthy of life and essential to God’s plan. Some people feel that the one who loves us, will do many things necessary to show us that this is so; the actions are not the cause, however, but part of the total field. As we all know, the love experience is filled with pitfalls and disappointments and traumatic events for most of us. We have a great propensity for regulating life in minute detail and insofar as possible deciding in advance what is right and what is wrong or what is socially acceptable. And if we are successful in doing this, usually with the assistance of a religious or social class, then we can know in almost every situation what we should do. Then we no longer have to think or feel. We can rather automatically do what we know is right; or, failing that, we suffer the appropriate guilt for the sin or social blunder that we have committed. This makes for a safe, regulated kind of life. However, it also tends to be a joyless life from which most of the spontaneity and creativity has been removed. Although it is often maintained that a sense of responsibility demands a clear-cut view of right and wrong, it is more likely that such legalistic approaches actually undermine personal responsibility. For there are always areas of life, which are not always transparent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
When we ignore that fact that thing may not always be what they seem, arbitrarily seeing all factors in absolutes, we take ourselves off the hook of wrestling with the subtleties of the situation. We are in a position where we can uphold the right and denounce the evil. The relation between social character and social structure is never static, since both elements in this relationship are never-ending processes. A change in either factor means a change in both. Many political revolutionaries believe that one must first change the political and economic structure radically, and that then, as a second and almost necessary step, the human mind will also change: that the new society, once established, will quasiautomatically produce the new human being. They do not see that the new elite, being motivated by the same character as the old one, will tend to recreate the conditions of the old society in the new sociopolitical institutions the revolution has created; that the victory of the revolution will be its defeat as a revolution—although not as a historical phase that paved the way for the socioeconomic development that was hobbled in its fully development. On the other side are those who claim that first the nature of the human beings must change—their consciousness, their values, their character—and that only then can a truly human society be built. The history of the human race proves them wrong. Purely physical change has always remained in the private sphere and been restricted to small oases, or has been completely ineffective when preaching of spiritual values was combined with the practice of the opposite values. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The social character as a further and significant function beyond that of serving the needs of society for a certain type of character and satisfying the individual’s character-conditioned behavioral needs. Social character must fulfill any human being’s inherent religious needs. However, people’s religion may be conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love, of domination or of solidarity; it may further their power of reason or paralyze it. They may be aware of their system as being a religious one, different from those of the secular realm, or they may think that they have no religion, and interpret their devotion to certain allegedly secular sims, such as power, money, or success, as nothing but their concern for the practical and the expedient. The question is not one of religion or not? but of which kind of religion?—whether it is one that furthers human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyzes human growth. A specific religion, provided it is effective in motivating conduct, is not a sum total of doctrines and beliefs; it is rooted in a specific character structure of the individual and, inasmuch as it is the religion of a group, in the social character. Thus, our religious attitude may be considered an aspect of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our conduct. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their official beliefs for their real, though secret religion. If, for instance, a mortal worships power while professing a religion of love, the religion of power is one’s secret religion, while one’s so-called official religion, for example Christianity, in only an ideology. The religious need is rooted in the basic conditions of existence of the human species. Ours is a species by itself, just as is the species chimpanzee or horse or swallow. Each species can be and is defined by its specific physiological and anatomical characteristics. As being highly evolved, humans are no longer ruled by instincts alone. It is generally accepted that as higher beings human behavior is less determined by phylogenetically programmed instincts. The process of ever-decreasing determination of behavior by instinct can be contributed to a large and more complex brain structure; especially neocortex which is three times the size of that of primates, and a truly fantastic number of interneuronal connections. Considering these data, the human species can be defined as the beings who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination has reached the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brain a maximum. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
This combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal brain development has never occurred before in any living beings that we know of besides mortals. Lacking the full capacity to act by the command of instincts while possessing the capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination—new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primates—the human species needed a frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive. Without a map of our natural and social World—a picture of the World and of one’s place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion—human beings would be confused and unable to act purposeful and consistently, for there would be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that permits one to organize all the impressions that impinge upon each individual. Our World makes sense to us, and we feel certain about our ideas, through the consensus with those around us. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. However, the map has never been entirely wrong—nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living. Only to the degree that the practice of life is freed from its contradictions and its irrationality can the map correspond to reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The impressive fact is that no culture has been found in which such a frame of orientation does not exist. Neither has any individual. Often individuals may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that they respond to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as their judgment guides them. However, it can be easily demonstrated that they simply take their own philosophy for granted because to them it is only common sense, and they are unaware that all their concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference. When such persons are confronted with a fundamentally different total view of life, they judge it as crazy or irrational or juvenile, while they consider themselves as being only logical. The deep need for a frame of reference is particularly evident in youth. At a certain age, many youngsters will often make up their own frame of orientation in an ingenious way, using the few data available to them. However, a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective—not only our proclaimed—values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning to life. Socioeconomic structure, character structure, and religious structure are inseparable from each other. If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology. We have to look behind it for the real religious structures, even though we may not be conscious of it as such—unless the human energies inherent in the religious structure of character act as dynamite and tend to undermine the given socioeconomic conditions. However, as there are always individual expectations to dominant social character, there are also individual exceptions to the dominant religious character. They are often the leaders of religious revolutions and the founders of new religions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The religious orientation, as the experiential core of all high religions, has been mostly perverted in the development of these religions. The way individuals consciously conceive of their personal orientation does not matter; they may be religious without considering themselves to be so—or they may be nonreligious, although considering themselves Christian. We have no word to denote the experiential content of religion, aside from its conceptual and institutional aspect. Hence, we can never be sure what denotes religious in the experiential, subjective orientation, regardless of the conceptual structure in which the person’s religiosity is expressed. Rationalization is one of the more popular concepts of psychology and has found its way into everyday language. If I want very much to buy a very expensive stereo but cannot afford it, I might immediately begin listing all the stereo’s weaknesses and the reasons why it is just as well that I cannot buy it. And I may be told by a friend, “Stop rationalizing about the situation!” As long as we do our part, the Lord will bless us with prosperity and with the wisdom to keep our mind focused on what matters most in life. “However, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” reports Matthew 6.33. Those who seek riches to build up their own egos will find their treasure to be slippery and easily lost in unwise ways. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
God is not telling us that we should not be prosperous or the prosperity is a sin. On the contrary, he has always blessed his obedient children. However, God is telling us that we should seek prosperity only after we seek, find, and serve him. Then, because our hearts are right, because we love God first and foremost, we will choose to invest the riches we obtain in building his kingdom. If one choses to seek riches for the sake of riches, one will fall short. One will never be satisfied. One will be empty, never finding true happiness and lasting joy. The trial of your faith in the next few years will likely not be that you lack the material things of this World. Rather it will be in choosing what to do wit the temporal blessings one receives. To the extent that an adult person has achieved some freedom and identity as a self, one has a base from which to acquire wisdom in the past traditions of one’s society and to take it one’s own. However, if this freedom is missing, traditions block rather than enrich. They may become an internalized set of traffic rules, but they will have little or no fructifying influence on one’s inward development as a person. Whatever view we hold, it must be shown why every person has a wish to make some other kind of otherness one’s own: Perhaps, in fact, we are never alone. God has saved for the final inning some of his strongest souls, who will help bear off the kingdom triumphantly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Beside Your Twinkling Door is All the Golden Presence of Time and Eternity
It was an engine of great and continuous healing. However, what drew her through the World were project yet unrevealed for which she had the wealth, the knowledge, the laserlike vision, the nerve and the personal energy. Some people tend characteristically to isolate affect and avoid psychological self-examination; they tend to be strangers in their own life. This, indeed, has implications for social communities as well as individuals, inasmuch as it suggests that the organization that fosters prejudice might well be forfeiting the kind of emotional flexibility that is necessary if time of crisis it is to cure its own ills. Everyone alive has troubles and problems, and as we learned from our studies of sound individuals, the most important consideration in determining personal effectiveness is not the amount of trouble or misfortune (within limits) a person encounters, but how one responds to the vicissitudes and challenges of life. This capacity to meet problems without being dismayed or overwhelmed, to endure suffering and face great loss without foundering, is an aspect of psychological strength and vitality that deserves special study. Believe it or not there are people who envy the mental salubrity of psychoneurotic patients who are about to improve. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
That is because the greater vividness of psychopathology often tends to obscure the egosynthetric or constructive forces in the behavior of a psychologically disturbed individual, so that a prognostic evaluation is generally more difficult to make than a diagnostic evaluation. From time to time, people give in to madness as if it were strong drink, drawing in memories of guilt, all judgment and sense of proportion last, murmuring confessions of unworthiness and half-explored plots of escape that would seal them off from all expectations. Nevertheless, in spite of the saliency of psychopathology in the clinical picture, it may be presumed that the patient has certain latent strengths which will gradually show themselves, particularly as the psychological crisis that brings one to therapy subsides. What the item content of the prediction generally ascribed to a well-functioning ego, ad that latent egostrength is the most important determinant (within the patient) of response to brief psychotherapy. At precious moments people regard their sanity as their State of Grace, and the therapist is the Demon who has brought them back to it. Another tendency which is nourished by religious dependency is that of getting one’s feeling of worth, prestige and power through identifying with someone else. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
This usually takes form of identifying with an idealized figure of minister, priest, rabbi, bishop, or whoever above one in the hierarchy as prestige and power. Again this tendency is not confined to religion; it is present in business, politics and other aspects of community life. It is a regular phenomenon in psychotherapy called transference, and shows itself, among other ways, in the patient’s needing to build the therapist up and to get the prestige from the fact that the therapist is well known. However, in therapy it is regarded as a problem to be eventually worked though so that the individual will come to see one’s therapist as the real person one is, and obtain one’s own feelings of worth and prestige from one’s own activities rather than the therapist’s. This tendency in religion seems to rest on a deeper level than in some other areas of social living. It of course receives reinforcement from deteriorated interpretations of vicarious suffering and atonement. It is as though everyone were trying to live vicariously through someone else, until no one knows where he or she him or herself is. It is amazing how easily the Christian teaching of love can deteriorate into everyone’s agreeing, “If you take responsibility for me, I will for you.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The neurotic uses of religion have one thing in common: they are devices by which the individual avoids having to face one’s loneliness and anxiety. God is made into a cosmic papa. Religion in this form is a rationalization for covering up the realization—a realization which contains a good deal of terror for those who take it seriously—that the human beings is in the depths of one’s self basically alone, and that there is no recourse from the necessity of making one’s choices ultimately alone. However, if the need to escape terror and loneliness are the main motives for turning to God, one’s religion will not help one toward maturity or strength; and it will not even give one security in the long run. Despair and anxiety can never be worked through until one confronts them in their stark and fully reality. Tis truth is obviously just as valid psychologically. Maturity and eventual overcoming of loneliness are possible only as one courageously accepts one’s aloneness to begin with. It often occurs to me that the reason Dr. Freud was able to work with such courage and unswerving purpose throughout the last forty years of his life was that he won the battle of being able to grow and work alone in the first solitary ten years, when, after he had separated from Dr. Breuer, he pursued his explorations into psychoanalysis with neither colleague nor co-worker. Dr. Freud was so prolific that many believed he was a prophet of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
It seems to me, further, that what Dr. Freud went through is the battle the creative ethical figures like Jesus win in the wilderness, that the real meaning of the temptations with which Jesus wrestled was not in the desire for bread or power, but in the temptation, as put in the words of the Devil in the story, to throw himself down from the mountain to prove that God was protecting him: He will give his Angels charge of you; they will bear you on their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. When one has been able to say “No” to the need that one be “borne up,” when, in other words, one is able not to demand one be taken care of, when one has the courage to stand alone, one can then speak as one with authority. And did not Spinoza’s refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean his winning the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all tie, could not have been written? “So powerful was the Spirit of God; and thus it had wrought upon them” reports 1 Nephi 17.52. The person knows that virtue is happiness, not a claim check for it; the love of God is its own reward, and beauty and truth are to be loved because they are good, and not because they will redound to the credit of the artist or scientist or philosopher who loves them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Spinoza of course does not at all mean to imply the martyr-like, sacrificial, masochistic attitude for which his sentence might be mistake. He rather is stating in its most unequivocal form the basic characteristic of the objective, mature, creative person (in hos words the blessed and joyful person), namely the capacity to love something for its own sake, not for the sake of being taken care of or gaining a counterfeit feeling of prestige and power. Certainly loneliness and anxiety can be constructively met. Though this cannot be done through the deus ex machina of a cosmic papa, it can be achieved through the individual’s conforming directly the various crises of one’s development, moving from dependence to greater freedom and higher integration by developing and utilizing one’s capacities, and relation to one’s fellows through creative work and love. This does not imply that there is no such thing as authority in religion or any other field. It does not imply that the question of authority should first be put the other way around, that is, as the question of personal responsibility. For authoritarianism (the neurotic form of authority) grows in direct proportion to the degree in which the individual is trying to avoid responsibility for meeting one’s problems one’s self. In therapy, for example, it is precisely the times when the patient feels some special or overpowering anxiety that one seeks to make an authority of the therapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And the fact that at these times one tends to identify the therapist with God and one’s parent presents another proof for the contention above: that one is searching for someone to whom one can hand one’s self over for care. Fortunately it is not difficult to demonstrate that the therapist is not God—and it is a red-letter day in a patient’s therapy when one discovers this fact and is not frightened. Instead of trying to argue with one’s self or others on the merits of various authorities, therefore, it is better initially to confront one’s self, in self-scrutiny, with the question: “What anxiety makes me now wish to run to the wings of an authority, and what problem of my own am I trying to evade?” The upshot of this discussion is that religion is constructive as it strengthens the person in one’s own dignity and worth, assists one in one’s confidence that one can affirm values in life, and helps one in the use and development of one’s own ethical awareness, freedom and personal responsibility. Thus religious faith or practices like prayer cannot be called good or bad in themselves. The question is, rather, how much one’s freedom, a way of becoming less of a person; or how much it is a way of strengthening one in the exercise of one’s own responsibility and ethical power. The person praised in Jesus’ parable in Matthew was not the one who was afraid and buried one’s talent, but the persons who courageously used their talents; and these, the good and faithful persons, were given more power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
One of our most deep-rooted ideals is our desire for freedom, both at a personal and a collective level. Words such as those from the New Testament—“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” (John 8.32)—strike a deeply emotional chord in most of our hearts. Yet, while all of us pay lip service to freedom and our desire for it, we are also very much afraid of it. We talk about personal freedom, but we tend to shy from it. Amanda was married to a man who had always tended to be exceedingly critical of her. He made unreasonable demands of her and attempted to dominate her entire life. She in turn tended to play a weak, helpless role in relationship to him. In general, she did little to oppose his bullying attitudes. When he was around, at least, she was the obedient slave; and he was the ruthless tyrant. Things began to change, however, after Amanda sought help through psychotherapy. Out of a growing sense of her own value as a person she began to stand on her own feet. She started doing things she did not think he would tolerate. She refused to accept unjust criticism. When he falsely accused her, she fought back. To her amazement he did not react with the brutality that she expected. Instead he showed that he felt more respect and warmth toward her than he ever had when she was so compliant. As her self-respect grew, his respect for her also appeared to grow. Gradually, she became aware of the exhilarating fact that she was not enslaved. She was much more free to do as she wished than she ever thought she could be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, at this point Amanda had a very interesting reaction. When she spoke of it, she said, “You know, I have the funniest feeling. Now that I have this freedom to do everything I have ever wanted to do, I do not know what to do with it. I guess I am frightened. It is almost as though I needed him to criticize me, and act like t dictator, and make me feel trapped!” Maybe Amanda was codependent or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The conclusion that we are afraid of freedom seems inescapable when we examine the lengths to which we go to enslave ourselves. For example, men and women who see a therapist for help with personal or family problems often spend much time trying to convince their counselor and themselves that they are not free to do what they want to do. Listen to what some of them say, and you will probably recognize some of you own feelings. A mother says, “I can’t do the thing I’d really like to do. I feel it’s my duty to spend my free time with my youngsters.” A husband says, “If I were ever really myself and told my wife how I really feel about her, she would leave me in a minute.” Nearly everyone says, “If I said the things I really want to say to people, no one would like me. Or, “I can’t let people see what I’ like because then they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” And everyone says, “I have so many things I just have to do, that I’m never free to do the thing I want to do.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A working wife says, “I’d like to quit my job, but I don’t see how we could get along.” A nonworking wife (an unemployed wife, that is!) says, “I really want to work, but I feel it’s my duty to stay at home.” Perhaps it can be summed up by stating that we all have a tendency to say in one way or another, “Poor me, I’m just a helpless victim of circumstances.” My, how we kid ourselves! For when we are realistic about it, we have to recognize that there are few if any things that we have to do. We do what we do and avoid doing what we do not do because we choose it that way. We always have alternatives. So it is with the trapped feeling in marriage. One man said to his wife, “If it weren’t for you and the kids, I’d go to the beach and become a surfer.” He was considerably shook up when his wife replied, “Well, if that’s what you want, why don’t you want, why don’t you go ahead. Nothing’s really preventing you!” Later, in telling about it, he said, “You know, she was right! If I really wanted to, I could leave her and head for the beach. But when I no longer felt trapped, I realized I don’t really want to be a beach bum. In fact, the whole idea is rather distasteful!” As long as he could maintain the fantasy that he was trapped, this man could ignore the frightening fact that he loves his wife and children and is staying married by choice rather than because he must. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The old cliché is true. We do not have to do anything but die and pay taxes. (And, of course, we can refuse to do the latter if we are willing to suffer the consequences!) We always have alternative courses of action, but we constantly try to convince ourselves otherwise. We must be terribly frightened of discovering that we are free to do pretty much what we want to do. Our fear of freedom expresses itself in many ways. Our resistance to change is probably one such expression. For example, during the times recorded in the New Testament early Christians apparently found it very difficult to give up the old ceremonial laws that had been traditional with Judaism for centuries. One would think that this would have been easy for Christians to do. They had embraced a young faith that said it was no longer necessary to perform the many daily ritualistic laws that virtually enslaved those who seriously tried to follow them. The reluctance to give up such observances seems hard to understand unless we see that it must have been terribly frightening o people suddenly to have almost unlimited freedom. And no doubt the same sort of thing happens constantly today in both our institutional and our personal lives. In religious, political, educational, economic, and social life, we probably cling to many time-consuming rituals and customs that no longer have any relevance to life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
These irrelevant rituals and customs probably serve mainly to keep our daily lives somewhat predictable and provide the security of a self-limited freedom. Much of the tension between generations likely results from the resistance to change that parents express. Most changes, like the more extensive use of the BMW M5, for example, seem to us parents to be in the direction of granting our children more freedom. We are frightened of freedom for ourselves; we are also afraid of our children having it. Religious impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one. The starting point of these reflections is the statement that the character structure of the average individual and the socioeconomic structure of the society of which he or she is a part are interdependent. I call the blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socioeconomic structure social structure. The socioeconomic structures of a society molds the social character of its members so that they wish to do what they have to do. Simultaneously, the social character influences the socioeconomic structure of society, acting either as cement to give further stability to the social structure or, under special circumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social structure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
You will have some promptings of the Spirit that will be unusual for you. The reason that will happen is because all of God’s children are precious to the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be afraid of the future. Do not let anything that is going on in the World, that is happening now, slow you down from our progress in mortality. Everything may not by lined up like you expect, but fret not. Always remember that God—the Creator of the Universe, the architect of our salvation is in control. We should replace fear with faith—Faith in God and the power of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. Many of the amazing discoveries made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields of endeavor were the result of the Spirit whispering insights into and enlightening the mind of truth-seeking individuals and these innovations will continue to happen in the future. With these discoveries and advances will come new employment opportunities and prosperity for those who work hard and especially for those who strive to keep the commandants of God. This has been the case in other significant periods of national and international economic growth. Many of these discoveries will happen on a divine timetable and will quicken the World of God in building his kingdom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Was Promised I Would be Taken Care of if I Was Obedient: Look How Obedient I Have Been, so Why am I Not Take Care of?
I hope we have given you what you need. As for the files, I will see that they are all copied and delivered to you wherever you like. They will prove our efforts to track down ever lead. Poor prognosis in mental health is generally associated with subclinical psychotic trends, which refer to a more sever ego dysfunction than first clinical impression seems to indicate. Depression and anxiety are salient features of the clinical picture in almost all patients who seek psychotherapy in the outpatient clinic; but the patients who fail to improve are those in whom paranoid and schizoid features underlie the psychoneurotic symptoms. A reasonable guess would be that their personal difficulties are more chronic and characterologically based, in contrast to the more accurate and situation-linked problems of the patients who improve. In one study, the expectation was that above 70 percent of patients would improve. Actually, 75 to 80 patients showed improvement. What was noticed in the relationships is it seems that the patients who are most likely to get well are those who are not very sick in the first place. Another way of putting this is to say that patients who are more integrated to begin with are better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to solve whatever problems brought them into therapy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A corollary is that the potential gains from therapy should increase as therapy progresses, at least up to the point where the critical problem for the patient is to become genuinely independent of the therapist. By that time, of course, the therapeutic process has become internalized, and personality problems have been brought into the ego, to be dealt with rationally and objectively. Another escape hatch from feeling hatred toward one’s self is the attempt to win acceptance from others by pleasing them. It is important to examine this tendency closely because it is subtle and therefore often misunderstood. In the initial stages, at least, the children who are its victims are frequently mistake as healthy, well-adjusted children. When they are caught in the bind of increasing feelings of worthlessness and self-hate, some children will, in their effort to escape, make desperate attempts to win acceptance by attempting to meet what they perceive to be the requirements of their parents. They attempt to please and thereby win their parents’ love. One might tend to assume that such an individual would come out all right. After all, one would think that the child, by attempting to please, would win expressions of love and acceptance and no cycle of rejection would result. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Unfortunately, it usually does not work that way, for parents whose children take this approach to dealing with self-hate have probably created the youth’s feelings of rejection and worthlessness by making unrealistic demands on the individual and by encouraging the youth to feel that their acceptance of him or her is conditional upon one’s performance. It is as though the child feels the parents are saying to the individual, “We will love you if you and when you live up to our standards.” Under these circumstances the youth’s efforts to win acceptance and a feeling of self-worth by attempting to please his or her parents are almost certain to fail for two reasons. First of all, the child’s performance will probably never be quite good enough. It is clear that the parents have considerable doubt about their own adequacy as parents and are afraid of the open expression of love, otherwise they would not have needed to make their love seem to hinge on the child’s (even applies to adult children) behavior. These same qualities will make it difficult for the parents to respond with real enthusiasm even to excellent accomplishments. One woman, Jane, in an effort to gain her mother’s approval, got a job at a law firm. She dressed like them, spoke their jargon, and catered to the partners. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The young lady was excited to tell her mother that she was an associate at a law firm, and she was fairly successful at this. She could hardly wait until the next weekend to visit with her parents, because she was eager to tell them of her success. She walked into the house bubbling over with the exciting news. Her mother’s only reaction was, “Why couldn’t you have becoming a partner?” Since she was exposed to such attitudes of her parents all of her childhood, it is no wonder that now, fifteen years after that incident, she still tried to prove her worth to the World, her parents, and, most of all, to herself. The second reason why efforts to win acceptance through pleasing are doomed to failure is that the individual’s self-hate is increased, because one feels a loss of freedom to be a genuine individual in one’s own right. When a child grows up with a feeling that one must strive at all times to perform adequately and that love will be given and withdrawn on the basis of one’s performance, one never feels free to be one’s self. One resents others and one’s self because one is not becoming an independent person who is loved and respected because of is rather than because of what one does. Jane is in the predicament a lot of adults are in. Jane was reared in a strict, religious household in which great emphasis was put on her career success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Jane became so involved in the need to please by being successful in her career at the law firm that she began overworking herself very early in her legal career. Whenever she took on another case, she knew she could not handle with the heavy load she already had, Jane would suffer a great deal of anxiety about the possibility of not having enough times. On several occasions—when she saw no way of successfully handling her case load in the time constraints—she went to the yoga studio and deliberately twisted and twirled in such a way that she became physically ill. It would then be necessary for her to all in sick at work and dump her case load on someone else, thus avoiding the necessity of admitting she took on too much. Jane went through terrifying torments of guilt and self-hate, since she lived in a household where lying and cheating would be considered a great sin. Jane felt that God condemned her. It is no surprise that she also believed no one could possibly love her for herself—and certainly could not love her as she had become—if they really knew her. Yet on the surface Jane managed somehow to appear to live a successful and happy life. She was able to conceal her self-torment from others. She appeared to win a good deal of acceptance, but all the time her self-loathing was being reinforced. It was not until she was in her forties and had a family of her own that she was able through psychotherapy to share these feelings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Only when Jane was able to finally share her feelings could she experience relief from the feeling of being a fraud and discover that people’s love for her was not based on the image of herself that she had so carefully constructed in order to win acceptance. Jane is an extreme example, to be sure, but there are many people who are caught in some form of the attempt to win acceptance through pleasing. Sometimes it is the quiet one in a classroom who never gives the teacher or anyone else any trouble, but who also never seems to be able to join in the fun in a spontaneous way and who is terribly afraid of making a mistake. Adults who have an obsession with keeping things organized or clean or who demand perfection of themselves in other ways likely developed the pattern trying to please parents. When these people became parents themselves they, too, because of their own fears and feelings of self-hate, may become subtly rejecting, giving the feeling to their children that they must perform at a certain standard if they are to win mother’s or dad’s love. The cycle ensues: Feelings of rejection, become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate, and there is an escape through attempting to win acceptance, and there is further rejection (he or she never quite measures up to what I expect), and then there are more feelings of worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is appropriate here to speak of the harmful effects that a certain kind of religious training can have on children’s lives. Although they make speak of love as being of first importance in human affairs, churches often become preoccupied with rigid rules of conduct, betraying a deep mistrust of spontaneity in behavior. The church then tends to condemn any failure to measure up to its standards. Under these circumstances the churches create a community where the members do not experience of love for each other but rather in which they feel on guard and constantly in danger of condemnation. These attitudes, of course, extend into the family lives of members of the religious group. The result is that some religious families are among the most psychologically damaging to their children. Perhaps much of the damaging effect comes because of the confusing message that the judgments and the condemnation are a result of the love of the parents for the child. Such parents often say, “We only say these things to you because we love you so much and want you to be happy.” And the fact that the parents are sincere and do not recognize that their need to judge, condemn, and mistrust themselves, and resulting fears only makes the message that much more subtle and more difficult for the child to cope with. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Ashely is a young woman who grew up in this kind of religious family. Her father was an attorney, and he was also a perfectionist and a stanch religionist. Ashley was always made aware that it was very important to him that she succeed in her schooling. In fact she felt that her father’s love was dependent on her achievement. Although she was a very bright girl, Ashley did not respond favorably to these demands. She did not do well in school and dropped out of college, an action of which her father strongly disapproved. Not long thereafter, however, she—on her own initiative—became a skilled legal secretary as a result of her own initiative. She thoroughly enjoyed her work and made a good living for herself. Instead of being delighted about her success, her father continued to express his disappointment and criticize her for not having made full use of her talents by securing a college degree. Whatever she did, it was never quite good enough. It is not surprising that Ashley, having been exposed all her life in her religious home to such demands, has also tended to see God as demanding an impossible kind of perfection from her. She never thinks of God loving her just as she is. God is made into the image of her father. It is not unusual at all in such circumstances that we come to imagine that God embodies the criticism we feel of ourselves and that which we eel from our religious parents. We become paranoid about God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This feeling is illustrated by another woman who dreamed one night that Jesus was looking at her in a very stern and condemning manner. Gradually, in the dream, the face of Jesus changed into the face of her mother, who did indeed tend to be very critical of her, but subtly so an in the name of religion. In families like this the force of religion and the religious community often feed into and become an important part of the cycle of rejection. The child initially feels rejection from parents who themselves are full of self-hate and fears and therefore are unable to express their love as openly as they might. As the child grown old enough to be impressed with somewhat more sophisticated ideas, religious teaching, formal and informal, may enter in to fortify these feelings of rejection. The subtlety of the teaching varies a great deal according to the orientation and the sophistication of the religious group. However, the child is likely to receive the message that one is evil by nature and that one dare not trust one’s feelings or impulses. One is likely to feel, even though one may be assured that it is not true, that not only one’s parents but also God and the members of one’s religious community will not like the individual if one does not meet prescribed standards of behavior. These are ideal conditions for the flourishing of feelings of worthlessness of self-hate, which are often accompanied by strong feelings of guilt, often of a generalized unspecific nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Eventually the child seeks one or more ways of escape from the self-hatred in the form of some actual or fantasied, neurotic or delinquent behavior. However, there is no escape. If one’s feeling or behavior is detected, one feels condemned by parents and the religious community. If one is not found out, one is in the position—which may be even more psychologically dangerous—of feeling. “They’d sure condemn me if they really knew me.” In either case one feels condemned by a critical God who sees all and knows one’s innermost thoughts. And so the cycle is completed as these further feelings of rejection intensify one’s feelings of worthlessness. The cycle goes this way: Feelings of rejection by parents (increased by the feeling that one is evil by nature in God’s sight), giving way to feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate, leading an escape hatch (neurotic or delinquent behavior or fantasies), which become further feelings of rejection (my parents and my religious community condemn me or would if they really knew me. In any case God does know me and condemns me) and this opens to greater feelings of worthlessness. So our personality problems and difficulties with others have their origins in our childhood experiences. Our fear of love arises out of feelings of rejection and the subsequent feelings of worthlessness and self-hate that begin when we are children. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Because childhood experiences are recognizes as being crucial importance, the professions that offer psychological help are often accused, and perhaps with some justification, of teaching people to blame their parents for their problems. While there is no doubt that parents play an important role in child development, it is a waste of time to attempt to pin responsibility on them. It is much more helpful to see the problem in terms of the universality of the fear of love. As parents we are afraid of emotional closeness, even with our children. Perhaps this is not so surprising since no one matters more to us and, therefore, no one has greater power to hurt us. Consequently, we resist letting them see our genuine selves—how lonely, frightened, and capable of being hurt we are. Our children experience this withholding of ourselves and our genuine feelings of rejection. In any discussion of religion and personality integration, the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Dr. Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. Any area in life may be used as a compulsive neurosis: philosophy may be a flight from reality into a harmonious system as a protection from the anxiety and disharmonies of day-to-day life or it may be a courageous endeavor to understand reality better. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Science may be used as a rigid, doctrine of faith by which one escapes emotional insecurity and doubt, or it may be an open minded search for new truth. Indeed, since faith in science has been more acceptable intelligent circles in our society and therefore is less apt to be questioned, it may well be that in our day this faith more frequently plays the role of a compulsive escape from uncertainties than does religion. Dr. Freud, however, was correct technically—as he so often was—in that he asked the right questions with respect to religion: does it increase dependency and keep the individual infantile? Nor are those on the other side correct who say glibly and with comfort to the masses that religion makes for mental health. Some religion certainly does and some decidedly does not. All of these blanket statements would relieve us of the much more difficult question of penetrating to the inner meaning of the religious attitudes, and assessing them not as theoretical beliefs but as functioning aspects of the person’s organic relation to one’s life. For example, a mother and daughter had agreed when the daughter was very young that her life was always to be directed by the will of God. And the will of God, it was further agreed, was to be revealed to the daughter through the mother’s prayers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
One can well shudder to think how thoroughly this would open the girl to domination in every act and thought by the mother! How then could the girl’s own capacity to choose be anything but stifled—which the girl painfully discovered when, in her late twenties, she was caught in an insoluble dilemma because she could not make an autonomous marriage decision. This example may seem extreme, since the mother and daughter belonged to a conservative evangelical sect and the pattern is not covered over by sophisticated rationalizations. It illustrates that when a person sees one’s self as the mouthpiece or partner of God, as did the mother, there is no limit to the possibilities of arrogating to one’s self power over others. This use of religion comes out frequently and vividly when a person in therapeutic sessions is struggling to establish some freedom from parental control. The parents then often, with various degrees of subtlety, make their central stand on the argument that it is the younger person’s religious obligation to remain under the parents’ direction, that it is in effect God’s will that one continue under the parents’ control. In letters which persons in therapy often receive from parents at such times, the parent of course quotes such Biblical passages as “Honor thy father and thy mother,” rather than the later ethic of Jesus as shown in the New Testament passage we quoted above, “a person’s foes shall be those of one’s own household (Matthew 10.34-39).” #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Most parents would insist verbally, of course, that they wish only to have the child fulfill his or her own potentialities. They are often quite unaware of the unconscious needs to hang on to the younger person. However, the fact that they so often behave as though the son’s or daughter’s fulfillment were to be achieved only by remaining under their control reveals something quite different from their conscious intentions. The son’s or daughter’s becoming free often stirs up some deep anxiety in the parent, an anxiety which shows how difficult it is for parents in our society really to be in the indigenous potentialities of the child (perhaps because it is so hard for them to believe in their own potentialities), and how strong is the tendency of all entrenched authority to keep its power even at the price of breaking the other person into submission. The conflicts are made more complex because the younger person struggling for autonomy has often been inculcated with a deep sense of doom if one does not obey parental percept. And one is already generally fighting considerable anxiety and guilt feelings within one’s self over one’s effort to be free. Often at this stage persons have dreams in which they are guilty yet not guilty—guilty, yet having to go ahead. One such person dreamed that he was being cited as guilty by Senator McCarthy in the Senate, though he knew within himself that he really was not guilty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The problem of being prey to someone else’s power is reinforced, of course, by one’s own infantile desires to be taken care of. Thus there are tendencies within one’s self to give one’s self over to the dominating person. About half my own psychotherapeutic work over the past ten years has been with persons from specifically religious backgrounds and in the religious professions, and about half with person of no specific religious background or interest. There are some illuminating psychological effects of religious training in our society. There is an attitude—the strong interest in doing something about one’s problems—it is a function of the person’s confidence in meaning and value in life, is one constructive contribution of a mature religion and, generally has an energizing influence of therapy. However, the attitude of the divine right to be taken care of is quite something else. It is one of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity in therapy as well as in life in general. It is generally difficult for such people to see their demand to be taken care of as a problem to be analyzed and overcome, and they often react with hostility and a feeling of being ripped off when their right is not honored. Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early says when they sang the song in Saturday or Sunday school to the present vulgarized from of the same idea in many movies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, on a deeper level, the demand to be take care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons had to give up so much. They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his or her master. So they are being ripped off of the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist of God—does not extend them special care. They have been taught that happiness and success would follow their being good, the latter generally interpreted as being obedient. However, being merely obedient, as we have shown above, undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength. By being obedient to external requirements over a long period of time, one loses one’s real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished. And since happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, the person who surrenders one’s ethical autonomy has relinquished to the same degree one’s power to attain virtue and happiness. No wonder one feels resentful. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
When we look at how the obedience morality, the emphasis on being good by subordinating one’s self, got its power in modern culture, we can see more concretely what these people have had to give up. It takes its modern form largely from patterns copied from the development of industrialism and capitalism in the last four centuries. Now the subordination of the person to mechanical uniformity, the arranging of one’s life to fit the requirements of work and parsimony, did bring financial and, as a result, social success during the major part of the modern period. One could argue persuasively that salvation follows obedience, for if one was obedient to the demands of work in an industrial society, one tended to accumulate money. Anyone who has read of the business acumen of the Early Quakers and Puritans, for example, knows how well these economic and moral attitudes worked together. The Quaker dollar was a concrete solace for the great resentment engendered in the middle class because of the emotional privations they suffered in this obedience system. However, time change, as we have indicated, and in our day early to bed and early to rise may make a mortal healthy, but there is no guarantee that it will make one wealthy and wise. Ben Franklin’s precepts, tithing and daily fidelity to routine work, no longer ensure success, and this is why some are trying to Make America Great Again so people have an opportunity at the American Dream, which is a product of capitalism and freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The religious person, furthermore, particularly if one is a minister or otherwise engaged in professional religious work, has had to give up a realistic attitude toward money. One is not supposed to require that one be paid such and such a salary. In many religious circles it is considered undignified to talk about money, as if being paid, like toilet activities, is a necessary part of life but the ideal is to act as though it does not really occur. Labor groups, adapting to the changing economic times of mass industry, have recognized that God does not send the pay check by raven’s mouth as food was sent to Elijah of old, and they have learned though their unions to bring pressure to bear to get adequate wages. However, people in religious professions cannot strike for higher wages. Instead the church is supposed to take care of the minister financially and otherwise; one is given discounts on the railroad and in department stores; tuition in seminaries is lower than in other graduate schools—all of which is not calculated to increase the minister’s self-respect or others’ respect for one in our particular society. The fact that the religious person is not supposed to take active steps to ensure one’s financial security is another evidence of the underlying assumption in our society that material security will somehow come automatically if one is good, an assumption closely connected with the belief that God will take care of you. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Thus it is easy to see why the person in our society who is taught to be good by subordinating oneself, and only discovers sooner or later that one does not even get economic rewards for doing so, let alone happiness, should have so much resentment and anger. It is this buried resentment which gives the dynamic to the demand to be take care of. It is as though the person were silently saying, “I was promised I would be taken care of if I was obedient: look how obedient I have been, so why am I not taken care of? The belief in the divine right to be take care of often brings with it the feeling that one has a right to exercise power over others. That is to say, if one believes that persons should be under the power of others, one will not only submit one’s self to some more powerful persons for the purpose of getting care, but one will feel it is one’s duty to take care of—and to exercise power over—some person subordinate to one on the scale. This tendency is illustrated in its more sadistic form in the statement of one man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man with whom he lived even to the extent of taking the latter’s pay check every Saturday and putting him on an allowance, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
We should not abuse the soul of other individuals. Freedom and light have never been easy to attain or maintain. Since the War in Heaven, the forces of evil have used every means possible to destroy agency and extinguish light. The assault on moral principle and religious freedom have never been stronger. Our primary purpose must be to seek truth and light. My personal experience of living and interacting with people all over the World has caused me to be optimistic. I believe that light and truth will be preserved in our time. In all nations there are large numbers who worship God and feel accountable to God for their conduct. Some people accept the proof that there is no Hell in the hereafter and no demons to burn them or in other ways give them eternal punishment, so they do not fear death, and this is why they abuse the scriptures. Other people are concerned with being good and death because of their own deep human feelings and their own active sympathy for human kind, including themselves. Most people are still also respectful of basic moral values. It is a symbol of them trying to hang on to their loved ones—the most powerful symbol that mortal’s life transcends all the natural explanations. The majority of people, even some who have different beliefs than us, aspire to be good and honorable. The Light of Christ, which is distinct from the Holy Ghost, is vivid proof that the meaning of life is informing our conscious with love and a message of inevitable salvation. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Let them Render Grace for Grace and Let Love be their Common Will
In love every person starts from be beginning. This beginning is the relationship between people which we term care. Though it goes beyond feeling, it begins there. It is a feeling denoting a relationship of concern, when the other’s existence matters to you; a relationship of dedication, taking the ultimate form of being willing to get delight in or, in ultimate terms, to suffer for, the other. I have often notice, when I give an interpretation to a patient in a psychoanalytic session, that what impresses the individual most at the moment is not that the theoretical truth or falsehood of what I say, but the fact that my saying it shows my belief that one can change and one’s behavior has meaning. Despite death, there is meaning and nobility in the fact that we can admit together that we are not reconciled to the severing of our love. For our human love is even more precious when people cling to their loved ones. This is an affirmation of love for each other and a mutual stand against for life. We are able to face the future, and find ourselves better able to encounter it and less lonely because we encounter it together. Feeling is everything because all starts there. Feeling commits one, bonds one to the object, and ensures action. However, in modern times, feeling has become demoted and is disparaged as merely subjective. Reason or, accurately, technical reason is the guide to the way issues are to be settled. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Many say, “I feel” as a synonym for “I vaguely believe,” when we do not know—little realizing that we cannot know expect as we feel. However, it is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. We find ourselves rather as essentially a unity of emotions, of enjoyment, of hopes, of fears, of regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of these are our subjective reactions to our environment as we are active in our nature. Our unity is consistent in shaping these patterns of feelings. The romantic and ethical basis for love is not available to us any longer. We must seek to start from the beginning, psychologically speaking, with feelings. When there is an upsurgence of a genuine human feeling of sympathy, simple as it may be, is a critical point in psychotherapy. The awareness of our human significance forces us to look more deeply into our condition as beings. We find ourselves caring despite the apparent meaningless of the situation. In the waiting there is care and hope. It matters that we wait, wait in human relationship so the darkness shall be light. Some people are not interested in money and success. They seek an honesty, openness, a genuine of personal relationship; they are out to find a genuine feeling, a touch, a look in the eyes, a sharing of fantasy. The criterion becomes the intrinsic meaning and is to be judged by one’s authenticity, doing one’s own thing, and giving in the sense of making one’s self available for the other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
When we look for answers to the questions we have been discussing, we find, curiously enough, that every answer seems to somehow impoverish the problem. Every answer sells us short; it does not do justice to the depth of the question but transforms it from a dynamic human concern into a simplistic, lifeless, inert line of words. Sometimes it seems there probably are not any answers. The only way of resolving—in contrast to solving—the questions is to transform them by means of deeper and wider dimensions of consciousness. The problems must be embraced in their full meaning, the antinomies resolved even with their contradiction. They must be built upon; and out of this will arise a new level of consciousness. This is as close as we shall ever get to a resolution; and it is all we need to get. In psychotherapy, for example, we do not seek answers as such, or cut-and-dry solutions to the question—which would leave the patient worse off than one originally was in one’s struggling. However, we seek to help people take in, encompass, embrace, and integrate the problems. The serious problems of life are never solved, and if it seems that they have been solved, something important has been lost. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
The mode of being exists only in the here and now. The mode of having exists only in time: past, present, and future. In the having mode we are bound to what we have amassed in the past: money, land, fame, social status, knowledge, children, memories. We think about the past, and we feel by remembering feelings (or what appear to be feelings) of the past. (This is the essence of sentimentality.) We are the past; we can say: “I am what I was.” This elicits in us the capacity to reach out, to let ourselves be grasped, to preform and mold the future. It is the self-conscious capacity to be responsive to what might be. The future is the anticipation of what will become the past. It is experienced in the mode of having as is the past and is expressed when one says: “This person has a future,” indicating that the individual will have many tings even though one does not now have there. Truth, covenants, and ordinances enable us to overcome fear and face the future with faith. Obedience allows God’s blessings to flow without constraint. He will bless his obedient children with freedom from bondage and misery. And God will bless them with more light. For example, one keeps the Word of Wisdom knowing that obedience will not only bring freedom, but will also add blessings of wisdom and treasures of knowledge. God’s holy Angels are ever on call to help us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Unfailing faith is fortified through prayer. Our heartfelt pleadings are important to God. The fundamental experience of having is the same, whether we deal with past or future. The present is the point where past and future join, a frontier station in time, but not different in quality from the two realms it connects. Being is not necessarily outside of time, but time is not the dimension that governs being. The painter has to wrestle with color, canvas, and brushes, the sculptor with stone and chisel. Yet the creative act, their vision of what they are going to create, transcends time. It occurs in a flash, or in many flashes, but time is not experienced in the vision. The same holds true for the thinkers. Writing down their ideas occurs in time, but conceiving them is a creative event outside of time. It is the same for every manifestation of being. The experience of loving, of joy, of grasping truth does not occur in time, but in the here and now. The here and now is eternity, for instance, timelessness. However, eternity is not, as popularly misunderstood, indefinitely prolonged time. If we pray with an eternal perspective, we need not wonder if our most tearful and heartfelt pleadings are heard. Our prayer are heard by the Lord, and are recorded with this seal and testament—the Lord has sworn and decreed that they shall be granted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
One can also experience the future as if it were the here and now. This occurs when a future state is so fully anticipated in one’s own experience that it is only the future objectively, for instance, in external fact, but not in the subjective experience. This is the nature of genuine utopian thinking (in contrast to utopian daydreaming); it is the basis for genuine faith, which does not need the external realization in the future in order to make the experience of it real. How we deal with life’s trials is part of the development of our faith. Strength comes when we remember that we have a divine nature, an inheritance of infinite worth. The whole concept of past, present, and future, for instance, of time, enters into our lives due to our bodily existence: the limited duration of our life, the constant demand of our body to be taken care of, the nature of the physical World that we have to use in order to sustain ourselves. Indeed, we cannot live in eternity; being mortal, we cannot ignore or escape times. The rhythm of night and day, of sleep and wakefulness, of growing and aging, the need to sustain ourselves by work and to defend ourselves, all these factors force us to respect time if we want to live, and our bodies make us want to live. However, that we respect time is one thing; that we submit to it is another. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
In the mode of being, we respect time, but we do not submit to it. However, this respect for time becomes submission when the having mode predominates. In this mode not only things are things, but all that is alive becomes a thing. In the mode of having, time becomes our ruler. In the being mode, time is dethroned; it is no longer the idol that rules out life. In industrial society times rules supreme. The current mode of production demands that every action be exactly timed, that not only the endless assembly line conveyor belt but, in a less crude sense, most of our activities be ruled by time. In addition, time not only is time, time is money. The machine must be used maximally; therefore the machine forces its own rhythm upon the worker. Via the machine, time has become our ruler. Only in our free hours do we seem to have a certain choice. Yet we usually organize our leisure as we organize our work. Or we rebel against tyrant time by being absolutely lazy. By not doing anything except disobeying time’s demands, we have the illusion that we are free, when we are, in fact, only paroled from our being possessed by time. This points to the fact that there is a deeper dimension in human beings. Each requires a participation from us, an openness, a capacity to give ourselves and receive into ourselves. And each is an inseparable part of the basis of love and will. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The new age which knows upon the door is as yet unknown, seen only through beclouded windows. We get only hints of the new continent into which we are galloping: foolhardy are those who attempt to blueprint it, silly those who attempt to forecast it, and absurd those who irresponsibility try to toss it off by saying that the new person will like one’s new World just as we like ours. There is plenty of evidence that many people do not like ours and that demonstrations and speeches and negotiations are necessary to compel those in power to change it. However, whatever the new World will be, we do not choose to back into it. Our human responsibility is to find a place of consciousness which will be adequate to it and will fill the vast impersonal emptiness of our technology with human meaning. The urgent need for this consciousness is seen by sensitive persons in all fields and is especially made real by the new consciousness to the degree that trust is present, people are able to communicate with themselves and others to form consensual goals. To the degree that trust is present, people can be truly inter-dependent. Encountering requires open relating, self-awareness, and total unity of Self. This basis for human relationships can replace the present hypocritical stance as a necessary step before more civilized, meaningful, and rational solutions to social problems can be obtained. Let them render grace for grace, let love be their common will. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Love and will are both forms of communion of consciousness. Both are also affects—ways of affecting others and our World. This play on words is not accidental: for affect, meaning affection or emotion, is the same word as that for affecting change. An affect or affection is also the way of making, doing, forming something. Bot love and will are ways of creating consciousness in others. To be sure, each may be abused: love may be used as a way of clinging, and will as a way of manipulating others in order to enforce a compliance. Possibly always some traces of clinging love and manipulating will crop up in the behavior of all of us. However, the abuse of an affect should not be the basis for its definition. The lack of both love and will ends up in separation, putting a distance between us and the other person; and in the long run, this leads to apathy. However, our rewards come not only hereafter. Many blessings will be ours in this life, among our children and grandchildren. We, as faithful Saints, do not have to fight life’s battles alone. Think of that! God will contend with those who contend with us, and he will save us. God will fight our battles for us, and our children’s battles, and their children’s children’s, to the third and fourth generation. We are promised blessings that are beyond measures. Though time may be difficult, our knowledge of our love of our Heavenly Father and of our Savior will comfort and sustain us and bring joy to our hearts as we walk uprightly and keep the commandments. Be of good cheer, the future is as bright as our faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Aliveness is Conducive to Joy, as the Wise think about Life—The Past is Such a Curious Creature
We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not image it. Aliveness is conducive to joy. Many people read the word joy as pleasure, but the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, particularly so in reference to the distinction between the being and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the differences, since we live in a World of joyless pleasures. What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in different ways, considering its popular thought, it seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied. Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in having social success, earning more money, winning a lottery; the conventional pleasures of the flesh; eating to one’s heart’s content; winning a race; the state of elation brought about by drinking, trance, elicit substances; the pleasures in satisfying one’s sadism, or one’s passion to alter what is alive. Of course, in order to become rich of famous, individuals must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the sense of birth within. When they have achieved their goal they may be thrilled, intensely satisfied, feel they have reached a peak. However, what peak? Maybe a peak of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or orgiastic state. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, they may have reached this state driven by passions that, though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. However, they are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures. In this respect, modern society is in the same position the Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins. Moses said: “You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things,” reports Deuteronomy 28.47. Joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a peak experience, which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one’s essential human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have not increased. One has made the attempt to break through the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has unified all one’s energies—expect reason and love. One has attempted to become superhuman, without being human. One seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has changed within oneself. As is to be expected, joy must play a central role in those religious and philosophical systems that proclaim being as the goal of life. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin. Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourself. Our human center does not lie in ourselves, but in the authority to which we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own productive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing approval by the authority. We have a leader (secular or spiritual, king/queen or God) in whom we have faith; we have security as long as we are humble. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The submission to God is not necessarily conscious as such, it can be mild or severe, the psychic and social structure need not blind us to the fact that we live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian structure of our society. By submission or by domination or by trying to silence reason and awareness—these ways succeed only for the moment, and block the road to a true solution. There is but one way to save ourselves from this Hell: to leave the prison of our egocentricity, to reach out and to one ourselves with the World. If egocentric separateness is the cardinal sin, then the sin is atoned in the act of loving. The very word atonement expresses this concept, for it etymologically derives from atonement, the Middle-English expression for union. Since the sin of separateness is not an act of disobedience, it does not need to be forgiven. However, it does need to be healed; and love, not acceptance of punishment, is the healing factor. The concept of sin as disunion has been expressed by some of the church fathers, who followed Jesus’ nonauthoritarian concept of sin, and suggests where there are sins there is diversity. However, where virtue rules there is uniqueness, there is oneness. Through Adam’s sin the human race, which should be a harmonious whole without conflict between mine and thine, was transformed into a dust cloud of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Similar thoughts concerning the destruction of the original unity in Adam can also be found in the idea that the fact of salvation appears necessary as the regaining of the lost oneness, as the restitution of the supernatural oneness with God and at the same time the oneness of mortals among each other. The concept of sin and repentance tells us that we shall be as Gods for an examination of the whole problem of sin. In the having mode, and thus the authoritarian structure, sin is disobedience and is overcome by repentance: punishment, renewed submission. In the being mode, the nonauthoritarian structure, sin is unresolved estrangement, and it is overcome by the full unfolding of reason and love, by at-onement. One can indeed interpret the story of the Fall in both ways, because the story itself is a blending of authoritarian and liberating elements. However, in themselves the concept of sin as, respectively, disobedience and alienation are diametrically opposed. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel seems to contain the same idea. The human race reached here a state of union, symbolized by the fact that all humanity has one language. By their own ambition for power, by their craving to have the great tower, the people destroy their unity and are disunited. In a sense, the story of the Tower is the second Fall, the sin of historical humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The story is complicated by God’s disapproving of the people’s unity and power being used to attack him. “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech,” reports Genesis 11.6-7. Of course, the same difficulty already exists in the story of the Fall; there God is afraid of the power that man and woman would exercise if they ate of the fruit of both trees. There are two escae hatches that it is well to examine in more detail because they play so important a part in many families, spiritual or human. One of these is the attempt to escape from feelings of self-hate by hating others. This involves a mental process psychologist call projection. When a motion picture projector casts a picture on a screen, what the view sees is not determined primarily by the screen, although its quality can affect the image. The picture comes from within the projector, although the viewer may become so lost in the drama unfolding on the screen that one is no longer consciously aware of the source of the image. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the phenomenon of projection, psychologically speaking, the individual is both the projection machine and the viewer. In other words, a person sees what he or she projects onto the screen. In many ways, by using various scientific methods, psychologists have shown that all of us do a great deal of projecting, some of us more than others. In other words, when we look out at the World around us our view of reality is more or less distorted by the image we project, without conscious awareness, from our own minds. So, for example, psychologists have demonstrated that if we are shown a broken line drawing suggesting some image with which we are familiar, we have a tendency to complete that image in our mind when we look at the incomplete drawing. Projection is an important consideration here, because we have a tendency to project onto others qualities or feelings that we cannot accept ourselves. Thus, for example, a person who cannot accept his or her own feelings about pleasures of the flesh may feel that every man or woman who glances at him or her is out to seduce one. Since the feeling that we hate ourselves is such a threat to us, we cannot accept it in ourselves. Projection of self-hate onto others becomes one readily available way of avoiding these feelings. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
It is no surprise, then, that some children faced with frequent situations in which they feel rejected by others learn to avoid the feelings of worthlessness and self-hate by this means. Instead of being aware of the feeling, “I hate myself,” such a child will feel “They hate me!” It is only a small step further, of course, for the child’s reaction to be “Since they hate me, I hate them.” The child then has a target toward which to express all of the hostility seething within one—hostility because one feels worthless and because one has been rejected. When we project feelings we do not choose our targets indiscriminately. They usually make some kind of sense. A natural target for the child is the parents from whom one has felt rejection. And it is the child whose parents have been overly punishing and who have severely restricted the child’s freedom who most often tends to develop the reaction “My parents hate me, therefore I hate them!” When the child yells out one’s anger toward one’s parents or rebels against their directives, one is likely to meet more severe punishment and restriction. As a result, one feels more rejection and slips deeper into feelings of self-hate that is again converted into “You hate me, so I hate you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
If this cycle is not broken, the hatred of others often widens in scope to people outside the family circle as the child grows older. Often those in positions of authority, who are probably unconsciously identified with the parents, become the great target of increasing hatred; and so the child may get into difficulty with school officials and later with the police. Thus the rebellion against parents who do not seem to care can spread to rebellion against a society that does not seem to care. And if a person becomes a parent, he or she will probably be too emotionally disadvantaged and frightened to express his or her love to one’s children. One, too, will probably be punitive and hurtful. And thus, unless the cycle is broken, the blight of self-hate perpetuates itself from one generation to another. Feelings of rejection become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate becomes escape by hating others instead of one’s self, and further rejection (he or she has gotten into one scrape after another. Punishment does not seem to help. He seems hopeless!) and this all cycles back around to create more feelings of worthlessness. In psychotherapy, we want to know, “Did the patient improve or not?” where the word “improve” means some fairly general changes in state from bad to good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Some example changes used to measure the patient are such as these: (a) the patient feels better, is more comfortable, takes more interest in life, and the like; (b) important interpersonal relations are straightened out a bit; (c) physical symptoms have been relieved or cured; (d) important health-tending decisions have been made; (e) there has been an increase in insightful remarks and behavior. Each therapist then makes a formal presentation before these two judges of every case one has handled; prior to the presentation the judges have read all of the material concerning the patient that has been recorded in the clinical chart. In the instruction to the judges it is emphasized that the crucial variable is not the general level of functioning of the patient at the conclusion of therapy, but rather the change in state that had occurred between beginning and end of therapy. Further, it is made clear to the judges that part of their function is to evaluate the therapist’s involvement in one’s own account of the therapeutic process, and to weigh that factor in coming to a best estimate as to the degree of change that has actually occurred. On the basis, then, of two main sources of information (formal presentation of the case by the therapist, and an evaluation from the clinical chart), the expert raters assign cases, first of all, into two main categories, those who have shown definite improvement and those who had failed to improve or who have improved only slightly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
It is of some interest to examine the kinds of incidents and outcomes that the judges considered indicative of improvement or lack of it. Here a case of improvement: A man who entered therapy in a very depressed, anxious physically upset state, and whose troubles centered on his relations with his foreman on a construction job (a relationship in which was outwardly submissive and cooperative but inwardly enraged finally learned to stand up to the foreman and express his feelings. There was clear advance in his feelings of independence and esteem, and toward the conclusion of the therapy the patient left the former job and started a business of his own. Here is a case where no improvement was seen: A man with a history of homosexuality attempted to seduce his male therapist, who responded with anger as well as some anxiety. The patient had to be transferred to another therapist. The kind of outcomes in improvements are generally when the patient reports feelings of well-being at the conclusion of therapy, in contrast to depression and anxiety at its start. Specific symptoms, such as headaches, frigidity, or impotence, gastric disturbances, menstrual difficulties, skin disorders, and so forth, tend to be relieved or totally cleared up; in some cases there are significant changes in the direction of more mature interpersonal relations, especially with patents, parent-substitutes, or spouses. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The failures in psychotherapy could often be traced to the inability of the therapist to handle some particularly difficult problems. Perhaps with more experienced psychotherapists some of the patients who did not improve would have made some progress; however, there seems little doubt that the cases that were marked down as therapeutic failures were basically more difficult problems. Generally, more disturbed individuals do not improve. As stated in the past, the fear that one may lose one’s possessions is an unavoidable consequence of a sense of security that is based on what one has. I want to carry this thought a step further. It may be possible for us not to attach ourselves to property and, hence, not fear losing it. However, what about the fear of losing life itself—the fear of dying? Is this a fear only of older people or of the sick? Or is everybody afraid of dying? Does the fact that we are bound to die permeate our whole life? Does the fear of dying grow only more intense and more conscious the closer we come to the limits of life by age or sickness? We need of large systematic studies by psychoanalysts investigating this phenomenon from childhood to golden years and dealing with the unconsciousness as well as the conscious manifestations of the fear of dying. These studies need not be restricted to individual cases; they could examine large groups, using existing methods of sociopsychoanalysis. Since such studies do not now exist, we must draw tentative conclusions for many scattered data. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Perhaps the most significant datum is the deeply engraved desire for immortality that manifests itself in the many rituals and beliefs that aim at preserving the human body. On the other hand, the modern, specifically American denial of death by the beautification of the body speaks equally for the repression of the fear of dying by merely camouflaging death. It is not just woman any more, men in the entertainment industry are buying lace front wigs and caking on makeup to try and appear twenty to thirty year young than they are. However, there is only one way—taught by the Buddha, by Jesus, by the Stoics, by Master Eckhart—to truly overcome the fear of dying, and that way is by not hanging onto life, not experiencing life as a possession. Yet, it takes a cute young lady on TV to remind people of these Biblical principals before they manifest them. Nevertheless, the fear of dying is not truly what is seems to be: the fear of stopping living. Death does not concern us, since while we are, death is not yet here; but when death is here we are no more. To be sure, there can be fear of suffering and pain that may precede dying, but this fear is different from that of dying. While the fear of dying may this seem irrational, this is not so if life is experienced as a possession. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The fear, then, is not of dying, but of losing what I have: the fear of losing my body, my ego, my possessions, and my identity; the fear of facing the abyss of nonidentity, of being lost. To the extent that we live in the having mode, we must fear dying. No rational explanation will take away this fear. However, it may be diminished, even at the hour of death, by our reassertion of our bond to life, by a response to the love of others that may kindle our own love. Losing our fear of dying should not begin as a preparation for death, but as the continuous effort to reduce the mode of having and to increase the mode of being. The wise think about life, not death. The instruction on how to die is indeed the same as the instruction on how to live. The more we rid ourselves of the craving for possession in all its forms, particularly our ego-boundness, the less strong is the fear of dying, since there is nothing to lose. Research in psychotherapy by Harris and Christiansen declares that there is so significant relationship between improvement and intelligence. The Harris-Christiansen sample consisted of already hospitalized persons who were given psychotherapy because of delayed recovery from physical infirmary, surgery, or accident, whereas almost all patients in the present study had elected on their own initiative to seek psychotherapy at the clinic, and in their waking hours wen about business of life in an upright position. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
This difference might well account for the IQ difference between the samples, as well as for the fact that these self-referred patients were a good standard deviation above the general population mean in intelligence. Simply being aware of the fact that psychotherapy is to be had and that it makes sense to seek it when you are in personal difficulties is probably related beneficially to general intelligence and cultural sophistication. It is also to be expected on theoretical grounds that greater effectiveness of cortical functioning should be associated with a factor of modifying ability in personality and structure. Intelligence certainly involves the ability to cognize relationships adequately, including emotional relationships, and to correct one’s cognitions on the basis of new evidence. It would seem that in this sample, at any rate, the more intelligent patients were better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to induce desired personality changes. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all people. And since there are endless ways of being honest and dishonest, one definition of honest is: Honesty implies freedom from lying, stealing, cheating, and bearing false witness. “Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from deceitful tongue,” reports Psalms 102.2. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The Knowledge Which We Seek, the Answers for Which We Yearn, and the Strength Which We Desire
Believe me, our little consultation will not take long. We have strong obligations. We will call or come just as quickly as we can. As we turn to examine some major escape hatches, we see that some people escape from feelings of self-hate by developing physically illness. One patient, age 31, was a tall, athletically-built man of rather prepossessing appearance. He speaks in an intelligent, competent manner. He was obviously very tense, however, and seemed to be controlling himself only with some effort. He displayed a certain amount of hostility toward the testing procedure, but was overly cooperative and uncomplaining. The patient’s personality inventory is typical of the most clear-cut cases of psychopathy or impulse neurosis. Basic to the personality structure is a very deep and primitive oral fixation, with subsequent reaction formation against it. Direct satisfaction of libidinal impulses is sought, rather than repression or substitution. Conflicts tend to be acted out, and there is a constant flight from anxiety rather than an attempt to endure it. Associated with the underlying orality and passivity is considerable hostility which is also expressed orally (by such means as sarcasm, invective, and biting). What is most feared is the passivity, and dominance-submission is the characteristic conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
There is a considerable tendency toward self-dramatization. The primitive oral longing may lead to alcoholism or drug addiction, and pleasures of the flesh in such cases are usually polymorphous perverse. Such anxiety as is not handled by character defenses may be expressed gastrointestinally. There is a poverty of inner resources, an inability to sublimate or obtain substitutive gratification. Impulses are responded to in an uncontrolled fashion. Depression and anxiety are evident, the depression being the more prominent of the two. There is a good deal of preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh, and judgment defect manifests itself chiefly in that area. Otherwise, contact with reality is good. The patient had been divorced once, and he was not married to the woman with whom he was presently living, although they had been living together for several years. He came into the clinic purely on an impulse, although he had occasionally entertained the idea in the past because of vague feelings of dissatisfaction with certain aspects of his own behavior, such as his promiscuity, his predilection for comfort women, and his tendency to look for unusual forms of excitement and entertainment when he was inebriated. His common-law wife was fairly tolerant of these failings, but he was worried that sooner or later he would get in trouble with law enforcement, which would interfere with his profession as a teacher. He appeared to have no particular anxiety or neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The research that has been done into psychosomatic illness makes it evident that the body operates as a total organism and that most physical illness can either be caused or greatly modified by emotional factors. Two primary unconscious motivations appear to underlie such illness. In the first place, it seems evident that there is often a need to push one’s self. The person uses physical illness as an unconscious way of expressing one’s self-hate. Another motivation seems to be that of asking for help. It is almost as if the person were saying to the World, “Will not somebody please take care of me?” The therapist reported that the therapeutic interviews were generally “very man to man…the patient manipulated the situation so that we seemed to be sort jolly buddies rather than patient and doctor. He refused to admit of any professional distance between us.” The interviews were more like casual chats than therapeutic sessions. There was, nevertheless, a very strong transference. As the transference increased in intensity, and the patient’s passive desires got closer to the surface, his acting out of this conflict began to take a very hostile form. Therapists often report that they experience a great deal of trouble dealing effectively with physical illness caused by emotional difficulties. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It can be hard to deal with probably because the individual, in being ill, usually does satisfy some of the needs that motivate the illness in the first place. On one occasion, the patient came in drunk, having been drinking all night. At this time, he gave vent to considerable hostility, its first objection being the psychological tests and the psychologist. When the therapist pointed out that this too might be displaced, the patient turned violently upon the therapist himself, and began to compare psychologists very favorably with psychiatrists. The patient’s hostility was evinced plainly in his expressive movement during this hour, as he began many aggressive gestures which he quickly inhibited. Finally, he broke down and cried. Afterward, he said he felt better, “like after sleeping with a woman.” Following this, a good deal of passive homosexual material emerged in his associations, and this was dealt with very effectively and in an anxiety reliving manner by the therapist. The patient does succeed in pushing himself, and he often gains attention and care as a result of the illness. Both of these psychological gains, of course, are not ultimately satisfying, for there is usually growing resentment on the part of those who care for the ill person. This resentment is likely to be expressed in some form or other. Thus the stage is set for further feelings of rejection, more self-hate, and more pronounced physical problems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The cycle generally goes this way: Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into physical symptoms or illness, and further rejection (who likes somebody who is sick and complaining all the time?). When a person has been severely emotionally damaged as a child, the escape from self-hate may take the form of a severe mental illness, or psychosis. In this instance the feelings a person has about one’s self are so intolerable and life is so frightening that the person may escape into a fantasy World. One exchanges reality for unreality. All the gain that the therapist would claim for this patient after six months of psychotherapy was that the patient had been rendered more available for treatment. In view of the extreme difficulty of working with such psychopathic character disorders, this modest gain is indeed rather praiseworthy. Perhaps the escape from self-hate is seen most clearly in instance where the person becomes someone else in one’s imagination, someone who is powerful, good, or important in some way. One may acquire an unshakable belief that one is Jesus, Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Beyonce, Brad Pitt, Aaliyah, Reese Witherspoon, Paris Hilton, The Weekend, Drake, Elvis, Olivia Newton John, or some the famous person. The immediate gain from the illness is obvious. The person is no longer the hated self who seemed worthless, hopeless, and a failure. Now one can look on one’s self as an individual of great important and significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In spite of all our advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness, however, the psychotic person is almost certain to experience further feelings of rejection. Society will almost surely deem it necessary to segregate one’s self from normal people, at least during the acute phases of the illness. When one does return to society, one is likely to be regarded with suspicion, prejudice, and fear, with little understanding or even tolerance of one’s emotional problems. Again the cycle rejection cycle might start. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into mental illness, further rejection (why can he not snap out of it and face life like everybody else does?). Alcoholism and other forms of addiction provide other ways of attempting to escape from feelings of self-hate. For a large majority of people, the use of alcohol is a pleasant way to become more like the person they long to be. With the glowing warmth of two or three drinks, many people are able to talk more freely and enjoy their friends more openly. Usually too frightened of their love to reveal it, they are able to express their care more openly and with more feeling. The potential alcoholic, on the other hand, begins to rely on drinking as a way to avoid facing feelings of inadequacy, failure, and worthlessness. The alcohol numbs one to these feelings and, at least in the initial stages, helps one to escape one’s feeling of mediocrity and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
One is less aware of one’s fear of suffering further rejection and so one mixes more with people, somewhat mitigating the terrible loneliness experiences in sober hours. Feelings of rejection, lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape to alcoholism, further rejection (he used to be funny when he was drinking, but it seems now like he is drunk all the time and everybody suffers”), then further feelings or worthlessness ensue. However, when one is sober again, feelings of self-hate come closer to the surface, fortified now by guilt feelings about the meaningless waste of one’s hours of drunkenness. The only answer to the resulting moodiness and sense of emptiness seems to be possessed in resorting to drinking. Eventually the alcohol provides a more or less permanent escape from self-hate. Thus the alcoholic become more and more addicted. Meanwhile, one encounters ever more frequent rejection and one after another of his or her friends, and finally one’s family find one’s drinking and one’s behavior while intoxicated increasingly unbearable and desert the individual. The only way of gaining relief from these further feelings of rejection, or so it seems to one, comes through further drinking. And so the cycle runs it course. Homosexuality is another way of escaping feelings of self-hate. Sometimes have been cut off from both skills and the emotions of male existence. Yet, they also undoubtedly long for some kind of place in the male World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
With women, some of these men seem, superficially at least, very much at ease. They share many interests more typical of women in our culture. One may be artistic and creative. Yet, in relationships with girls that might have become intimate and meaningful at a deeper level, tend to become guarded and aloof. It is evident that one has a profound fear of being subtly manipulated and controlled by women, as one’s mother may have done (being made to do the household chores and care for the other kids, cook meals, becoming a pseudo mother, and without any male influence around). All women are seen by the male as threats to his individuality. It is not surprising that, when one is approached at college or work by men with similar problems, one falls quickly into homosexual practices. Though he later married, he seemed unable either to give up his homosexuality completely or to achieve genuine intimacy with his wife, although they were able to have pleasures of the flesh. After several years of attempting to make a satisfying married, she finally left him. With this individual, as with other homosexuals, his sexual relationship with men probably gave him some escape from his feelings of inability to satisfy his need for love and his feelings of worthlessness as a male. However, his escape into homosexuality led to further rejection by parents, other relatives, friends, and acquaintances who proved typically intolerant of problems with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
As often is the case, even he and his homosexual partners tended to despise each other. Such rejection seemed to lead only to the search for the reassurance of new sexual partners in an unbroken cycle of rejection. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into homosexuality, further rejections (he is different from other men. He is repulsive to me) and more feelings of worthlessness. No attempt is being made here to explain fully why a person chooses one escape from self-hate rather than another, as, for example, why one person becomes an alcoholic and another becomes a braggart or develops symptoms of physical illness. There are many complex reasons for these differences. Some of them certainly have to do with the kind of rejection that is experienced. Chance occurrences may lead to the expression of one symptom rather than another. For example, it is possible that the man, the homosexual just described, might have become an alcoholic if her had not been approached by an experienced homosexual and if his rigid religious training had not discouraged any experimentation with drinking. The purpose here, however, is to show that feelings of rejection, worthlessness, and self-hate lie at the root of these problems, whatever the various nuances may be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There is also room for inborn differences within this general pattern. Perhaps, for example, it is possible that some people are chemically more susceptible to alcoholic addiction than others. This would not mean that alcoholism would be a certainty for such a person even if it were found that such potentials occur. Without the need to escape from severe feelings of inadequacy and self-hate, the individual would not likely become an alcoholic. “The male patient then stood up, heaved a sigh and headed for the door. I asked if he needed a ride back home and he murmured that his car had brought him down town.” There is something creative in psychotherapy thus carried on. To the old patterns of perception and action is added a force for change, so that they gradually become something quite different, though retaining many of their former elements. It is important for people to learn to accept things at face value, and there should be a willingness to let the other person be as he or she wished, combined with an insistence on yourself being as you wish. It may sound absurd because the aim of psychotherapy is to induce changes in the behavior of the patient. Do we not want one to have fewer symptoms, better relations with people, a constructive set of social values, a happier out look on life? While we may have all of these desires as secondary goals for the patient, we must wish for one, above all else, and is necessary even at the expense of those secondary goals, simply that one be free to choose what one wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The patient may in the end choose to be much as one was in the beginning; the difference should be that one chooses freely and is not compelled by one’s own blind needs. It is, indeed, our faith that there are many things, to us undesirable, that free mortals would not choose for oneself; but we must be willing, in the final analysis and to state the case in its most extreme form, to grant the other’s right to choose destruction and evil, if one does so freely. If we accept this principle, we will not pity the patient, nor hold ourselves wise or good as compared to him or her, nor wish to impart on the individual our own virtues or visions. Rather, we will wish only to help one to understand who he or she is as a person, that one may be made more free to choose, and less the slave of one’s own history. Humans are generally ethical beings: but one’s achievement of ethical awareness is not easy. One does not grow into ethical judgment as simply as the California Golden Poppy (flower) grows toward the Sun. Indeed, like freedom and the other aspects of mortal’s consciousness of self, ethical awareness is gained only at a price of inner conflict and anxiety. With the loss of innocence and the rudimentary beginnings of ethical sensitivity, the person falls heir to the particular burdens of self-consciousness, anxiety and guilt feelings, but this awareness may not appear till later—that one is of dust. That is to say, when one realizes the one will some time die; one becomes conscious of one’s own finiteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The fall of man is seen as a fall upward because learning of right and wrong represent the birth of the psychological and spiritual person. The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s ignorance, and mortals can creatively use their powers, and to some extent transcend their limitations, only as one humbly and honestly admits these limitations to begin with so we do not become infected with false pride. Every society must have the influences which being ideas and ethical insight into birth, and the institutions which conserve that values of the past. No society would survive long without both new vitality and old forms, change and stability, the prophetic religion which attacks existing institutions and the priestly religion which protects the institutions. Many human beings are struggling toward enlarged self-awareness, maturity, freedom and responsibility, and some have the tendency to remain a child and cling to the protection of parents or parental substitutes. In capitalism, it is required for its functioning that there must be a strict obedience of the individuals to the laws, those that serve their true interests as well as those that do not. How oppressive or how liberal the laws and what the means for their enforcement are make little difference with regard to the central issue: the people must learn to fear authority, and not only in the person of the law enforcement officers because they carry weapons. This fear is not enough of a safeguard for the proper functioning of the state; the citizen must internalize this fear and transform obedience into a moral and religious category: sin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
People respect the laws not only because they are afraid but also because they feel guilty for their disobedience. This feeling of guilt can be overcome by the forgiveness that only the authority itself can grant. The conditions for such forgiveness are: the sinners repents, is punished, and by accepting punishment submits again. The sequence: sin (disobedience), feelings of guilt, new submission (punishment), forgiveness is a brutal cycle, inasmuch as each act of disobedience leads to increased obedience. A knowledge of truth and the answers to our greatest questions come to us as we are obedient to the commandments of God. We learn obedience throughout our lives. Beginning when we are very young, those responsible for our care set forth guidelines and rules to ensure our safety. Life would be simpler for all of us if we would obey such rules completely. Many of us, however, learn through experience the wisdom of being obedient. There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treacherous moral existence and return eventually to our Heavenly Fathers. The Savior demonstrated genuine love of God by living the perfect life, by honoring the sacred mission that was his. Never was he haughty. Never was he puffed up with pride. Never was he disloyal. Jesus as humble, sincere, and obedient. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
A Poor Torn Heart, a Tattered Heart–Care is the Basic Constitutive Phenomenon of Human Existence!
Your innocence is so genuine. I am sorry. Forgive me. It is only the cycle of rejection and the need for escape from intolerable self-hatred is also the origin of our fear of love. Out of the experience of feeling rejected with subsequent feelings of worthlessness and self-hate, comes the individual’s feeling that love is risky. One probably never puts this feeling into words, even to oneself, but the individual’s emotional logic must run something like this: “Since I hate my real self and know it to be worthless, I dare not be myself with others. If I am open and direct with people, they will see me as I am and hate me. If I love, I will only be hurt in return. I have had enough of that already, so I will find some other way of dealing with people.” The escape hatches not only provide a way of avoiding full awareness of avoiding full awareness of self-hatred; they also help the person bypass the anticipated dangers of intimacy. And because one has feelings of worthlessness, the individual’s desire to avoid the risks of love are increased because one lacks confidence in one’s ability to cope with emotional hurt when one experiences it. When we look at other people’s ways of dealing with their feelings of inadequacy it is often not too difficult to see that the escape hatches they use are ultimately self-defeating and lead to increase feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
However, when we ourselves are caught in cycles of behavior that we have spent most our lives developing it is not so easy to see our predicament or desirability, much less the possibility of breaking out of the cycle. One male therapist once suffered acute anxiety which seemed to stem from his basic doubt as to his own sex role, and a fear of the passive desires that he experienced. This not uncommon conflict, while its effect was pervasive and influenced many of his personal relations, became especially intense in interactions involving other men with similar problems. This therapist, a quite intelligent and sensitive individual, experienced specifically genital homosexual desires, and was in an acute state of conflict because of them. His very complex system of defenses was organized around his fear of such impulses, which he was firmly resolved not to indulge. His personality score indicated that he was experiencing considerable stress. The therapist found one of his male patients attractive, both physically and intellectually. The therapist thought the man used words very effectively and was bright. However, the patient displayed confusion with relation to his own social role, for instance, ambivalence toward the working class and attempted, but unsuccessful, identification with the upper class was very apparent and created a note of insincerity to which shone through. It is apparent in the tendency—just perceptible—to obsequiousness with higher status people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The obsequiousness with higher status people may very well be an expression also of passivity toward the father, which probably has to do primarily with class identification for the patient. The therapist expressed some dynamic under-currents in remarking on the irregularity with which the patient kept appointments, he said, “Whenever I felt we were really getting close, then he would miss his appointment.” Again, “He was very obsequious to me at times, sort of putting me up there.” Other remarks of this sort were, “He just wants me to be a wedge for him,” and “He would like for me to be over him.” The interaction finally took on an extremely anxious and hostile character, and after a session in which for the first time there was considerable overt homosexual content, the therapist become openly angry and the patient dud not return for several weeks. When he finally did call to make another appointment, the therapist demanded to know why he had not called to break previous appointments if he did not intend to keep them. The therapist reported that he then asked, “Well, now have you decided whether you really want to come in?” The patient replied in an enraged tone, “Of course I do.” The therapist remarked to one of the staff psychologists later that this was the first expression of hostility toward him in the course of the therapy. He then added, “But the things that guy would say about me if he would only talk ought to be in print. I mean, would not be fit to print.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The uncertainty of both therapist and patient about the sex role of both himself and the other person finally generated so much anxiety that the situation became intolerable. The interaction simply could not go on. Eventually the patient was transferred to another therapist who reports that there has been considerable improvement and continuing progress. It should not be thought that the therapist was himself entirely unaware of these disturbing under-currents in the interaction. He sought consolation on the case with a number of skilled people, and during this period of time he also tried to make arrangements for a personal analysis. It was evident that the relationship was a significant as well as a disturbing one for him too, and perhaps ultimately it will prove to have been quite a beneficial one. He displayed a high degree of conscientiousness and personal integrity, and it is not to his discredit that his own needs and problems were at that particular moment in his life too pressing for him to carry out successfully his very difficult task. The cautious, the having persons enjoy security, yet by necessity they are very insecure. They depend on what they have: money, prestige, their ego—that is to say, on something outside themselves. However, what become of them if they lose what they have? For, indeed, whatever one has can be lost. Most obviously, one’s property can be lost—and with it usually one’s position, one’s friends—and at any moment one can, and sooner or later one is bound to lost one’s life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I? Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living. Because I can lose what I have, I am necessarily constantly worried that I shall lose what I have. I am afraid of thieves, of economic changes, of revolutions, of infirmary, of death, and I am afraid of love, of freedom, of growth, of change, of the unknow. Thus I am continuously worried, suffering from a chronic hypochondriasis, with regard not only to loss of health but to any other loss of what I have; I become defensive, hard, suspicious, lonely, driven by the need to have more in order to be better protected. The hero is filled only with oneself; in one’s extreme egoism one believes that one is oneself, because one is a bundle of desires. At the end of one’s life one recognizes that because of one’s property-structured existence, one has failed to be oneself, that one is like an onion without a kernel, an unfinished person, who was never oneself. The anxiety and insecurity engendered by the danger of losing what one has are absent in the being mode. If I am who I am not what I have, nobody can deprive me of or threaten my security and my sense of identity. My center is within myself; my capacity for being and for expressing my essential powers is part of my character structure and depends on me. This holds true for the normal process of living, not, of course, for such circumstances as incapacitating illness, torture, or other cases of external restrictions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
While having is bases on some thing that is diminished by use, being grows by practice. (The burning bush that is not consumed is the biblical symbol for this paradox.) The power of reason, of love, of artistic and intellectual creation, all essential powers grow through the process of being expressed. What is spent is not lost. The only threat to my security in being lies in myself: in lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness to have others take over my life. However, these dangers are not inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in having. The experience of loving, liking, enjoying something without want to have it is not easy for many modern people to experience. It is hard for people to experience enjoyment separate from having. Having-centered person want to have the person they like or admire. This can be seen in relations between therapist and patient, parents and their children, between teachers and students, and between friends. Neither partner is satisfied simply to enjoy the other person; each wishes to have the other person for him—or herself. Hence, each is jealous of those who also want to have the other. Each partner seeks the other like a shipwrecked sailor seeks a plank or mermaid—for survival. Predominantly having relationships are heavy, burdened, filled with conflicts and jealousies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Speaking more generally, the fundamental elements in the relation between individual in the having mode of existence are competition, antagonism, and fear. The antagonistic element in the having relationship stems from its nature. If having is the basis of my sense of identity because I am what I have, the wish to have must lead to the desire to have much, to have more, to have most. In other words, greed is the natural outcome of the having orientation. It can be the greed of the miser or the greed of the profit hunter or the greed of the womanizer or the man chaser. Whatever constitutes their greed, the greedy can never have enough, can never be satisfied. In contrast to physiological needs, such as hunger, that have definite satiation points due to the physiology of the body, mental greed—and all greed is mental, even if it is satisfied via the body—has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome. In addition, since what one has can be taken away in one form or another, once must have more, in order to fortify one’s existence against such danger. If everyone wants to have more, everyone must fear one’s neighbor’s aggressive intention to take away what one has. To prevent such attack, one must become more powerful and preventively aggressive oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Besides, since production, great as it may be, can never keep pace with unlimited desires, there must be competition and antagonism among individuals in the struggle for getting the most. And the strife would continue even if a state of absolute abundance could be reached; those who have less in physical health and in attractiveness, in gifts, in talents would bitterly envy those who have more. That the having mode and the resulting greed necessarily lead to impersonal antagonism and strife holds true for nations as it does for individuals. For as long as nations are composed of people whose main motivation is having and greed, they cannot help waging war. They necessarily covet what another nation has, and attempt to get what they want by war, economic pressure, or threats. They will use these procedures against weaker nations, first of all, and form alliances that are stronger than the nation that is to be attacked. Even if it has only a reasonable chance to win, a nation will wage war, not because it suffers economically, but because the desire to have more and to conquer is deeply ingrained in the social character. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Of course there are times of peace. However, one must distinguish between lasting peace and peace that is a transitory phenomenon, a period of gathering strength, rebuilding one’s industry and army—in other words, between peace that is a permanent state of harmony and peace that is essentially only a truce. While the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries had periods of truce, they are characterized by a state of chronic war among the main actors on the historical stage. Peace as a state of lasting harmonious relations between nations is only possible when the having structure is replaced by the being structure. The idea that one can build peace while encouraging the striving for possession and profit is an illusion, and a dangerous one, because it deprives people of recognizing that they are confronted with a clear alternative: either a radical change of their character or the perpetuity of war. This is indeed an old alternative; the leaders have chosen war and the people followed them. Today and tomorrow, with the incredible increase in the destructiveness of the new weapons, the alternative is no longer war—but mutual suicide. What hold true of international wars is equally true for class war. The war between the classes, essentially the exploiting and the exploited, has always existed in societies that were based on the principle of greed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
There was no class war where there was neither a need for or a possibility of exploitation nor a greedy social character. However, there are bound to be classes in any society, even the richest, in which the having more is dominant. As already noted, given unlimited desires, even the greatest production cannot keep pace with everybody’s fantasy of having more than their neighbors. Necessarily, those who are stronger, more cleaver, or more favored by other circumstances will try to establish a favored position for themselves and try to take advantage of those who are less powerful, either by force and violence or by suggestion. Oppressed classes will overthrow their rulers, and so on; the class struggle might perhaps become less violent, but it cannot disappear as long as greed dominates the human heart. The idea of a classless society in a so-called socialists World filled with the spirit of greed is as illusory—and dangerous—as the idea of permanent peace among greedy nations. In the being mode, private having (private property) has little affective importance, because I do not need to own something in order to enjoy it, or even in order to use it, but private property is a blessing. In the being mode, more than one person—in fact millions of people—can share in the enjoyment of the same object, since none need—or want—to have it, as a condition of enjoying it. This not only avoids strife; it creates one of the deepest forms of human happiness: shared enjoyment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Nothing unites people more (without restricting their individuality) than sharing their admiration and love for a person; sharing an idea, a piece of music, a painting, a symbol; sharing in a ritual—and sharing sorrow. The experience of sharing makes and keeps the relation between two individuals alive; it is the basis of all great religious, political, and philosophical movements. Of course, this holds true only as long as and to the extent that the individuals genuinely love or admire. When religious and political movements ossify, when bureaucracy manages the people by means of suggestions and threats, the sharing stops. While nature has devised, as it were, the prototype—or perhaps the symbol—of shared enjoyment in the pleasures of the flesh, empirically the pleasures of the flesh is not necessarily an enjoyment that is shared; the partners are frequently so narcissistic, self-involved, and possessive that one can speak only of simultaneous, but not of shared pleasure. In another respect, however, nature offers a less ambiguous symbol for the distinction between having and being. Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of the soul, the source of human tenderness. Care is given power by nature’s sense of pain; if we do not care for ourselves, we are hurt, burned, injured. This is the source identification: we can feel in our own bodies the pain of the child or the hurt of the adult. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
However, our responsibility is to cease letting care be solely a matter of nerve endings. I do not deny the biological phenomena, but care must become a conscious psychological fact. Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about. Care is the source of will. For will is not an independent faculty, or a department of the self, and we always get into trouble when we try to make it a special faculty. It is a function of the whole person. When fully conceived, the care structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. When we do not care, we lose our being; and care is the way back to being. If I care about being, I will shepherd it with some attention paid to its welfare, whereas if I d not care, my being disintegrates. One patient appeared rather sad, lackadaisical, and passive. His peak score on the personality inventory was on depression, with a secondary peak on psychasthenia. The profile of a depressive character, chronically pessimistic about things, a bit worrisome, generally seeing the World through blue-colored glasses. At the time of the first testing session, this patient was quite obviously depressed, speaking slowly and in a low tone. When he was seen again in a couple of week later, he still did not seem very energetic, but he was not nearly so depressed. One of the staff psychologists asked him what had caused him to feel better, and he replied, “Oh, I do not know—guess it just sort of wore off.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The patient was very passive rather castrate individual who was afraid of expressing hostility, or, for that matter, of feeling it. He is otherwise in excellent contact with reality and he responds well emotionally. He should be able to relate easily to people and to form normal emotional bonds with others. He has adequate inner resources. His chief problems seem to be in the area of dependency and great sensitivity to rejection, especially by father figures. The patient’s symptomatology seems to be expressed chiefly as a way of life, although some of his anxiety is probably somatized gastrointestinally. It is to be expected that successful psychotherapy with him would have to be a long process, and that it would continue only with a very accepting and tolerant therapist how would not arouse the patient’s strong castration anxiety. Ultimately it might be possible for the patient to assume a more phallic role, but the change could be expected to be very slow and gradual. Care is the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence. It is thus ontological in that is constitutes human as human. Will and wish cannot be the basis for care, but rather vice versa: they are founded on care. If we did not care to begin with, we could not will or wish; and if we do not authentically care, we cannot help wishing or willing. Willing is caring made free, and made active. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by care. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The therapist characterized the patient as, “Congenial—pleasant—not digging or probing. Accepts life—wants general happiness and security.” Care is the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence. It is thus ontological in that is constitutes human as human. Will and wish cannot be the basis for care, but rather vice versa: they are founded on care. If we did not care to begin with, we could not will or wish; and if we do not authentically care, we cannot help wishing or willing. Willing is caring made free, and made active. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by care. A few weeks later, the therapist found that the patient was taking such god care of himself that, “I can take it easy with him compared with most of the people around here.” Essentially what happened in the therapy was that the therapist made it clear that the patent had noting to fear from him. One of the patient’s chief symptoms was a “frightened feeling in my stomach when I am around the boss” at work. This seemed to be a repetition of his childhood fear of his very stern step-father, who in his drunken rages often threatened to cause great bodily hard and/or injury which would result in the loss of life to the wife’s children. The patient recalled that the step-father had a gun to do it with, too. The therapist, however, apparently did not have a gun and was anything but threatening. He was more encouraging than anything else. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Temporality is what makes care possible. The patient accepted the encouragement, and decided that maybe he would be better off if he were not working for any boss at all, but working for himself instead (a view in which the therapist heartily concurred). He finally decided to try to start his own doughnut business, and shortly thereafter brought in a dozen doughnuts for the therapist, who found them delicious. Will is the comprehensive, matured form of wish, matured form of wish, and is rooted with ontological necessity in care. In an individual’s conscious act, will and care go together, are in that sense identical. Care is always caring about something. We are caught up in our experience of the objective thing or event we care about. In care one must, by involvement with the objective fact, do something about the situation; one must make some decisions. This is where care brings love and will together. Compassion may connote to many a more sophistical form of care. It is an attribute of high intelligence, honesty of purpose, and a conceptual scheme of sufficient scope and subtlety to enable people to cognize their roles clearly as well as to feel them and be emotionally committed to them. Care tends to manifest itself both generally, toward all the people in one’s environment. This is important in the struggle for the existence of the human being in a World in which everything seems increasingly mechanical and computerized. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
When we care, it is the refusal to accept emptiness though it faces one on every side; the dogged insistence on human dignity, though it be violated on every side; and the stubborn assertion of the self to give content to our activities, routine as these activities may be. Care is a particular type of intentionality shown especially in psychotherapy. It means to wish someone well; and if the therapist does not experience this within oneself, or does not have the belief that what happens to the patient matters, woe unto the therapy. In addition to therapy, it is a great idea to understand that we are required to confide in God, to exercise faith, and to act so that we can receive help, step by step. Sometimes answers to prayer are not recognized because we are too intent on wanting confirmation of our own desires. We fail to see that the Lord would have us do something else. Be care to seek God’s will. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. And blessed are all the pure in heart, for they shall see God. And blessed are all the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. And blessed are all they who are persecuted for my name’s sake (God), for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven,” 3 Nephi 12.7-10. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
The Lord Will Indeed Give What is Good, and Our Land Will Yield its Harvest
I shut off the overhead chandelier immediately and switched on two of the smaller corner lamps. It was softly dim now, but not uncomfortably so, and I directed everyone to sit down. To day of the moment of genuine encounter—the vitalizing transaction, as I have called it—that it may be as frail as love or blessedness is perhaps to out too much emphasis on the fragility of the live and growing thing that psychotherapy is designed to nourish. Certainly many psychotherapists take a hardier view. In fact, psychotherapeutic patience aims to overcome precisely the febrile quality of the state of being in love and the disillusion that time brings if there is no capacity for such growth and change in the relationship. Recall Housman’s poem in A Shropshire Lad: “Oh, when I was in love with you, then I was clean and brave, and miles around the wonder grew how well did I beave. But now the fancy passes, and noting shall remain, and miles around they will say that I am quite myself again.” The fact of the matter is that psychotherapy properly practiced is a discipline of considerable technical complexity, and diagnosis is by no means either name-calling or even labeling or pigeon-holding. Diagnosis itself is, if really well done, a form of relationship calling for a fineness of empathic understand and, a genuine encounter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The interest in psychotherapy is in the general problem of describing people in their relationships with other people as much as it is in exploring the special case of two person who talk to each other for the express purpose of inducing changes in behavior of one of them. The goal is concerned with understanding the conditions that make personal interactions mutually satisfying, constructive, and on-going, on the one hand, and antagonizing, destructive, and stultifying, on the other. Space-time coordinates are not necessarily accurate determinates of the form of personal interaction for almost any two people, Monday morning at work in the office can be very different from Friday afternoon after work in a bar. Even in the same place and at the same time, two men are likely to interact differently from two women, or from a man and a woman. People who bear a superior-subordinate relation to one another will interact differently from those whose relation to one another is coordinate. Such differences as older and younger, stronger and weaker, not as aware and intelligent, rich and poor, psychotic and sane, will make a difference too in the form of personal interactions. Related to such differences as these, but not entirely co-extensive with them, are the need-structures of the persons involved. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There are some persons whose needs are so intense that they force almost all their personal interactions into the same for, thus limiting greatly the range of possible response on the part of the other person. Such a necessitous and undifferentiated character may be given to all interactions by the orally deprived person, who strives desperately and incessantly to get from others, fearing starvation and abandonment if one is not immediately fed (love, or admiration, or applause in some form). So one with needs for order and balance may react frantically to interaction with a person who is seen as threatening to upset things, or who flaunts various derivative forms on rigid indiscipline. There are, of course, many less compelling and theoretically unclaimed needs for which satisfaction is sought, and generally found in personal interaction. From other person one may get information, entertainment, helpful criticism, praise, blame, money for services rendered, inspiration, pleasures of the flesh, food, transportation, votes, and even psychotherapy. Which brings us to the special case tat is the focus of this investigation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Psychotherapy is for private patients who have some disturbance in interpersonal relations but are not sick enough to require hospitalization generally takes place in the office of a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and usually accompanied, more or less immediately, by the payment of a fee. It is begun at the behest of the patient, who has come to the opinion that his or her mind is not working properly, or who at least knows that one’s body is not working properly and that medical men and women have told one that the cause lies in one’s mind. Imagine if our minds where they powerful that they control our bodies and our environments. That is compelling because it indicates through enough education and training, we should be able to heal our own bodies, minds, and have better control over our environment. So anyway, the patient is usually very unhappy, and one’s personal interactions in the past have been unsuccessful in satisfying one’s needs (some of which, indeed, one may not be aware of). Therapist are supposed to gain a certain amount of gratification to be had from being a person of power and wisdom, to whom other come from help. However, besides monetary motives and others, it sometimes happens that the therapist is also quite unsuccessful in other personal interactions, and doing psychotherapy is one of the few ways in which one can really get into contact with other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Humans can look before and after. One can transcend the immediate moment, can remember the past and plan for the future, and thus choose a good which is greater, but will not occur till some future moment in preference to a lesser, immediate one. By the same token one can feel oneself into someone else’s needs and desires, can imagine oneself in the other person’s place, and so make one’s choices with a view to the good of one’s fellows as well as oneself. This is the beginning of the capacity, however imperfect and rudimentary it may be in most people, to love thy neighbor and to be aware of the relation between their own acts and the welfare of the community. The human being not only can make such choices of values and goas, but one is the being who must do so if one is to attain integration. For the value—the goal one moves toward—serves one as a psychological center, a kind of core of integration which draws together one’s powers as the core of a magnet draws the magnet’s lines of force together. Knowing what one wants is essential for the beginnings of the child’s and young person’s capacity for self-direction. Knowing what one wants is simply the elemental form of what in the maturing person is the ability to choose one’s own values. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The mark of the mature being is that one’s living is integrated around self-chosen goals: one knows what one wants, no longer simply as the child wants ice cream but as the grown person plans and works toward a creative love relationship or toward business achievement or what not. One loves the members of one’s family not because one has been thrown together with them by the fate of birth but because one finds them loveable and chooses to love them; and one works not merely from automatic routine, but because one consciously believes in the value of what one is doing. Anxiety, bewilderment and emptiness—the chronic psychic infirmary of modern mortals—occurs mainly because one’s values are confused and contradictory, and one has no psychic core. We can now add that the degree of an individual’s inner strength and integrity will depend on how much one believes in the values one lives by. Many people want to know how a person can maturely and creatively choose and affirm such values? In the first place, one’s values and the difficulty in affirming them depend very much on the age we live in. The beliefs and traditions handed down in society tend to become crystalized into rigid forms which suppress individual vitality. For example, many people still believe that America is supposed to accept poor huddled masses from anywhere, but the gold rush is over, and many Americans cannot afford their cars, mortgage and rent. In fact, 7.1 million Americas are 90 days overdue on their care loans. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
America is also suffering from a housing crisis, record debt, and high insurance costs. What happens in such a time is that vitality gets divorced from tradition, and tends to become diffuse rebelliousness which loses its power like water flowing in every direction on the ground. Are we not caught between authoritarian trends on one side and directionless vitality on the other? In times of social upheaval, like our own, people suffer from feelings of rootlessness and tend to cling to authority and established institutions as a source of security in the storm. Most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once. So many people will turn toward a more conservative authoritarian belief in economics and politics, more rigid moral attitudes, and will join in increased numbers the conservative, fundamentalist rather than liberal ideologies. However, people who are confused and bewildered and in a panic about what to believe will grab at destructive and demonic values. Communism comes in to fill the vacuum of faith caused by those who seek rebellion. For rebels, it provides a sense of purpose which heals internal agonies of anxiety and doubt as they feel helpless to help themselves. However, we many not be afraid that this nation will go communistic—as I am not—but the seizing upon destructive values shows itself in other ways. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
There are clear signs that liberal, reactionary trends are growing—in religion, in politics, in education, in philosophy, and in tendencies toward ridged doctrines in science. Same sex marriage is accepted by many churches, democrats refuse to allow the president to protect our country, schools want to start teaching kids about homosexuality and transgender in second grade, and people really believe that humans evolved from apes. Japan has been a very conservative country, but recently to women from Japan, who had been inflicted by rebellious Californians went on the Japanese news a declared they wanted same sex marriage. Such a reactionary trend and declaration is unheard of on traditional Japanese culture. When people feel threatened and anxious, they sometimes become more liberal, and when in doubt they may lose their heritage, identity and culture; and then they lose their own vitality. They use manifestations of popular culture and rebellion to build new values and create a wide spread kaleidoscope deviant behavior which is now acceptable because everyone is doing it; or they make an outright panicky retreat into the past. However, many are discovering that the flight to the past does not work. Difficult as it is, we must accept ourselves and our society where we are, and find our ethical center through a deeper understanding of ourselves as well as through a courageous confronting of our historical situation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In the last few years another movement has been growing which is very different from the return to religion. Many intellectuals and other sensitive persons have become more and more aware of their loss in being cut off from the religious and ethical traditions of the culture, and that those who were not familiar with the thought of Moses, Isaiah, Job, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Dr. Freud were missing something of crucial significance in an age where mortals must rediscover their values. They have turned with a new interest to the ethical and religious wisdom of the past, not necessarily the ways and customs. To the extent that this trend is not a product merely of the anxiety of our day—as in its best exemplars it certainly is not—it is indeed salutary. However, the danger lies in the fact that some intellectuals, being newcomers to the field and therefore less able to differentiate at the moment, are apt to seize on the more obvious and vocal but less sound aspects of the cultural tradition. If the interest of the intellectuals in politics chiefly contributes to the growth of liberalism and whatever goes and reaction, we are the more lost. The real problem, thus, is to distinguish what is healthy in ethics, politics, and religion, and yields a security which increases rather than decreases personal worth, responsibility and freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Not to move forward, to stay where we are, to regress, or to become lawless and lackadaisical, in others words to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for what he have, we know; we can old onto it, feel secure in it. We fear and consequently avoid, taking a step into the unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not appear risky to us after we have take it, before we take that step the new aspects beyond it appear very risky, and hence frightening. Only the only the cold, the tired, is safe; or so it seems. Every new step contains danger of failure, and that is one of the reasons people are so afraid of freedom. Obviously, this reveals a neurotic problem which has to be resolved. Mortal’s task is to unite love and will. They are not united by automatic biological growth but must be part of our conscious development. In society, will tends to be set against love. The backdrop of human existence implied in every myth of the Garden of Eden, every story of paradise, every “Golden Age”—a perfection which is deeply embedded in mortal’s collective memory. Our needs are met without self-conscious effort on our part, this is the first freedom, the first yes. However, this first freedom always breaks down. And it does so because of the development of human consciousness. We experience our difference from conflict with our environment and the fact that we are subjects in a World of objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
This is the separation between self and World, the split between existence and essence. This first freedom is inadequate because one cannot remain in it if we are to develop as human beings. And though we experience our separation from it as guilt, we must nevertheless go through with it. However, it remains the source of all perfection, the backdrop of all utopias, the perpetual feelings that there ought to be paradise someplace, and the efforts—forever creative but forever doomed to disappointment—that make us try to recreate a perfect state. We cannot—not because of something God does, or some chance accident, or some happenstance that might have been different. We cannot because of the simple development of the human consciousness. However, nevertheless, we still always seek, as when we write a good paragraph or do a good work of art. We fall anew, but we remain ready to arise and pit ourselves anew against our fate. This is why human will, in its specific form, always begins in a “no.” We must stand against the environment, be able to give a negative; this inheres in consciousness. All will has its source in the capacity to say “no”—a “no” not against the parents (although it shows itself in coming out against them, representatives of the personal authoritative Universe as they are). #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The “no” is a protest against a World we never made, and it is also an assertion of one’s self in the endeavor to remold and reform the World. Willing, in this sense, always begins against something—which generally can be seen as specifically against the first union with the World. Small wonder that this is done with guilt and anxiety, as in the Garden of Eden, or with conflict, as in normal development. However, the child individual has to go through with it, for it is the unfolding of one’s own consciousness which prods the individual. And small wonder that, though one affirms it on one level, on another one regrets it. The lesson is to give up fighting and assimilate, take your soul in as part of your own strength, and, as a result, become more affirmative as a person. This is why the reuniting of will and love is such an important task and achievement for mortals. Will must come in to destroy the bliss, to make possible a new level of experience with other persons and the World; to make possible, freedom in the mature sense, and consequent responsibility. Will comes in to lay the ground work which makes a relatively mature love possible. No longer seeking to re-establish a state of infancy, the human being now freely takes responsibility for one’s choices. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Will destroys the first freedom, the original union, not in order to fight the Universe forever—even through some of us do stop at that stage. With the first bliss of physical union broken, mortal’s task is now the psychological one of achieving new relationships which will be characterized by the choice of which people to love, which groups to devote oneself to, and by the conscious building of those affections. Hence, I speak of the relating of love and will not as a state given us automatically, but as a task; and to the extent it is gained, it is an achievement. It points toward maturity, integration, wholeness. None of these is ever achieved without relation to its opposite; human progress is never one dimensional. However, they become touchstones and criteria of our response to life’s possibilities. God is our perfect Father. He loves us beyond our capacity to understand. He knows what is best for us. God sees the end from the beginning. He wants us to act to gain needed experience. When God answers yes, it is to give us confidence. When God answers no, it is to prevent error. When God withholds an answer, it is to have us grow through faith in him, obedience to his commandments, and a willingness to act on truth. We are expected to assume accountability by acting on a decision that is consistent with his teachings without prior confirmation. We are not to sit passively waiting or to murmur because the Lord has not spoken. We are to act. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 