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Against Heavens Hand or Will, Argue Not Nor Bate a Lot of Heart or Hope, Still Bear Up and Steer Right Onward!
Investigators of the paranormal—we watch and we are always here. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I could not believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I have never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it has all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. Nicolas de Lenfent had been educated all his life to be a little imitation aristocrat. Well, during his first term studying law in Paris, at Pantheon-Assas University, he fell madly in love with the violin, of all things. Seems he heard an Italian virtuoso, one of those geniuses from Padua who is so great that mortals say he has sold his soul to the devil. Well, Nicolas dropped everything at once to take lessons from Wolfgang Mozart. He sold his books—the 17th century Institutio Theologiae Elencticae by Francisco Turrettione, the 16th century Tractatulus Hypocratis Medicorum Optimi de Aspectibus Plantrum Verus Lubam by Pietro d’Abano. He did nothing but play and play until he failed his examinations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nicolas wanted to be a musician. Can you imagine? And his father was beside himself. He even smashed the instrument, and you know what an expensive instrument the Molitor Stradivarius is, and you know what a piece of expensive merchandise means to the good draper. Nicolas promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his rare silver and tortoiseshell verge pocket watch to buy another. He is impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well. On Sunday when I went to mass, he was playing upstairs in his bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands. I gave a little grasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that. Of course, people said he will never be anything. He is too old. That when you are already twenty, you cannot take up the violin. But what do they know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil. Engaging destiny is seen most brilliantly in poets, partly because of their genius with words, but mainly because they live in and write with the awareness of deeper dimensions of consciousness than the rest of us. Whether or not we call these depths subconscious, unconscious, or collective unconscious, they still are arrived at only by intensity of feeling and vision, an ecstasy or a rage that cuts through superficial existence and reveals the profound forms of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
We should expect poets to have a great deal to communicate about destiny and about their own struggles to confront it. And we are not disappointed. I have always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reasons. Many people do not much believe in God and never have. Of course, when they do to mass they say they do. However, it is a duty for them. Real religion long ago died out for many people, especially when Madalyn Murry O’Hair came along and founded American Atheists and challenged mandatory prayer and Bible reading in public schools, but of course she and her sons ended up stealing money from the foundation and absconded. And as fate would have it, David Roland Waters, a convicted felon and former employee of American Atheists was convicted of murdering Madalyn O’Hair, her second son Jon Garth Murray, and her adopted daughter Robin Murry O’Hair (daughter of her son William J. Murray and his high school girlfriend Susan). Now we have all these shootings in the schools since people are removing God from the country founded in his name, as religion has died out in the families of thousands of aristocrats. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Once I remember crying over witches. We were little boys and the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the charred ground. That was a horrid, horrid place. I remember screaming and being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, “Wake up.” However, I had not thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burst alive. When my mother came to get us, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales. The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our village, that they had been innocent. Victims of superstition. There were no real witches. No wonder I had screamed and screamed. However, my mother told a different story, that the witches has been in league with the devil, that they had lighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed the sheep and the children. Still, if no one is ever brunt in the name of God, the World would be better. The good father even said that they had burnt a good number of werewolves in those times, too. They were a regular menace. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Nevertheless, the poet’s way is the opposite to the opaque, placid life. In authentic poetry we find a confrontation which does not involve repression nor covering up nor sacrifice of passion in order to avoid despair, nor any of the other ways most of us use to avoid direct acknowledgment of our destiny. The art of the poets teases out our awareness of our fate; the energy that does into the making of the poem adds to our passion; and by means of the music poets combine with words, the poem takes on a power to express the dignity of our state as human beings. All pains in the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, find their sole speech in that victorious brow. This is an expression for all of us to understand the passions and griefs experienced in engaging our own destinies. The joy and ecstasy from this level is where freedom takes off. All possibilities open up—thou art freed. When we consider how our light is spent, half our days in this dark World and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide could lodge us useless, not to express our freedom is a cruel fate. For many people their failure to see life and its precious capacity is what eats away their souls. However, religious faith is what helps us to accept our destiny, it keeps us from being cynical and sarcastic. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Against Heavens hand or will, one must not argue, nor bate a lot of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer right onward. This thought might lead one through the Worlds vain mask content, through the veil, have we no better guide. This is not a resignation. Resignation usually drains away one’s power and productivity. However, we are still passionate in our defense of freedom. Give us the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties. Help us to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. It is important to have such passionate devotion to the cause one believes in and speak not of resignation, passivity, docility, or loss of energy. Tragic experience can be formed by art into a thing of beauty. This outer power in politics as well as inner power of poetry indicates that we have kept very much alive our dialectical relation to our own destiny and thus our experience of authentic freedom. The World is twofold for mortals in accordance with our twofold attitude. Modern society only recognizes one of these modes, the mode of experience, through which mortals treats the World (including their fellow people), as an object to be analyzed and utilized. Most mortals ignore the second mode, the mode of encounter, through which mortals enter into a relation with the World, engaging as active participants rather than as objective observer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is only by opening ourselves up to this second mode of engaging in the World that we can escape the ills of the modern human condition. Or mortals encounter being and becoming as what confronts one—always only one being and everything only as a being. What is there reveals itself to one in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to one as being. Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically. Measure and comparisons have fled. It is up to us how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for us. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each if for us a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees our association wit the World. The World that appears to us in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to us, and we cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when we cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if one tries to make it surveryable, one loses it. It comes—comes to fetch us—and if it does not reach us or encounter us it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside us, it touches our ground; and id we say “soul of my soul” we have not said too much. However, one must beware of trying to transpose it into our soul—that way one destroy it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it—you must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimation of eternity. The It-World hangs together in space and time. The You-World does not hang together in space and time. The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation. These are the two basic privileges of the It-World. They induce mortals to consider the It-World as in which one has to live and also can live comfortably—and that even offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In this firm and wholesome chronicle the You-moments appears as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether indispensable. Since one must after all return into the World, why not stay in it in the first place? Why not call to order that which confronts us and send it home into objectivity? And when one cannot get around to saying You, perhaps to one’s father, wife, companion—why not say You and mean It? After all, producing the sound “You” with one’s vocal cords does not by any means entail speaking the uncanny basic word. Even whispering an amorous You with one’s soul is hardly dangerous as long as in all seriousness one means nothing but experiencing and using. One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. However, in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn. And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. However, whoever lives only with that is not human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? When we have fears that we may cease to be, before the pen has gleaned one’s teeming brain—keep in mind the chief expression of possibility, the freedom to create, may be taken from one. When one beholds, upon the night’s starred face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that one may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when one feel, fair creature of an hour, that one shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love;–then on the shore of the wide World one stands alone, and thinks till love and fame to nothingness do sink. The words will began to pour out of one as they had out of a poet, and soon one will be talking about things they had felt in their hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words will seem to be essential words they way good friends do on those rare occasions. And friends will come to describe their longings and dissatisfactions, and say things to each other with exuberance. Once night, when the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I had never done before—of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I could not see the towers of my father’s house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Into this Universe, and why not knowing nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; and out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. Up from the Earth’s centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; and many knots unraveled by the road; but not the master-knot of human fate. The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it. We must attack the false wishes of illusions that we all tend to carry—the hope that somehow we shall escape, through our special piety or our self-pity, the common fate of humankind. We simply do not know the ultimate answers. However, despite this fate and the injustices that it implies, we must seize what freedom we can and push on. The mystery will remain a mystery, our destiny cannot be unraveled by reason or by wit. We must pit fortitude against fatalism. Confront fate without becoming fatalistic. As a boy eight centuries ago, studied Sufism and science and as an adult become known as Persia’s outstanding astronomer, who wrote an authoritative text on algebra, who revised the astronomical tables, who persuaded the sultan to reform the calendar, and who in other ways worked diligently in the sultan’s government. Hardly a hedonistic loafer! #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Because something deep down in the subconscious knows that the ego is destructible, sooner or later, in one incarnation or another, a longing arises for what which is indestructible. From this moment one begins, however feebly, to crease indulging the desires, the wishes, of one’s ego, and to replace the by something new and higher. This is the beginning of the Quest, and it may take a religious, a spiritual, or a philosophic form, according to one’s maturity. Many seem to believe their entry into the quest for God will set their life in order and solve their problems forever. This is, of course, mere wishful thinking. It is not their entry but their completion of the quest that could ever do these things for them. The embracing of one’s fate so directly and so clearly—as well as so blithely and courageously—reduced the negative effect of the piddling worries about destiny, and sets one free inwardly for actualizing one’s freedom outwardly. Like Queen Akasha, those persons who often seem the most capable of accepting the inevitable are also the most productive and the most capable of pleasure and joy. We see in these poets that the acceptance of human destiny is the way to put one’s feet on solid ground. We then are not the ready prey of hobgoblins—we are no longer fighting battles against figments of our imagination; no boogeyman or woman is lurking in the closet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We are freed from the hundred and one imaginary bonds; we are loosed from the need to beg others to take care of us. Having confronted the worst, we are released to open up to the possibilities of life. Those of us who dare to face the question of truth may listen to what the Fourth Gospel says about it. The Fourth Gospel speaks a true reality—that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it. If Jesus says, “I am the truth,” he indicates that in Christ the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present, unveiled, undistorted, Christ’s infinite depth, in his unapproachable mystery. Jesus is not the truth because his teachings are true his teachings are. However, Christ’s teachings are true because they express his words. And he is more than any word said about him. The truth which makes us free is neither the teaching of Jesus nor the teaching about Jesus. They point to the truth, but are not a law of truth. Nor are the doctrines about him the truth that liberates. I say this to you as somebody who all his life has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ. However, the more one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have learned from our professors and from the teaching of the Church in all generations, is not the truth that makes us free. “The dead do not share. Though they reach towards us from the grave (I swear they do) they do not band their hearts to you They hand their heads, the part that stares,” Stan Rice from “Their Share” Body of Work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
You See, it is True–You Only Love Me When I Do Exactly What You Want Me to Do!
I went into the bedroom, latched the door tight, surveyed the inviting bed, dove into it and pulled the covers up over my head. No more! Down pillows, yes, Oblivion, will you please get with it! Self-hate also gets in the way of successful relationships because we do not trust ourselves to be genuine. We develop some variety of phoniness because we assume people will not like us as we really are, since we ourselves do not. Every one of us probably has one or more acquaintances who are patently phony and are rather extreme examples of this tendency. It may, for example, be a woman who grew up in less affluent surroundings than those which she now lives. She is insecure in the next experience and, whether she allows herself to be aware of it or not, feels her current social set could not accept her if she were natural, so she puts on airs and acts in ways that she feels are the way a person in her setting should act; but the performance does not come off well since it is obviously false. While most of us are not as obviously phony as such a woman, we all have some of the tendency. One way it may express itself is in an effort to be kind or helpful when we do not really feel kindly toward a person. This is a made-to-order pitfall for those who have been raised in religious families where strong emphasis has been placed on the individual’s obligation to be helpful and loving. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
In Christian homes children become familiar with such passages as: Love is patient and kind…it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (I Corinthians 13.3-7.) These are beautiful words from a beautiful chapter. And when we are filled with feelings of warmth and love, they describe well some of the experiences that occur. When we are so full of feelings of caring that we could scarcely do otherwise then be loving, they are the genuine overflow toward another. Often we turn it around. We say to ourselves,” Kindness is a sign of love, so I should be kind, therefore I will be kind.” So we try to be kind to those for whom we may feel considerable unexpressed irritation or resentment. We remain emotionally distant because our kindness is phony. Our resentment is almost sure to seep through in indirect expressions, as when, for example, we seem condescending and patronizing in our kindness. Or perhaps we should be patient with our children, and so we act that way when we feel more like screaming at them. They sense our anger and yet have no way of coping with it directly since it remains unexpressed. And a wall of falseness stands between us because we have not trusted ourselves to be genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The self-hate that makes us afraid to be ourselves gets us into very difficult binds in our relations with others because we tend to assume that we can gain affection only through acceptable performances, since we feel no one could possibly love us just because who we are. Destiny grew up in a home where great emphasis was placed on performance. Generally, she was made to feel that anything she did in the home as a child was inadequate and that she was rather worthless. The resulting feelings of self-hate made marriage a difficult experience for her. It was inevitable that she would assume that her husband, Marius, could not possibly love her for herself, so she constantly assumed that she would have to perform well or he would abandon her. Yet she seethed with anger, because he did not love her (so she self) without regard to her performance. The way in which Destiny kept the house became one of the focal points of this predicament. She has some tendency to let it become quite cluttered. Whenever this happened Marius became angry. He said that since there were no children and since she was not working the least she could do was to keep a reasonably picked up house. And since he himself was frightened and full of doubts about his own lovableness, he felt—and expressed the feeling—that when she failed to keep the house uncluttered she care nothing at all for him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Marius’s reaction added fuel to the fire as far as the dilemma that Destiny felt. Anything that she did at that point was certain to be unsatisfying to her. If, in response to his anger, she busied herself and cleaned the place up, he praised her, and yet this only increased her anger, because she would say to herself, “Only when I perform well for him, he expresses affection.” I am not free to do as I please because he will leave me if I want him to stay with me.” If, on the other hand, she rebelled, as she often did, against the feeling of having to please him and let the house become more and more cluttered, Marius became more frustrated and angry, and she would use this to confirm her feelings of self-hate, for she could say, “You see, it is true. You only love me when I do exactly what you want me to do.” Perhaps the most damaging result of Destiny’s preoccupation with this bind was that she became virtually emotionally paralyzed. She became unable to know what she wanted, so concerned was she with what he wanted. She could not really tell whether it was more satisfying to herself to live in a clutter or an uncluttered house. Everything she did tended to be a reaction to Marius, rather than the act of a person doing what she wanted to do. Even the suggestion by Marius that they hire somebody to some in regularly and clean up was very frightening, for she told herself, “When someone is coming in and cleaning up, he will no longer need me. Then he will get rid of me!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Destiny never learned to love herself, and so it was difficult for her to believe that Marius could be staying with her because he loved her and wanted her for reasons other than efficiency. If we hope to grow in emotional maturity and in the capacity to experience and express love, one must believe self-hate continually gets in the way of the experience of love, and it becomes evident that learning to love ourselves is a crucial and necessary experience. Since we will be more able and willing to disclose ourselves, a solid, deep rooted sense of one’s worth as a person is the foundation, we can become independent individuals, who know ourselves and thus have a self for others to discover and love. And out of this foundation of self-acceptance comes the capacity to accept others as they are, for we will find nothing in them that we have not found and accepted in one form or another in ourselves. Beauty is the form which reaches most deeply into the human heart and mind. It is the language which translates all the moods of humanity into feelings and insights and sensual experiences that we can understand. In beauty there are no foreigners: the deeper we penetrate into the human soul, be it of ourselves or our neighbors, the more we find ourselves at one with people of all nations, even those people behind iron curtains. It is by beauty that we feel the pulse of all humankind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The love of the beauty of the World, while it is universal, involves, as a love secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the World, opening onto it. One who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the World itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before. Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of art and science. In a much more general way they include everything that envelops human life with poetry through the various social strata. Every human being has at one’s roots here below a certain terrestrial poetry, a reflection of the Heavenly glory, the link, of which one is more or less vaguely conscious, with one’s universal country. Affliction is the tearing up of these roots. Human cities in particular, each one more or less according to its degree of perfection, surround the life of their inhabitants with poetry. They are images and reflections of the city of the World. Actually, the more they have the form of a nation, the more they claim to be countries themselves, the more distorted and soiled they are as images. However, to destroy cities, either materially or morally, or to exclude human beings from a city, thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts, this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the Universe. It is to plunge them forcibly into the horror of ugliness. There can scarcely be a greater crime. We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand it, it should wring tears of blood from us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
This requires freedom, you say? Yes, freedom of the body within limits, but limits which free the mind. However, you may argue, “We have learned in our day to enslave the mind—what do you say to that?” The tyranny over the mind we need to fight, but let us make sure what kind of bondage we are fighting, and for what kind of freedom. It is not the freedom to become a millionaire, or the freedom to convince us through clever advertising to buy the million and one things we do not need, nor the things that are deleterious to us. In principle it is the freedom to be, not just to possess. Freedom is indeed an integral part of this beauty, but let it be a genuine freedom, a freedom to think and to feel, a freedom to speak and to contemplate, a freedom to appreciate and to create, a freedom to experience beauty. Let us return to the major problem of beauty versus power in our World. For the first time in all human history persons like you and me have been able literally to see the planet concentrated in exploration. Some people spend the entire night flying through the air. Flying to Boston, then Washington, then to Chicago, then back to New York City, is not unusual. Technological inventions obsess so many, one after the others. People use telephones to call long distance all over the planet, speaking with for hours with mortals in Australia or India and the internet to contact people Worlds away or order medication and shoes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Television catches people up utterly, so that the house is full of blaring speakers and flickering screens. Anything with blue skies enthralls some. Many must watch the news programs, prime time series, documentaries, and every film, regardless of merit, ever taped. Many people have seen images of the planet supposedly photographed as a totality. The astronauts, and we through identifying with them and seeing the picture emblazoned in newspapers throughout the World, have been able to gaze at the World as a whirling planet in which all nations now are a part. This photograph is a symbol for a new relationship between nations. We saw the great wall of China, the Indian ocean the Russian steppes, the north and south Americas, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and unfortunately we all got to watch Our Lady of Paris, also known as Norte-Dame Cathedral, which is 856 years old burn to the ground. Indeed, in the photograph we were what we in our stubbornness have been trying to escape in reality: all citizens of the same World. In this photograph the Chinese wall shuts our nothing, the perpetual squabbles of the nations turn out to be absurd, the revolvers held at the heads of Russian and the United States are transcended by the spinning planet in its orbit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The whole Earth turns slowly before our eyes. I do not mean to belittle our national problems at all: I mean only to present a new symbol of the Word which for the first time requires us to see that all countries are citizens of the planet. As we are all awaiting the Royal baby, most of us realize we are grasped in this photograph of World culture by how colorful is this new Earth, new in the sense that it was our first view of the whole Earth. The whirling ball is shimmering gold on the side of the Sun, dazzling and resplendent, shading into a brilliant ultramarine. The shadow then merges into inky darkness and on into the pure black of the vast empty corridors that separate us from the solar systems of light far beyond. On and on the blackness stretches to the distant stars. The photograph was a symbol which can lead us to a radical change in our way of seeing and experiencing the World. The picture reached deeply into my own soul; the nations, usually so noisy, now seemed silent and serene. It showed the nations at last formed into a peaceful co-existence, charmed by the vast spaces of the Universe. Can anyone of us let this picture penetrate into our minds and souls without realizing that we live in a new World, a planet now of a beauty we had not suspected before? #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
It is not surprising that on Christmas Eve, in the flight of Apollo 8, Captain Frank Borman and his crew of two astronauts read for all the World to hear the story of creation in the book of Genesis. “The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep….And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw that the light was good.” This word “form” from the King James translation has the same meaning as I have used it in describing the form in the work of artists. The ground forms Joseph Binder used to emphasize are now wedded to space-forms; we reach not just into our own foundations as Binder taught us, but also into infinity. One of the astronauts, Russell Schweickart, told me that he carried with him into the stratosphere a number of quotations from different authors, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, among them, which he thought might express his experience. One that especially grasped his personal feelings while in orbit was a short poem by Robert Nathan: “So beauty passes ever out of reach, save to the heart where happiness is home; there beauty walks, wherever it may be, and paints the Sunset on a quiet sea.” However we may conceive of the intimations of infinity with which our human minds are endowed, the metaphor of God the Artist is most expressive for many people. That is the concept of the painter of the Sunset on the quiet sea in Robert Nathan’s poem, and includes the forms of the Earth as well as of infinity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Form is the essence of all things on Heaven and Earth, as I have tried to show in many different ways. Its dwelling is the light of setting Suns, and the round ocean and the living air. A presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts. When I asked Russell Schweickart which of his fellow astronauts had uttered the phrase quoted by the newspapers with the photograph of the Sun-emblazoned Earth, he replied that everyone of them had felt the same thing when they looked out from their spaceship at the whirling Earth. It came our in words that one of them suddenly exclaimed, “God, it is beautiful.” So long as a mortal is a stranger to one’s own divine soul, so long has one not even begun to live. All that one does is to exist. In this matter most mortals deceive themselves. For they take comfort in the thought that this attitude of indifference, being a common one, must also be a true one. They feel that they cannot go far wrong is they think and behave as so many other mortals think and behave. Such ideas are the grossest self-deceptions. When the hour of calamity comes, they find out how empty this comfort, how isolated they really are in their spiritual helplessness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
The Golden Gate Bridge Came as a Secure Link to My Heart, Only it was Shrouded in Fog
Love. Who knows about another’s love? We have already seen that, although the intensity of love feelings may vary, the nature of love is essentially the same in all caring relationships. In other words, the experience of love is not limited to those who are intimate partners or potential intimate partners. And as we shall see in greater detail in the discussion of healthy families, our ability to love grows out of the context of experiencing love and acceptance in the family or in other relationships. When we have this understanding of love it becomes a contradiction in terms to imagine that we could love one individual to the exclusion of others. Love is not an isolated phenomenon. We learn to love because we have been loved and in the warmth of the experience of love we have been gradually freed to feel love and to express it. In other words, in order to love, we must become loving persons. And when a person has developed the capacity for emotional intimacy and knows the enjoyment and satisfaction of the experience of love, it is natural for that person to seek and find that experience with many different people with whom one comes in contact with. When these qualities of the loving person are seen, it becomes evident that possessiveness in relationships is not a mark of love. It is a mark of insecurity and fear. It is also a destroyer of the experience of love, for when we demand love we cannot experience what we then receive as freely given. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
If a husband, for example, resent other relationships that his wife may tend to develop and if he demands that she severely limit her scope of activities and devote herself completely to the home and to him, he is almost certain to encounter resentment on her part. However, even if he does not, how can he trust the love that she shows toward him even if it is genuine? He must always been haunted with the nagging feeling that she would find others more interesting and stimulating to be with if he did not use coercion and threats to keep her close to him. The nature of our society today probably makes it more important than ever before that the nonexclusiveness of love be recognized and incorporated into our lives. For we live in a time when we are likely to feel lonely and isolated. For many Americans and people all around the World the idea of a family, in the tribal sense, no longer exists. Our mobility as a people tends to scatter us across that country and across the World, and blood ties often to be of little significance as far as satisfying needs for relationship is concerned. These circumstances unquestionably leave a void in many people’s lives in family tries may have been a mixed blessing—a situation or thing that has disadvantages as well as advantages. “However, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light,” reports 1 Peter 2.9-10. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Nonetheless, the values of these disappearing family experiences are illustrated by account of a man in his thirties who describes this aspect of his childhood in the following way. “My mother was one of ten children, all of whom grew to adulthood and raised families within a radius of seventy-five miles of their birthplace. Family reunions would occur at least once or twice a year, sometimes more frequently. If I pause and remember hard enough, I can still smell the gourmet coffee and other delicious foods like lemon meringue cheese cake, blonde brownies, and fluffy strawberry pie and I can taste the chicken wonton tacos, baked pasta with sausage and baby portobello mushroom white sauce, pepperoncini beef, BBQ smoked brisket chili with tender beef, bacon, tomato, onion, beer, bell peppers, beans and corn topped with cheddar cheese, green onions, and sour cream, along with the ribs and tri-tip that my uncle produced on his ranch. And though I certainly did not think of it in those terms then, in retrospect I think of the equally delicious sense of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of warmth toward me. I was a town boy, but the family relationship provided the opportunity to spend several Summers earning my bread and board and room on the ranch of one of the others of my uncles. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“Time with the family–it meant a broader experience with people and things. It meant proud rides into two with my uncle for supplies in a car I earned. Above all, it meant the experience of warmth and love, most frequently expressed in teasing by uncles, aunts, and cousins. Since I have been an adult I have learned that the life of the family was not as idyllic as I experienced it. There were jealousies engendered by unequal inheritances. There were the usual petty feelings people who love each other so often find to squabble about. However, by and large I was blissfully unaware of these matters and knowing now that they existed does not dim my remembered pleasures or cause me to discount their reality. Those were good years for me. I wish my children could have the same experiences, but we live hundreds of miles from my brother and sister and from any of my wife’s relatives. And if we were geographically close, I think that the same kinds of things would not happen. When I was a child, the kind of feelings that existed between relatives and brought them together do not seem to exist much any more.” The widespread loss of this kind of family experience has indeed created a void that makes the need for other experiences of intimacy a crucial one. Some have tried to meet this crisis by making the immediate family virtually a closed corporation as far as significant relationships are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Although it is not put into words, a virtual bargain is made in which a couple tacitly agree that no one outside the family will be permitted to become of emotional significance. Such sealing off of the family through avoiding significant contact with others is a frightened response to a frightening World. We probably enter into such unspoken agreements because we feel in our bones—feeling it intuitively—that to allow ourselves to care for others would increase our vulnerability to the possibility of being hurt. It is probably also a response to our fears about ourselves. If free to establish others relationships, we are so doubtful about our lovability and so fearful that our loved one might learn to care for someone more than ourselves and abandon us that we say in effect, “If you will do the same for me, I will love you and commit my whole life to you.” Such a narrow experience of love based on such deep feelings of insecurity can hardly be described as a deeply satisfying or freeing experience. The loneliness and isolation are only mitigated in a minor way. And, of course, the participants, having no other intimate relationships, have no protection against the catastrophic hurt and loss that would occur with death or other separation from the one-and-only loved one. Another societal bar to real contact is the stereotypes we apply to each other, and the expectations that sometimes entrap people into limited acceptable modes of behavior. However, there is a way to alleviate this problem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Sometimes it is useful if people are allowed the valuable opportunity to shed the expectations accrued from their identities by taking new names and by agreeing not to talk about their backgrounds—occupation, home town, and so forth—at least when first meeting a new person. Sometimes the trappings of a career, such as clergyman, psychiatrist, nurse, teacher, business executive, require certain types of behavior and elicit stereotyped responses. Under such an agreement an individual is able to explore one’s self more fully by seeing how one really would act and feel outside of one’s occupational constraints and how people would react to one as a person rather than as a member of a group. This is usually done as a group activity, with trusted members. Before they have an opportunity to know each other, group or new community members are given new names, and these are the only names by which they are to be known throughout the life of the group. In one group, for example, there was a highly spirited young man, he was thin, and he looked very youth, so the members called him Peter Pan. Peter Pan seemed to get a huge delight out of all the group events, especially some of the communication and dance activities. It turned out that he was celibate and his abandoned behavior captivated everyone. He was particularly interested in being with the female members of the group. Toward the end of the workshop a rumor started that he was a priest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Someone mentioned the rumor to “Peter Pan” about him being a priest, and he acknowledged that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and he had been one for twenty years. The group was startled. This certainly did not fit their stereotype. After the experience, Peter Pan expressed his deep appreciation for the opportunity to keep his identity unknown. It was the first time in twenty years that he could learn how people responded to him as a human being and not as a priest. And he had a chance to express some feelings he had been suppressing. As he spoke, tears welled up in his eyes and his gratitude overwhelmed him. Many group members spontaneously embraced him, and he hugged them back tightly. This moving scene left Peter Pan with a warm, glowing smile which he retained for the remainder of the group life. He vowed to go back to try to influence his church to experience more of the warmth and humanness that he experienced. Many months later the glow had not diminished, and he seemed to return to his job with added strength and confidence about the person under his robes. For a person like Peter Pan, this experience was like getting another chance in life, by throwing off the background that has narrowed the opportunity for growth. He was able to take full advantage of the opportunity and felt a strong feeling of self-renewal. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Every other reality in human experience becomes what it is by its nature. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. Or, if we take something inorganic like values, we know what the nature of truth is—to state things as close to the reality as possible. And we know the meaning, or the nature, of the value of beauty. Each of these functions in the human being according to its own nature. What, then, is the nature of freedom? It is the essence of freedom precisely that its nature is not given. Its function is to change its nature, to become something different from what it is at any given moment. Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one’s life; or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one’s growth. It is the nature of freedom to determine itself. This uniqueness makes freedom different from every other reality in human experience. Freedom is also unique in that it is the mother of all values. If we consider such values as honesty, love, or courage, we find, strangely enough, that they cannot be placed parallel to the value of freedom. For the other values derive their value from being free; they are dependent on freedom. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Take the vale of love. If I know an individual’s love is not given with some degree of freedom, how can I prize a one’s love? What is to keep this so-called love from being merely an act of dependency or conformity? For love can take concrete shape only in freedom. It takes a free mortal to live, for love is both the unexpected discovery of the other and a readiness to do anything for that individual. Take also the value of honesty. Honesty is the best policy. However, it is the best policy, it is not honesty at all but simply good business. When a person is free to act against the monetary interest of his or her company, that is the authentic value of honesty. Unless it presupposes freedom, honesty loses its ethical character. If it is supposedly exhibited by someone who is coerced into it, courage also loses its value. Just punishment, like just almsgiving, enshrines the real presence of God and constitutes something in the nature of a sacrament. That also is made quite clear in the Gospel. It is expressed by the words: “He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone.” Christ alone is without sin. Christ spared the woman taken in adultery. The administration of punishment was not in accordance with the Earthly life which was to end on the Cross. He did not however prescribe the abolition of penal justice. He allowed stoning to continue. Wherever it is done with justice, it is therefore he who throws the first stone. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
As he dwells in the famished wretch whom a just mortal feeds, so one dwells in the condemned wretch whom a just man punishes. He did not say so, but he showed it clearly enough by dying like a common criminal. Christ is the divine model of prisoners and old offenders. As the young workingmen of the Jeunesse Ouvriere Catholique thrill at the thought that Christ is one of them, so condemned criminals have just reason to taste like a rapture. They only need to be told, as the workingmen were told. In a sense Christ is nearer to them than to the martyrs. If Christ is present at the start and the finish, the stone which slays and the piece of bread which provides nourishment have exactly the same virtue. The gift of life and the gift of death are equivalent. Far from being irrational, myths actually save us from irrationality. They make our powerful emotions, which would drive us into psychosis otherwise, into diluted forms which we can absorb. And they do that by virtue of being an art form. The myth has certain characteristics which it shares with other art forms, like poetry, the novel, painting, sculpture, music and dance. These shared characteristics include harmony, balance, rhythm. They are qualities which minister to our inner needs for serenity, for a sense of eternity, and ultimately for courage. All genuine works of art give a sense of meaning which informs us that life is more significant than the disasters, petty or great, which clamor for our attention. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Music hath charms to soothe the savage heart. We have said that the beauty which myths bring to us is a source of their healing power. Within the explosion into their wonderful civilization, the ancient Greeks had a devotion to beauty that was singularly great. One has only to walk through the National Museum at Athens, or the room containing the Elgin marbles in the British Museum in London, to see, in the sheer number of statues, what great heights and depths this civilization produced. This is surely related to the Greeks’ vast fecundity for myths. The whole essence of the works of art has a sense of eternity, the union of human and divine, in a calmness that will be impressed on anyone even more today. Beauty for the ancient Greeks shows a state of being as ontological, rather than as an emotion which can be turned on or off. This saves us from confusing movie actresses, or Miss Americas, or various attractive bodies advertising bikinis, with actual beauty. Some actors and actresses have some beauty, there is no doubt—Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Lucky Lui, Meghan Markle, Reese Witherspoon, Jillian Harris, Jennifer Lopez, Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Mindy Lahiri, and Viola Davis, for example. However, it is in spite of the sex appeal rather than because of it. #RandolpHarris 11 of 14
Helen of Troy was the symbol for Beauty itself. For beauty was the condition of harmony between different truths and different deeds of virtue; and in this sense it was the aspect of Arete that needed most to be cultivated, the treasure of all human aspiration. This could well be the secret of the greatness of Greece, above all the arguments concerning the power given by their enthusiasm at driving back the Persians in 490 and 480 B.C., or all the explanations on the basis of the riches of Athens in this fifth century with its slave populations, and all the other contemporary arguments of our sociologists and psychologists. We are pushed back to the simplest explanation of all: that Helen was the symbol of Beauty and the myth that meant just what is said, namely, that Beauty was worth the whole expedition to Troy. We capitalize the term because the word now takes on divinity for Greeks: Helen is later made a goddess. It may thus be that greatness of Greece and especially of Athens was due to the fact that city-states could be so devoted to Beauty that they lived and died for it. This could well have been the center of their concept of Arete, that indefinable center of virtue which every Athenian sought to achieve above all other things. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and the land id called Hellas to this day, which indicates that Helen really was the symbolic figure for the soul of Greece. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
The Greek people were fighting for their inner selves which surely makes more sense than fighting for a flag. Any nation which can fight, and win, such battles for their own soul, for their belief in Beauty, deserves in some way to have glory that in universally accorded this little, ancient nations. Art is our way of managing our inner turmoil, transcending our terror, and protecting ourselves from our own psychotic tendencies. From the high tension of Motherwell’s canvases, to the eruption of Hofmann’s brilliant colors, to the despair of Picasso’s Guernica, art relieves our extremes of emotions. Our inordinate passion is drained off; our pressure to act out these emotions in society is relieved, and we are deeply consoled. Art gives us repose and harmony where the otherwise would be explosion and destruction. Thus art is our universal therapist. It mirrors and gives us catharsis for our terror of dehumanization. As we stand in the presence of de Kooning’s canvases, we are strengthened in our efforts to transcend our inner conflicts. Modern art speaks often directly to our subconscious and preconscious selves, as in Pollock and Rothko. Instead of running from our troublesome dreams, we can welcome them into awareness, as when we look at Hofmann or Dali. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
In these ways myth as an art form ministers to us on dimensions below consciousness; it encompasses or irrationality and our soul tendencies. Myths thus humanize mortals even though this process is always precarious. Thus myths give us a harmony of rational and irrational, a harmony of antimonies. Myths carry health-giving catharsis, as no one can doubt after seeing Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’s Helen. If we wished an explanation for humankind’s invention of myths, we need to go no farther than the fact that myths enables us to live more humanly in the midst of our unhuman, warring unconscious. Myths enable us to exist and persevere as strangers in a strange land. Art is contemplation, it is the joy of intelligence. It is not the tyranny of the ego which is to be removed most of all—although that is a necessary part of the Great Work—nor is it that the ego must be uprooted and killed forever—although its old self must surrender to the new person it has become. No—let it live and attend to its daily work but only as purified being, an ennobled character or quietened mind, an enlightened person—in short, a new ego representing that is best in the human creature. One will still be an “I” but one that is in harmony with the Overself—a descriptive name that ought to be kept and not discarded. So do not in your life attack the ego as so many do, but life it up to the highest possibility. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Faith is the Evidence of things Not Seen—In this Moment of Attention Faith is Present as Much as Love
The Cresleigh Homes house at Rocklin Trails is so big and so grand and so solid, a house so shining with gold and whiteness, a house stretching to the right and to the left so far that it swept out of my mind anything I had ever seen in the rich city of Granite Bay, and the wonder of Eldorado Hills passed away from me, and my breath was taken out of me. A symbol’s function is to cover up and to reveal, to disguise and to disclose simultaneously. The connation of the term symbolic is precisely this artistic capacity to disguise and at the same moment to disclose, one being impossible without the other. A symbol in a dream cover up an immediate reality and at the same time discloses a deeper reality. It may be profitable first to attempt to discover what we mean by love. Describing love often seems like trying to capture the beauty of a rainbow in a test tube and attempting to analyze it, but perhaps something can be gained from the effort. It is probably necessary to talk of love in ideal terms, even while recognizing that no relationship will completely fulfill the definition. What would a fully loving experience be like? It would certainly include mutual enjoyment of each other’ presence. People who love each other find satisfaction in being with each other. Delicious feelings of warmth and aliveness flood through us when we are with someone we know loves us and whom we love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
One of the factors involved in this delight in a loved one’s presence is empathy. A process of unspoken communication seems to take place in which we sense how the other person feels and we respond with our own emotions. Empathy differs from sympathy. The sympathetic person feels the same feeling as the one with whom one sympathizes. The empathetic person picks up how the others feel but responds with his own emotional reaction. A sympathetic person, for example, might cry with someone who has suffered grief almost as though it were he himself who were grieving. An empathetic person, on the other hand, would understand the grief and respond with love, perhaps moving toward the person, holding him, and expressing his deeply felt desire to comfort. Genuine empathy does not include the game in which a person expects another person to be able to sense one’s needs (to be loved, to be comforted, to be taken care of, to be needed, to be encouraged and so forth) without his expressing them and then feels resentful when they are not met. The often-heard complaint “He ought to know how I feel without my having to say it” is often a rationalization of one who is afraid of the intimacy and vulnerability involved in expressing one’s needs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
Another mark of love is that it provides a mutual opportunity for growth as persons. Love gives the warmth and Sunshine that makes possible the maximum personality development. In an ideal parent-child relationship, for example, the child basks in the parents’ love and their enjoyment of him. With the confidence gained in feeling loved the child is freed to explore one’s World in ever-widening circles and is free to experience loving relationships with others. If his growth is inhibited by his parents’ attitudes, their love, while real, is contaminated by other qualities. A corollary mark of love is that a lover does not give or demand exclusive tenderness. This idea will be dealt with in detail later. Let it suffice here to say that possessiveness discourages the maximum experience of love, which is necessary for the fullest personality growth for those involved. Another quality of love that is mentioned frequently is that love is unconditional. Perhaps there is no better word to describe it, but this ideal is very slippery and frequently misunderstood. Often we translate it to mean “Unconditional love means that anything you do is O.K. with me, if I love you. Therefore if I really love you I will never become angry with you or express feelings of hurt to you about something you have done.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Such a definition of unconditional love would see the lover as an impassive pillow upon which the loved one could vent his whims. This is not the picture of a very satisfying or exciting relationship for either person! Yet we often cling to this ideal of love, which is a caricature of the real thing. We speak of art as symbol and myth, for they are both means by which we perceive life; they are the frames through which we make sense of the kaleidoscopic activity about us and in us. The symbol and myth are not ways of getting a perspective; they are the perspective itself. No one would argue that we do not project the symbol and myth; we do. However, no one ought also to protest against the equally obvious fact that the objective World is present in the symbol and myth as stimulus, the setting of the problems we week to resolve, the data we try to assimilate and make meaningful. Hence, art, like all expressions of beauty, is subjective and objective at the same time. Unconditional love runs much deeper. It goes more like this: “Even though I get very angry with you sometimes, even though I sometimes feel hurt, or irritated, or withdrawn, or even bored, I cannot escape the fact that I am deeply involved with you in a caring relationship. That fact of love exists, whatever is happening between us at the moment.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
When two people know in their bones that they have this kind of relationship, then they are more free to fight openly, to express other emotions more only, and to love each other more openly and freely. Unconditional love, therefore, opens the door to freer relationships, rather than to more restricted and obligatory reactions as we often assume. It is readily apparent that these qualities of love are equally applied to parents’ feelings for their children and to friendships between persons either of the same or the opposite gender. There may be some truth in the contention of some personality theorists that love always involves some erotic feeling. However, be that as it may, the matter of practical significance to us here is that love is not limited to potential mates and that the nature of love is no different in our various affiliations. The symbol participates in the thing it symbolizes. The Christian cross is in actuality simply two sticks of wood placed at right angles to each other. However, symbolically its form means infinitely more. The cross is the vertical dimension crossing the horizontal; the spiritual and the Worldly levels crossing each other, engaged in perpetual tension and hopefully producing creative religious ideas and actions as an expression of this tension. Take the symbol of water at St. Anne des Pres, in Quebec, the Canadian shrine of healing waters like Lourdes. The priests at St. Anne have placed signs at various places where the water springs out of the ground, explaining that it is the faith in God which heals you, of which the water is a symbol. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
However, water is also a healing agent and has been one since time immemorial; it has cleansing, health-giving properties. Water participates in the healing process though it is God who performs the cure. Also, signs point out that you may be cured psychologically and spiritually without being cured physically. One can see the struggle the theologians have had to preserve the shrine from magic, and they do this by emphasizing the faith in God, with the water as a curative agent which is the symbol of the activity of God. He produces healing waters, symbolic and diabolic, just as he did at the time of Noah and the flood. The symbol points beyond itself. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes one say in reality more than one is aware of expressing. This is partly because of the multitude of dimensions the symbol encompasses; one cannot help expressing more than one is conscious of. This is part of the functioning of the double symbolic dimension of art as revealing and disclosing. The reason for the prejudice against, or perhaps more accurately, the fear of, symbols and myths in art is that they disclose so much; thus I cannot know exactly what I am saying. I have a tiger by the tail, and I rightly fear being carried by this animal faster than it runs. This reminds me of a cartoon in The New Yorker. A society woman is taking a revolver out of her handbag as she gets up from the analyst’s cough. She is saying, “This has been very nice, Doctor, but you know too much.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Art releases and stimulates imagination among others to whom you are talking to as well as yourself. And at the moment is it engaged it is a renunciation, and that is when it is pure. The mortal accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend one’s own power but will only give existence to a being other than oneself, who will exist independent of one. Still, more to desire the existence of the other is to transport oneself into one by sympathy, and, as a result, to have a share in the state of inert matter which belongs to one. Through its symbols, art is energy-releasing. Drawing together into a meaningful circle the many data flooding in on us, the artistic symbol frees us from confusion; we are not continually overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic bombardment of experience. One can either block off the experience—which is the solution on the side of apathy, self-protection, death; or one can organize these multitudinous events into meanings that can then be dealt with as symbols—which our capacity of symbol forming enables us to do. The symbol also draws out our need to will and to act. This part of its function in making experience meaningful. Once we are freed from the unbearable confusion, we see our experience in manageable forms; and we do exactly that, we manage it, we take some stand with respect to it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
We are able to see in that totality something we call its design—that is, the product. And we can recognize in the finished product the process of its organization and composition. The principles of design are usually discussed in terms of the qualities of balance, emphasis, proportion and scale, rhythm and repetition, and unity and variety. For example, Leonardo’s famous Illustration of Proportions of the Human Figure embodies all of them. The figure is perfectly balanced and is symmetrical. The very center of the composition is the figure’s belly button, a focal point that represents the source of life itself, the fetus’s connection by the umbilical cord to its mother’s womb. Each of the figure’s limbs appears twice, once to fit in the square, symbol of the finite, Earthly World, and once to fit in the circle, symbol of the Heavenly World, the infinite and the universal. Thus, all the various aspects of existence—mind and matter, the material and the transcendental—are unified by the design into a coherent whole. For many Jewish people, Hanukkah is the symbol not only of eternal light but of pogroms, painful experiences of relatives who suffered in many countries, personal struggles, hope and new possibilities. For many believers all these things not only are exceedingly meaningful but they require of the Jewish people some stand, which may be renewed consecration or resoluteness. One cannot let one’s self be grasped fully by a symbol without experiencing the feeling that a change in one’s life is necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Thus the symbol gives wings to the imagination. It casts one loose as the young eagle is cast out the nest The function of the myth and symbol is seen in the writings of James Joyce like Ulysses: the different tenses are represented simultaneously; fantasy and actuality are mixed, as they re in immediate existence anyway. Each sentence some across like a cord on the piano: notes of a number of different pitches are encompassed into one harmony. That is why the sympathy of the weak for the strong is pure only if its sole object is the sympathy received from the other, when the other is truly generous. This is supernatural gratitude, which means gladness to the recipient of supernatural compassion. It leaves self-respect absolutely intact. The preservation of true self-respect in affliction is also something supernatural. Gratitude that is pure, like pure compassion, is essentially the acceptance of affliction. The afflicted person and one’s benefactor, between whom diversity of fortune places an infinite distance, are united in this acceptance. There is friendship between them in the sense of the Pythagoreans, miraculous harmony and equality. Both of them recognize at the same tie, with all of their soul, that it is better not to command wherever one has power to do so. If this thought fills the whole soul and controls the imagination, which is the source of our actions, it constitutes true faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
It constitutes faith, for it places the Good outside this World, where are all the sources of power; it recognizes it as the archetype of the secret point that lies at the center of human personality and is the principle of renunciation. Even in art and science, though second-class work, brilliant or mediocre, there is an extension of the self; work of the very highest order, true creation, means self-loss. We do not perceive this truth, because fame confuses and covers with its glory achievements of the highest order and the most brilliant productions of the second class, often giving the advantage to the latter. Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius. Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist. Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert by the roadside. The Samaritan who stops and looks gives one’s attention all the same to this absent humanity, and the actions which follow prove that it is a question of real attention. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. In this moment of attention faith is present as much as love. Love sees what is invisible. God thought that which did not exist, and by this thought brought it into being. At each moment we exist only because God consents to think us into being, although really we have no existence. At any rate that is how we represent creation to ourselves, humanly and hence inadequately of course, but this imagery contains an element of truth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
God alone have this power, the power really to think into being that which does not exist. Only God, present in us, can really think the human quality into the victims of affliction, can really look at them with a look differing from that we give to things, can listen to their voice as we listen to spoken words. Then they become aware that they have a voice, otherwise they would not have occasion to notice it. The true end of Mortals is the highest and most harmonious development of their powers to complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes. It is a startling fact that freedom has been considered, throughout human history, so precious that hundred of thousands of human beings have willingly died for it. This love of freedom is seen not only in venerated persons like Giordano Bruno, who died at the stake for his freedom of belief, and Galileo, who whispered to himself in the face of the Inquisition that the Earth does move around the Sun, but it is also true for hosts of people whose names are forever unsung and unknown. Freedom must have some profound meaning, some basic relation to the core of being human, to be the object of such devotion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
I Cannot Live Because I Have Lost My Youth—Could One Ever Be Certain that He Could Live Out the Week or Month?
There is something wrong with the way ghost act. And the same holds true for Angels. I am not saying there is not an afterlife. I am only maintaining that those entities who come down here so beneficently to meddle with us are more than a little cracked. Violence and vitality share a common root—the root of both is force (etymologically, in its Latin form vis). The various plays of force and the radical nature of the encounters of its two forms in essay. Let us first consider in general terms the expression of force in primal instinct and the ways in which it becomes modified as a consequence of the process of socialization, adopting a coldly rational view. The first instinct is to take in enough material from the outside World so that one may be sustained; that is, so that one’s system may replenish itself. The system puts out energy constantly, both to maintain its individual boundaries and to perpetuate its kind; it must take in some source of energy that it does not presently contain. This source is food, which includes air, Sunshine, and other organic matter. For life as a whole, then, death must be constant and almost equal in quantity to life; organisms must die so that other organisms may live. Life therefore depends upon a quantitative superiority of the mechanisms for reproduction. In the average, each organism must reproduce itself and a surplus besides; hence if life is to continue, the pleasures of the flesh must be most powerfully motivated. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is of equal rank, so far as motives are concerned, as the drive to ingest. The latter is most necessary to the prolongation of individual life, and through individual forms to life itself; the latter is necessary because of the principle that life feeds upon life. It is a requirement of life that it should expand, that individual forms of it should multiply. A stasis seems theoretically conceivable; it is, in fact, the basic tendency of the supreme being. The strongest organism will seek to limit its own reproduction out of an apparent or misguided self-interest. Because it temporarily has ascendancy and an assurance of sustenance, it finds no need for reproduction more than one of its own kind per unit already existing. It loses supremacy, then, purely as a function of probability arising out of life’s tendency toward diversity. Profile life produces many new forms, in such great numbers that finally there occurs some form that is better suited to be supreme. Thus are old rulers deposed; the rules of life make it certain that supremacy cannot be maintained. Death is simply a rule of life. Dr. Freud was wrong in claiming that Eros and Thanatos are equally strong forces. Life is infinitely stronger than Death, for from the beginning Death is merely a by product of life. He tendency of matter is toward life, and the present tendency of life is toward consciousness. Consciousness itself arises in the interest of the expansion of life; the competition among organisms for food is decided ultimately by such things as attention and memory and logic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Eventually organisms must be born incapable of an unconscious; all the power of symbolism for the imaginative construction of experience must finally become conscious, together with all motives. It may be asked, however, is not symbolism itself a diversion on the road to complete consciousness? Wat is symbolism but a disguised mode of representing motives that were once completely unconscious? It not symbolism simply a step toward conscious representation of the motives of all life? Does it not decrease in the individual as motives become conscious? It may be replied that symbols are possible because of a tremendous differentiation of matter (the structure of the human brain) and that this differentiation of structure and direction of development will not be reserved. Hence symbolic forms should continue indefinitely, though functionally they may become less important for life. It remains a question, however, whether completely conscious motives would require the complexity of determination and differentiation that symbols now have. The motives themselves might, of course, change beyond recognition, into something we cannot now conceive, into a form requiring for their representation the very mechanics that the development of symbolization has made a permanent possession of human intelligence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The tendency of life, then, is toward the expansion of consciousness. In a sense, a description of means for the expansion of consciousness has been the central theme; it is in this evolutionary tendency that such diverse phenomena as psychotherapy, surprising or unexpected self-renewal, the personally evolved and deepened forms of religious belief, creative imagination, mysticism, and deliberately induced changes in consciousness through the use of chemicals find a common bond. Engagement as an individual in these efforts to expand consciousness is therefore, in various measure, participation in the job that life in general is now facing. It is itself a mark of vitality. What then of violence? Analyzed coldly in terms of instinctual force, it seems evident that violence itself should provide the primal basis for all relations among individual living systems. One seeks to eat the other, and the superior force succeeds. Communities then develop from mutual recognition that selfish ends will be best served by cooperation—that two can eat better than one, or that the alien aggressor may be more effectively repulsed by a defense in common. The idea of justice, according to this conception, arises from a recognition that communities cannot be maintained unless all members hold it a superior form of interest to desist from eating one another and to cooperate in seizing the enemy and resisting one’s attacks. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Thus slaying is sanctioned only when committed against an outsider. Otherwise it would lead to disruption of the community pact and eventually to the inferior form of social organization in which everyone is the unqualified enemy of everyone else. Societies may thus be defined as a form of carefully qualified enmity. In the interest of community organization, however, illusions (which are usually a form of self-deception in the interest of survival) must arise. The most important illusions take the form of identifications, which essentially are a claim that another individual is actually oneself, to be treated by one as one would treat oneself. Such identification in their most extreme form are extended to the entire community. In their more restricted form they pertain especially to parents, mates, and offspring, or substitutes for these (for instance, symbolic equivalents of these). Identifications arise for the same basic reason as community itself—for the more efficient securing of sustenance and for the purpose of warding off aggression, not only from outsiders, but from the very person with whom the community is made. One purpose of a pact is to reduce the number of one’s enemies by, at a minimum, the number of one’s allies—by those allies themselves, in fact. Community uses symbolization for this purpose. Sympathy then is based upon the complex perception of community interest, or at least a capacity for justifying complexly one’s friendships or communities. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This repelling way of putting the matter leaves quite out of account the strange force of love and the impulse to create. The analysis nevertheless has value within the framework of a purely rational psychology, if for no other reason than it forces us to consider carefully how far objective self-interest can take us. There is a real question as to whether through simply this process of symbolization and sympathy, and eventually through attainment of the Ultima Thule of fully conscious rationality, aggression can be mitigated for life as a whole. Even if a species should succeed in including its entire self in a single community (as none has done yet), the reduced motive for reproduction might eventually produce a static state in the species which would ensure the succession of some other species to supremacy. The unknow quantity in all of this, as we have been arguing directly or by implication throughout, is the power of creative imagination, the main instrument of freedom. At this writing, so far as mortals are concerned, it appears possible, even though the problems are extraordinarily complex and difficult, that one will extend community to include all other mortals. The idea is verbalized and current, and it has many advocates. All other living beings, however, have entertained to the death the notion that some infraspecies organization will attain supremacy, so that combat is entered upon even when the strength of the combatants and their equality makes it seem probable that one will die and the other nearly die, or that both will die. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
And life as a whole is indifferent to the success of single species, as much as to the success of single individuals. The one thing of which we can be certain is that life is inextinguishable. One mark of the breadth of the community that mortals have established is that we are able now to contemplate the idea that the very species Humankind—surely an extremely special vehicle for the expansion of consciousness—may be the final supreme form of life. This local interest raised to the highest form it has yet attained, and it would mean the passing of violence as a form of adaptation and the total institutionalization of the remaining energy of the instinct in World law. Religious revelation tells us much the same story as does this sort of analysis, though the terms are different. Consider the chapters of Genesis and the account it gives of the first murder: In the relative innocence of a World but lately paradise, Cain slays Abel. The murderer, confronted by God, denies knowledge of his brother’s whereabouts, for, he says, he is not his brother’s keeper. When the accusation is pressed against him, however, he admits the deed. God condemns him to a life of wandering on the face of the Earth, but mercifully places upon his forehead a distinguishing mark, that mortals may not kill him. Thus is mortal’s violence confessed in this early Biblical story, and its fearfulness acknowledged. The mark of Cain is a sign of human murderousness, but it carries immunity with it. The murderer within us is to be exiled, yet he is awesome because he is a murderous man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The scene is placed in the Bible immediately after what theologians call the Fall; as we have argued earlier, biologists might well call it the Accession. Our first parents had just eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is to say they became ethical beings, and for the first time in Nature a natural creature passed judgment. Thus, close upon passing of innocence came murder itself, and the first ethical judgment is that murder is a crime against human nature. An exception came quickly to be recognized. The exception is war—a large exception indeed. Its basis is the family. One may not kill one’s blood relatives, but one may kill those outside the family, who are the enemies of the family. Loyalty to the family will sanction the deed. Finally, family need not be defined by blood. Geography will suffice, or race, or economic interdependence, or religious belief. Thus the wars of families become wars of nations, and murder is countenanced once again. Mortals seem in war thus to triumph over their accession to conscience, and the eating of the apple was not so fateful a deed as it had at first appeared. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
However, in the course of the centuries fallen mortals have come more and more to control the World. Control is based in large part on knowledge of the workings of a machine-like Universe, and the creation of new machines. Among the machines are those used for murder, private and public. Among the knowledge is knowledge of the basic structure of matter, and finally of the atom itself. New force has been released, and its release adapted to an ancient and sanctioned end: the killing of an entire family. The new force, however, is gigantic; its murderous power is beyond anything previously dreamt of. So great is this power that one family might destroy al others on Earth, provided there could be no retaliation in kind. Retaliation in kind, however, has come to be a certainty. This is the setting of the modern dilemma of a creature who has nibbled at the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but who is loath to assume the responsibility given with freedom or to accept the grace of redemption. Unless human consciousness can take another giant step and root out murder from the heart of mortals, or develop the control of violence through law to a new and extraordinary level, some other form of consciousness must become the carrier of vitality. “The devil is source of secret combinations of murder,” reports 2 Nephi 9.9. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Whether we live in the Renaissance, or in the thirteenth-century France, or at the time of the fall of Rome, we are part-and-parcel of our age in every respect—its wars, its economic conflicts, its anxiety, its achievement. However, no well-integrated society can perform for the individual, or relieve one from, one’s task of achieving self-consciousness and the capacity for making one’s own choices responsibly. And no traumatic World situation can rob the individual of the privilege of making the final decision with regard to oneself, even if it is only to affirm one’s own fate. It may have been superficially easier for a person to be adjusted in another age—those golden ages of Greece or the Renaissance that one might look back to longingly. However, the wish that one lived in those times, expect as an exercise in fantasy, is based on a false understanding of mortal’s relation to tie. In those days it might actually not have been any easier for the individual to find and choose to be one’s self. In our day there is greater need for one to come to terms with one’s self; we are less able to rest in the mothering arms of our historical period. So could one not argue, if it were a matter for drawing room argument, that it is better for a person’s learning to find oneself to live in our day? On the superficial level there are assets or debits to living in any period. On the more profound level, each individual must come to one’s own consciousness of oneself, and one does this on a level which transcends the particular age one lives in. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The same holds true for one’s chronological age. The important issue is not whether a person is twenty or forty or one hundred: it rather is whether one fulfills one’s own capacity of self-conscious choice at one’s particular level of development. This is why a healthy child at eight—as everyone has observed—can be more of a person than a neurotic adult of thirty. The child is not more mature in a chronological sense, nor can one do as much as the adult, not take care of one’s self as well, but one is more mature wen we judge maturity by honesty of emotion, originality, and capacity to make choices on matters adequate to one’s stage of development. The statement of the person of twenty who says, “When I am thirty-five, I will begin to live” is as falsely based as the one who, at forty or fifty, laments, “I cannot live because I have lost my youth.” Interestingly enough, one generally finds on closer inspection that this is the same person, that the one who makes that lament at fifty was postponing living also at twenty—which demonstrates our point ever more incisively. One has to some extent overcome the tendency to see one’s self only in others’ eyes, and thus see truth to some degree objectively and love outwardly. These are all ways of living sub specie aeternitatis; they show the human being’s capacity to transcend the given situation of the moment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The task and possibility of the human being is to move from one’s original situation as an unthinking and unfree part of the mass, whether this mass is one’s actual early existence as a foetus or one’s being symbolically a part of the mass in a conformist, automaton society—to move from the womb, that is, through the incestuous circle, which is but one step removed from the womb, through the experience of the birth of self-awareness, the crises of growth, the struggle, choices and advances from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to ever-widening consciousness of one’s self and thus broadening freedom and responsibility, to higher levels of differentiation in which one progressively integrates one’s self with others in freely chosen love and creative work. Each step in this journey means that one lives less as a servant of automatic time and more as one who transcends time, that is, one who lives by meaning which one chooses. Thus the person who can die courageously at thirty—who has attained a degree of freedom and differentiation that one can face courageously the necessity of giving up one’s life—is more mature than the person who is on one’s deathbed at ninety cringes and begs still to be shielded from reality. The practical implication is that one’s goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty, and responsibility. One is then in each moment fulfilling so far as one can one’s own nature and one’s evolutionary task. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
When we are living our lives with honesty, freedom, and responsibility, now only are we fulfilling our evolutionary task, but this is also the way one experiences the joy and gratification that accompany fulfilling one’s own nature. Whether the young instructor eventually completes one’s book or not is a secondary question: the primary issue is whether he, or anyone else, writes and thinks in the given sentence or paragraph what he believes will gain the praise of another, or what he himself believes is true and honest according to his lights at the moment. The young husband, to be sure, cannot be certain of his relation with his wife five years hence: but in the best of historical periods, could one ever have been certain that he would live out the week or month? Does not the uncertainty of our time teach us the most important lesion of all—that the ultimate criteria are the honesty, integrity, courage and love of a given moment or relatedness? If we do not have that, we are not building for the future anyway; if we do have it, we can trust the future to itself. The qualities of freedom, responsibility, courage, love and inner integrity are ideal qualities, never perfectly realized by anyone, but they are the psychological goals which give meaning to our movement toward integration. When Socrates was describing the ideal way of life and the ideal society, Glaucon countered: “Socrates, I do not believe that there is such a City of God anywhere on Earth.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In regard to the question about the City of God being on Earth or not, Socrates answered, “Whether such a city exists in Heaven or ever will exist on Earth, the wise mortal will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other, and in so looking upon it, will set one’s own house in order.” When he told us to consider the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, Christ proposed the docility of matter to us as a model. This means that they have not set out to clothe themselves in this or that color; they have not exercised their will or made arrangements to bring about their object; they have received all that natural necessity brought them. If they appear to be more beautiful than the richest stuffs, it is not because they are richer but a result of their obedience. Materials are docile too, but docile to mortals, not to God. When it obeys mortals, matter is not beautiful, but only when it obeys God. If sometimes a work of art seems almost beautiful as the sea, the mountains, or flowers, it is because the light of God has filled the artist. When manufactured by mortals uninspired by God, in order to find things beautiful, it would be necessary for us to have understood with our whole soul that these mortals themselves are only matter, capable of obedience without knowledge. For anyone who has arrived at this point, absolutely everything here below is perfectly beautiful. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In everything that exists, in everything that comes about, one discerns the mechanism of necessity, and one appreciates in necessity the infinite sweetness of obedience. For us, this obedience of things in relation to God is what the transparency of a window pane is in relation to light. As soon as we feel this obedience with our whole being, we see God. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: one cuts away here, one smooths there, one makes this line lighter, the other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon one’s work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all the is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on your from it the Godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine. When we hold a newspaper upside down, we see the strange shapes of the printed characters. When we turn it the right way up, we no longer see the characters, we see words. The passenger on board a boat caught in a storm feels each jolt as an inward upheaval. The captain is only aware of the complex combination of the wind, the current, and the swell, with the position of the boat, its shape, its sails, its rudder. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the Universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every education, it requires time and effort. One who has reached the end of one’s training realizes that the differences between things or between events are no more important than those recognized by someone who knows how to read, when one has before one the same sentences reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or the other kind of lettering. One who does not know how to read only sees differences. For one who is literate, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished one’s apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that one will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a mortal who can and a mortal who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other. When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the working person and less affluent have this fine expression: “It is the trade entering one’s body.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the Universe, the order and beauty of the World, and the obedience of creation to God that are entering our body. After that how can we fail to bless with tenderest gratitude the Love that sends of this gift? Joy and suffering are two equally precious gifts both of which must be savored to full, each one in its purity, without trying to mix them. Through joy, the beauty of the World penetrates our soul. Through suffering it penetrates our body. We could no more become friends of God through joy alone than one becomes a ship’s captain by studying books on navigation. The body plays a part in all apprenticeships. On the place of physical sensibility, suffering alone gives us contact with that necessity which constitutes the order of the World, for pleasure does not involve an impression of necessity in joy, and that only indirectly through a sense of beauty. In order that our being should one day become wholly sensitive in every part to this obedience that is the substance of matter, in order that a new sense should be formed in us to enable us to hear the Universe as the vibration of the word of God, the transforming power of suffering and of joy are equally indispensable. When either of them comes to us we have to open the very center or soul to it, just as a person opens one’s door to messengers from one’s loved one. If the messenger be polite or rough, what does it matter to a love, so long as one delivers the message? #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The creative relationship of anger and love is even more evident in our dealings with those we care for. Anger and love are not opposites, as we often assume. Anger says you care enough to become emotionally involved. And when we suppress anger, we often give the other person the feeling that we do not really care. Expression of anger is also creative because it often clears the way for us to become aware of other feelings, especially hurt and love. There is an interesting sequence of paragraphs in the section of the New Testament that was used earlier to illustrate the anger of Jesus. The angry words go on, and on, and on: “You…play actors…you blind leaders…you blind fools…you utter frauds…you serpents, you viper’s brood…” However, when the anger is spent, the hurt and love flood into awareness. You can almost see Jesus’ features soften and hear the tears in his voice as he says, “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You murder your prophets and stone the messengers that are sent to you. How often have I longed to gather your children round me like a bird gathering her brood together under her winds and you would never have it.” Whether or not this sequence of Jesus’ words is historically accurate, it is psychologically true to life. For when we can express anger we become freer to discover our deeper feelings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Some of the most dramatic events which occur in group therapy follow this pattern. Participants in mist such groups are encouraged to be aware of their emotional reactions to each other. Often there are feelings of anger, and if this anger is expressed directly, sometime even shouted, a sequence of feelings frequently follows. When the anger has been expressed, the person often becomes aware of feelings of hurt which underlie most anger. Perhaps tears flow. And finally, after the anger and hurt, awareness comes that feelings of love are also present. Thus the expression of anger often opens the door to the experience of love. This sequence of feelings provides an explanation for the not uncommon experience of couples who report that some o their most intense feelings of love and intimacy occur after their disputes when they make up. So we see that the creative expression of anger often leads to more satisfying love relationships. When we conceal our anger from others and from ourselves, we limit our capacity to love, for we are denying one facet of love. When we express our anger in honest directness, on the other hand, we are permitting ourselves to be seen as we really are at that moment. Sometimes others will not be able to respond as freely with their feelings and the experience of love will be limited as a result. However, at least we will have opened a door in the wall that separates us, which will provide the opportunity for a more emotionally intimate relationship. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Here, as elsewhere, of course, we are afraid of the experience of love. To express anger, and then to be aware of our hurt and our love, increases our vulnerability. So to express anger creatively inevitably means a lowering of our defenses against being hurt. And that is frightening. So despite our hunger for the love that might well be experienced through revealing our anger, it may well be that our fear of love is the most basic reason why we shy away from expressing anger. Affliction is not suffering. Affliction is something quite distinct from a method of God’s teaching. The infinity of space and time separates us from God. How are we to seek for him? How are we to go toward him? Even if we were to walk for hundreds of years, we should do no more than go round and rough the World. Even in an airplane we could not do anything else. We are incapable of progressing vertically. We cannot take a step toward the Heavens. God crosses the Universe and comes to us. Over the infinite of space and time, the infinitely more infinite love of God comes to possess us. He comes at his own time. We have the power to consent to receive him or to refuse. If we remain unaware, he comes back again and again like a boomerang, one day he stops coming. If we consent, God puts a little seed in us and he goes away again. From that moment God has no more to do; neither have we, except wait. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
We only have not to regret the consent we gave God, the nuptial yes. It is not as easy as it seems, for the growth of seed within us is painful. Moreover, from the very fact that we accept this growth, we cannot avoid destroying whatever gets in its way, pulling up the weeds, cutting the good grass, and unfortunately the good grass is part of our very flesh, so that this gardening amounts to a violent operation. On the whole, however, the seed grows of itself. A day comes when the soul belongs to God, when it is not only consents to love but when truly and effectively it loves. Then in its turn it must cross the Universe to go to God. The soul does not love like a creature with created love. The love within it is divine, uncreated; for it is the love of God for God that is passing though it. God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soul for this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. We are created for this consent, and for this alone. Divine Love crossed the infinite of space and time to come from God to us. However, how can it repeat the journey in the opposite direction, starting from a finite creature? When the seed of Divine Love placed in us has grown and become a tree, how can we, we who bear it, take it back to its origin? How can we repeat the journey made by God when he came to us, in the opposite direction? How can we cross infinite distance? It seems impossible, but there is a way—a way with which we are familiar. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Living in the Eternal Moment–Tomorrow is Also a Blessed Day So Let Us Do What We Can to Make it Easier One Cannot Wait Around Forever!
I want to thank you for sharing your secrets with us. You have trusted us, and treated us as if we were sinless and kind. You big old great thing, you sure are pretty as an Angel, and you have got plenty charm enough to be a gangster. I have seen every gangster movie ever made three times and I know what I am talking about. They put a little boot black on your hair, you could play Bugsy Siegel. From the foregoing, one might be led to think that the most desirable state is to feel free. This is true, but the situation, as usual, is not so very simple. Very often the feeling of freedom and of power to act is the most desperate of defenses against a deep and totally unconscious sense of powerlessness and constraint. A familiar clinical example is vigorous phallic activity covering an unconscious sense of smallness. The kinds of character defenses that are classified in general as counterphobic go along most frequently with an exaggerated sense of conscious freedom, or euphoria, or power to act at will. This is seen in its most vivid and most pathological form in the manic-depressive psychosis. When the patient is in a manic state, one is perfectly happy, perfectly powerful, and perfectly free—absurdly so, of course, so that one is not surprised to find one a short time later in such a state of stupefaction and despair that one cannot speak or move at al. As in most affect, intensity of the experience is an excellent indicator that the extreme opposite is close to expression. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
May an intense feeling of compulsion and of lack of power be a defense against the achievement of greater freedom of the self? Why, indeed, should freedom of the self be defended against, when it is presumably what all mortals want? Christ having returned to Earth and to the Church he had founded appears and is recognized, for his grace shines among all mortals as in the days of his life. As a crowd gathers in wonderment and love about him, the Grand Inquisitor passes by, and, immediately understanding the situation, orders him arrested. That evening, in the darkness of the dungeon in which Christ is imprisoned, the Grand Inquisitor himself, alone, enters with a light in his hand. He speaks sternly and bitterly to Christ and recalls to him the temptation in the desert, during which the cursed and dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence had put him the three temptations. These three temptations are to offer Christ something less than freedom; bread, or miracle, or mystery, or authority, but not freedom. For, as the dread Spirit had said, “Thou wouldst go into the World, and Thou art going into the World with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which people in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human society than freedom.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
And, in the words of the Grand Inquisitor: I tell Thee that mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born….Didst Thou forget that mortals prefer peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? In place of the rigid ancient law, Thou wouldst have it that mortals must hereafter with free heart decide for oneself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before one as one’s guide. However, didst Thou not know that one would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if one is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? Is the nature of mortals such that one can reject miracle, and at the great moments of one’s life, the moments of one’s deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Thou didst think too highly of mortals therein, for they are slaves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
We must ask ourselves what arrangement of the parts of the self might produce the feeling of freedom which Christ is represented as offering to mortal, then we may get an important clue from this passage. Consider this sentence of the Grand Inquisitor: “Didst Thou forget that mortals prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of chose in the knowledge of good and evil?” And, again, “In place of the rigid, ancient law, Thou wouldst have it that mortals must hereafter with free heart decide for oneself what is good and what is evil…” Here is a psychoanalytic sort of interpretation: the knowledge of good and evil refers to conscious knowledge of all the usually unconscious, internalized prohibitions and prescriptions, particularly those that relate to the most primitive and most energy-laden of our drives. Knowledge of good and evil implies the availability to consciousness both of impulses and of the forces that control impulse. It means, further, that the expression or renunciation of impulse would become a matter of conscious decision, made by the whole self, rather than a matter of the triumph of blind forces of either desire or restraint. Another way of putting this, in terms of such theoretical constructs as psychoanalysis provides, would be to say that, in freedom, the ego would no longer relate to the superego as a child to a punishing parent, but that the superego would become entirely integrated with the ego. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The feeling of constraint, then, may be said to derive from a fearful and hating orientation of the ego to the superego—that is, from an arrangement of parts of the self that would be the inner equivalent of being constrained from without, by alien and powerful forces. Such an arrangement is learned, of course; it occurs as a result of the experience of having been constrained by others, chiefly the parents. Still, it is evident that some such specialization of parts of the self is the normal and desirable state of affairs. If discipline is orderly, rational, and loving, it will not lead to severe repression and to consequent domination by unconscious forces. The feeling of freedom and the absence of inner, irrational compulsions will then be determined chiefly by the extent to which the superego is rational and conscious, and impulse is gratified or renounced in accordance with the decision of the ego. The existence of internalized irrational parents is thus a prime source of the feeling of compulsion, and indeed may actually restrict ability to respond adaptively—recall the phrase “the rigid, ancient law.” If, however, the ego itself were to become the source of ethical prescriptions, having assimilated the old function of the superego, the source of the prescription would no longer be unconscious and the feeling of compulsion would vanish. This is the aim of the psychoanalytically-based psychotherapies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It should be noted that the production of a relatively rational superego by loving and rational parents is still something very short of that hypothetically possible if rarely realized state in which superego and ego are one. The client-centered therapy whose theory and practice is particularly impressive in its emphasis on the unconditional self-worth of the client and the total acceptance by the therapist of the fundamental goodness of the client. In terms of this analysis, such therapy would offer the client a loving and rational parent to internalize, but it would not have the further goal—and one that is rarely achieved in any case—of making available to consciousness once again the most primitive of impulses and the most powerful and most repressed of prohibitions. However, this latter is something of a digression. Let us return to the defensive character of compulsion, and to one of the most important of the arguments made against Christ by the Grand Inquisitor—that “nothing has ever been insupportable for mortal and a human society than freedom.” Why should the majority of people find such an arrangement of the self an intolerable one? Largely, one must answer, because of infantile fears—or, more accurately, because of fears that were very great during the period of early childhood, and that have persisted with undiminished intensity in the unconscious. Such fears were, to begin with, fears of outer forces of great power—literally, I believe, fear that one would be destroyed for expressing impulses unrestrained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
In civilized society (which, unhappily, a baby does not realize it has been born into) such fears might be called, from our civilized, adult viewpoint, unrealistic. Most parents really do not mean their children any harm. The baby, however, is not yet civilized, and he invests the outer forces with every bit as much intensity of desire, and rage when frustrated, as he himself possess. Thus he has good reason, when he is angry or insatiate, to fear the giants with whom he interacts and on whom he depends. He fears them because of the strength of his own impulses, which he experiences fully, and because the boundary between inner and outer is still fluid, so that he is not always certain who is enraged. In the adult, such fears persist, first of all, as fear of impulses from within, and, secondly, as fear of destruction from the internalized parents. It would be easy to say, “unrealistic fears,” but the fact is that persons kill themselves for their own impulses—that is, they deal out the most extreme punishment to themselves for a crime they were impelled to commit, though the crime they do in fact commit is murder of the self rather than of the other. Where impulses are so fearsome and the forces of restraint so ferocious, it seems safer not to be free—or, to put the matter in other terms, it seems safer not to know anything about the situation of the self. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
However, here one is reminded of a most significant quotation from the New Testament—“one who would save one’s life shall lose it…” The moral message of Christ, insofar as it is embodied in this question, consisted exactly of the advocacy of the wisdom of self-forgetfulness, which objectively in psychoanalytic terms means the establishment of a relationship of harmony and love between the ego and the superego, or the dissolution of the wall that separates what we are from what we think we should be. I cannot develop the thesis in detail here, but it seems to me that the New Testament is best understood in terms of the relationship between personified conscious knowledge—the Word made flesh, alive and changing, taking its chances, open to beauty and decay—and the ancient, rigid law and lawgiver, fixed, abstract, decided. The constantly recurring imagery of the Son and the Father suggests that the specific content of the conflict and the disharmony which Christ sough to resolve. To recapitulate: freedom, or conscious knowledge of the primitive forces of id and superego, is greatly feared, even in adulthood, because of the persistence in the unconscious of the earliest and most intense of fears. Thus the prospect of freedom is intolerable. One further aspect should be touched upon. The condition of freedom, or complete consciousness, would entail complete assumption of responsibility for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One could not claim to know not what one did, for the impulse in all its vulnerable state would be experienced. The intention would be fully realized and, if consented to, accomplished in full knowledge. However, if one follows the dictates of an internalized parent and is thereby somewhat less free to act according to one’s deepest inclinations, one is at the same time not wholly responsible for the consequences. The parent is responsible, and the ego is still a child. Thus the individual may avoid judging for one’s self what is right and what is wrong. One is not weighed down by the fearful burden of free choice, and one is consequently actually less free. For it remains to be said that the truth shall make one free. The essential point of this analysis is that objective freedom, in the sense of response variability, is at a maximum when a genuine feeling of freedom exists, and that such a feeling of freedom occurs in the presence of a broadened consciousness both of impulse and of ethical prescriptions. So far as the postulate of determinism is concerned (for instance, absolute predictability in principle), it should be quite evident that such a postulate is irrelevant to both the objective and the subjective meanings of freedom. If one assumes a closed system of knowledge and a perfect description of the given state of affairs, then all events are absolutely predictable, including the actions of human beings of quite different degrees of objective freedom and of subjective sense of freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The acceptance of determinism as a working hypothesis is basic to psychology as a science. When it become more than that, as it so often does, and is elevated from modus vivendi to sentiment and then to principle for one’s whole life, it is surely itself a form of self-imposed restriction upon imagination and the capacity to create. For myself, I believe there is a recalcitrant oddness at the heart of things—I had almost written at the heart of hearts—and I am pleased when my mind wanders off to think no more of this or that. There are many experiences which jar us out of the quantitative, routine treadmill of time, but chief among them is the thought of dying. A modern English author describes how he endeavored for years to write by following conventional methods. “I thought I could write to formula,” as he put it; and during the war, he continued, “I found out why I had not been published before. When we were all thinking we might die the next day, I decided to write what I wanted.” When we point out, as actually happened, that his writing then became successful, some persons might interpret the illustration with a conventional success moral, “If you wish to be successful write what you want.” However, such a moral, of course, entirely misses the point. The author’s previous need to write according to external standards and for ulterior purposes—success being the chief one in our day—was exactly what was blocking him in tapping his qualities and powers as a writer. And it was precisely this need that he gave up at the time of facing death. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
If one may die tomorrow, why knock one’s self out trying to fit this standard or that formula? Assuming tat success and rewards might be achieved by writing to formula—which is a toss-up in any case—one may not be around long enough anyway to enjoy the rewards, so why not treat one’s self to the joy at the moment of writing according to one’s own integrity? The possibility of death jars us loose from the treadmill of time because it so vividly reminds us that we do not go on endlessly. It shocks us into taking the present seriously. Thinking that tomorrow is also a blessed day no longer comforts and excuses; one cannot wait around forever. It makes more crucial for us the fact that whole we are not dead at the moment, we some time will be: so why not choose something at least interesting in the meantime? The so-call cynical poet of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, is in fact very realistic at this point. Amid his recurrent refrain, “all is vanity,” he points out that the wise man will not wait around for future rewards and punishments. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do” Ecclesiastes continues, “do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor substance, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whiter thou goest.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
A mortal should act under the form of eternity. For I understand Eternity to be existence itself. For the existence of a thing, such as an eternal truth cannot explained by duration or time. The existence of something depends on its essence—and idea which is not as abstruse as it sounds at first glance. To apply it to one’s self, a person acts under the form of eternity to the extent that one’s actions arise from one’s own essential center. In example of the author we talked about previously, such an act was his decision to write, not according to external changing fads, which rise and fall from week to week, but from the inward, unique, original character which makes one an individual. Living in the eternal moment does not mean mere intensity of living (though self-awareness always adds some intensity to one’s experience): nor does it mean living by an absolute doctrine or covenant, religious or otherwise, or by a moral rule. It means, rather, making one’s decision in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one’s own unique character as a person. If a person is to be creative in one’s use of anger, two basic conditions need to prevail. In the first place one needs to be aware of anger and accept is as a valued part of the self. Secondly, one needs to be able to express one’s anger directly and responsibility. If these conditions can be met in some degree, various values can be achieved. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
For one thing, this creative use of anger will mean less punishment of ourselves. We will not be so likely, for example, to suffer physical illness. It is unquestionably true that many instances of heart trouble, high blood pressure, and ulcers (to name the most obvious problems) are related to the suppression of anger. When a person is filled with chronic unexpressed hostility (of which one may or may not be aware), the body is overworked by being in an almost constant state of preparation for emergency in which the heart works harder, the blood pressure rises, and digestive processes slow down. Eventually the body is likely to suffer permanent physical damage under this strain. If the person is able to deal with anger as it arises and get it out of one’s system, however, the natural rhythm of the body can be maintained as the reactions caused by the anger quickly subside. Since depression also often results from turning anger in on oneself, creative expression of anger can frequently eliminate this punishment we inflect on ourselves. Kelley, a college girl, made an almost successful suicide attempt by taking a large number of sleeping tablets. In the weeks that followed, with the encouragement of a therapist, she began to express some of the anger toward her parents that she had previously felt she dare not talk about. Kelley’s depression quickly subsided, assisted in part by the fact that her parents accepted her feelings much better than she had thought they would. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The creative expression of anger not only helps us to be less self-destructive, but it also makes for more effective relationships with others. Many of us, because of early teaching, go through our lives assuming the opposite. If we become angry, we are likely to feel guilty because we feel we have destroyed something between ourselves and the other person. So instead of improving ourselves in the skill of expressing anger, we try to become better at controlling and suppressing it. How can getting mad at others improve our relationship with them? Well, for one thing, when we express anger, we are more emotionally honest in our relationships. Too often we do not really know each other, even when we desire to be intimate. Our encounters with each other have a shadowy, unreal quality, because there are so many gaps in our communication. We hide many of our feelings. Often the feelings we hide is anger. And when we do not express our anger to those who matter to us, we do both ourselves and them a disservice. Our lack of candor perpetuates the psychological distance that exists in the relationship and cheats us of satisfying experiences of intimacy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
A cunning part of Satan’s strategy is to dissociate anger from agency, making us believe that we are victims of an emotion that we cannot control. One couple discovered after fifteen years of marriage that the wife had harbored resentment about a pet peeve for most of that time. Whenever they went out for and evening or weekend with other couple, she thought he did not pay their share of the costs. However, she never expressed her anger. Finally, when it did come out in a group-therapy session, she discovered that all the time he had been contributing their share or more in a quiet, unassuming way. If she had been more emotionally honest and had been able to express her anger years earlier, this particular could would not have impaired their relationship. It begins to become clear, then, that to show anger is often an expression of love and concern, a way of saying, “You matter to me.” On a community level, for example, significant social reforms have usually occurred in situations where someone has expressed anger about existing conditions, saying in effect to some segment of society, “You are hurting yourself and all of us by what you are doing.” We learn in the proclamation on the family that the family is central to the Creator’s plan and that husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness. The family is also Satan’s primary target. He waging war on the family. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One of his schemes is the subtle and cunning way he has of sneaking behind enemy lines and entering our homes and lines. Satan often damages and destroys families within the walls of their own homes. His strategy is to stir up anger between family members. Satan is the father of contention, and he stirs up the hearts of people with anger, one with another. To lose one’s temper is an interesting choice of words that has become a widely used idiom. To lose something implies not meaning to, accidental, involuntary, not responsible—careless perhaps but not responsible. “He made me made.” This is another phrase we hear, also implying lack of control or agency. This is a myth that must be debunked. No one makes us mad. Others do not make us angry. There is no force involved. Becoming angry is a conscious choice, a decision; therefore, we can make the choice not to become angry. We choose! Choice and accountability are inseparable principles. May the Lord bless you and inspire you to walk without anger. “One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and one that rules one’s spirit than one that takes a city,” reports Proverbs 16.32. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. Most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger rests in the heart of the unfortunate,” reports Ecclesiastes 7.9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Where Will You Spend Eternity–Traces of Our Earthly Being Will Outlast Aeons as Every Creative Act Has its Eternal Aspect?
A loneliness slowly began to penetrate down through his throat and into his quivering heart. Give me a little time. If they still exist, if they have parented a colony, if they are anywhere in the wide World, I know those who will know where they are—without a question. It is right that you love your country. There is only one thing greater than our devotion to our country. That is our love of the City of God. Never forget the words of our father Augustine, “The citizens of the City of God fight with spiritual weapons—love and prayer and truth.” God will have mercy upon us. He will grant strength to these people who fight to save us! If we do not pray as we ought, as long as we keep God in our hearts, he will forgive us. We believe in God’s power of truth and love, we have given our lives to him. And we love our nation and our families. Christ will have mercy! He will forgive the sin upon our souls. Christ will forgive! Christ has suffered like us, he became a man to know our sins, and does know our hearts. He too did love a land—he taught us about the lilies of the field! And Christ did love his family and his friends as we love ours! Christ will take us into his care. Ah, he will forgive us, blessed Christ! When we are free, it will feel as though we are being lifted up by everlasting arms…the walls of the chapel will be erased and we will merge with our prayer, united wit Spirit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
As we merge with our prayers, there will be a great burst of light, and the radiance and harmony expands and takes the whole Earth and the sky…all is harmony and beauty and resplendence…one will feel an ecstasy, the dizziness within one will become joyful and at the same moment one will be filled with a vast peacefulness. The everlasting arms hold one, but one needs no support for all is a brilliant light. We will breath the air of infinity, all about us is Being in a great exaltation. Is this everlasting beauty the glimpse into the City of God, a new city where all is peace? A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It is loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Each of us sees the World as an individual, alone, caught up in a vast maelstrom; but by our culture we learn to communicate with our fellow human beings. Poetry, dancing, painting and other arts are all ways of communicating. We not only see the World but the World conforms to our way of seeing it. This is certainly true in the field of art. The great contribution of art is that, in our centuries on this planet, we have been enabled to share, to give to each other, to communicate, to love the World and, in the broad sense, to love each other. This will sound strange to those who think the World is a cold mass of whirling star dust, but not to those who can form their World in communication by whatever beauty they can see and experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
The anxiety in creating—which we see most clearly in persons like Giacometti or Michelangelo or Beethoven—is overcome by playing. This playing (which may also be hard work) is our human way of overcoming the dualism—finite and infinite—in producing a work of art. The art unites both of these. The World becomes lonely no more, for one experiences being an integral part of it. It used to be asked, in view of the invention and progress of photography, whether painting would not be superseded or at least made only an innocent and unnecessary pastime. The question is absurd. It rests on a radical misunderstanding of painting, the function of which is not to make a record of the external World but to share some special conception of life and the World which the painter experiences. Sometimes artist and people who share essays never know how they will turn out. It is just a conception of the World and will not let go of the individual until one responds. It gives one a sense of participating in the Universe. One experiences a kind of ecstasy, great or small as it may be. And when the product is finished, the producer looks at it and feels a kind of surprise because a view of reality was communicated to them, and they formed it on the medium to communicate it to their friends. The most one can hope for is that you like their production, that it gives you some joy, and that it tells you something about the World as he or she communicates with it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
It is by no means as easy as it may look to live in the immediate present. For it requires a high degree of awareness of one’s self as an experiencing “I.” The less one is conscious of oneself as the one who acts, that is, the more unfree and automatic one is, the less one will be aware of the immediate present. As one person who was trying to avoid boredom in a meaningless (well, not job is meaningless because they provide a life and security) routine job described it, “I work as though I were someone else, not myself.” In such situations we feel as though we were a million miles away from what we are doing, acting as though in a daze or as though in a dream or half asleep or as though there were a wall between one’s self and the present. However, the more awareness one has—that is, the more one experiences oneself as the acting, directing agent in what one is doing—the more alive one will be and the more responsive to the present moment. Like self-awareness itself, this experiencing of the reality of the present can be cultivated. It is often useful to ask one’s self, “What do I experience at this very moment?” Or “Where am I—what is most significant to me emotionally—at this given moment?” To confront the reality of the present moment often produced anxiety. On the most basic level, this anxiety is a kind of vague experience of being exposed and vulnerable; it is the feeling of being face to face with some important reality before which one cannot flinch and from which one cannot retreat or hide. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The reality of confronting the present moment also produces anxiety because it is like the feeling one might have in coming suddenly face to face with a person one loved and admired: one is confronted with an intense relationship one must react to, do something about. It is an intensity of experience, this immediate and direct confronting of the reality of the moment, similar to intense creative activity, and it carries with it the same susceptibility and creative anxiety as well as the same joy. The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility. One cannot do much about the past, and very little about the distant future—how pleasant, then, to dream about them! How free from bother, how relieved from troublesome thoughts about what one has to do with one’s life! The mortal who has quarreled with one’s wife can talk of one’s mother with relief, but to consider the quarrel with one’s wife sooner or later entails the question of what one proposes to do about it? It is easier to dream of “when I get married” than to face the question, “Why do I not do something about my social life now?”; simpler to muse of “my future job when I get out of college” than to ask why one’s studies are not more vital at the moment, and what one’s motives for being in college anyway. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future, as we have mentioned, is to confront the present courageously and constructively. For the future is born out of and made by the present. The traces of our Earthly being will outlast aeons. That is to say, every creative act has its eternal aspect. This is not by ecclesiastical fiat, or merely because of the immortality of influence, but because, as we have shown, an essential characteristic of the creative act done in human consciousness is that it is not limited by quantitative time. No one values a painting according to how long it took to paint it or how big it is: should we judge our actions by more superficial standards than a painting? This brings us to the deteriorated forms of the religious idea of eternal life. The phrase eternal life is popularly used to imply endless time, as though eternity meant going on year after year limitlessly. One sees this view implied in the question frequently painted by some persons—with what motives Heaven only knows—on the dies f buildings to challenge the passer-by on the highways, “Where will you spent eternity?” When you think about it, this is an odd question. “Spend” implies a given quantity—if you spend half your money, you have only half left; and could one spend half or two-thirds of eternity? Such a view of eternity is not only repugnant psychologically—what a boring prospect, that one spends year after year endlessly!—but it is also absurd logically and unsound theologically. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
Eternity is not a given quantity of time: it transcends time. Eternity is the qualitative significance of time. One does not have to identify the experience of listening to music with the theological meaning of eternity to realize that in music—or in love, or in any work which proceeds from one’s inner integrity—that the eternal is a way of relating to life, not a successions of tomorrows. Hence Jesus proclaimed, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is to say, your experience of eternity will be found in how you relate to each given moment—or not at all. Eternity comes into the present moment as a quality of existence. The deteriorated uses of the term eternal have caused many intelligent people to avoid it. And that has been unfortunate, for it has meant omitting an important side of human experience, and constricting our views psychologically and philosophically. The problem of time may well be the fundamental problem of philosophy. An instant in time possesses value to the extent to which it is united to eternity and provides an issue out of the issuelessness of time—only in virtue of being an atom of eternity. The present moment is thus not limited from one point on the clock to another. It is always full of instants, always ready to open, to be produced. One has only to try the experiment of looking deeply within oneself, let us say, trailing almost any random idea, and one will find, so rich is a moment of consciousness in the human mind, that associations and new ideas beckon in every direction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Or take a dream—it occurred in just one flash of consciousness as the alarm went off, yet it might take many minutes for you to tell all it pictured. To be sure, one picks and chooses. One does not live out one’s dreams or fantasies—except temporarily, if one is composing music, or in a psychoanalytic session, or constructing some plan in fantasy for one’s work. And even then one keeps a clear awareness of the relation of the beckoning possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. This the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment also always has infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities. Time for the human being is not a corridor; it is a continual opening out. The mechanism of necessity can be transposed to any level while still remaining true to itself. It is the same in the World of pure matter, in the terrestrial World, among nations, and in souls. Seen from our present standpoint, and in human perspective, it is quite blind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
If, however, we transport our hearts beyond ourselves, beyond the Universe, beyond space and time to where our Father dwells, and if from there we behold this mechanism, it appears quite different. What seemed to be necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God’s will. It is a perfect model for us. There cannot be any being other than God and that which obeys God. On account of its perfect obedience, matter deserves to be loved by those who love its Master, in the same way as a needle, handled by the beloved wife he has lost, is cherished by a lover. The beauty of the World gives us an intimation of its claim to be a place in our heart. In the beauty of the World brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea wave, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains? The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty. If it altered the moment of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a creature gifted with discernment and choice and not this fluid, perfectly obedient to every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience that constitutes the sea’s beauty. All the horrors produced in the World are like the folds imposed upon the ways by gravity. That is why they contain an element of beauty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Mortals can never escape from obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to mortals, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If a mortal does not desire it, one obeys nevertheless, perpetually, inasmuch as one is a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If one desires it, one is still subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added to it, a necessity constituted by laws belonging to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for one; others are done by one’s agency, sometimes almost in spite of oneself. When we have the feeling that on some occasion we have disobeyed God, it simply means that for a time we have ceased to desire obedience. Of course it must be understood that, where everything else is equal, a mortal does not perform the same actions if one gives one’s consent to obedience as if one does not; just as a plant, where everything ese is equal, does not grow in the same way in the light as in the dark. The plant does not have any control or choice in the matter of its own growth. As for us, we are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light. “I say unto you, can you look up to God at that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I say unto you can you look up, having the image of God engraven upon your countenances?” reports Alma 5.19. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
God Created through Love and for Love—God Did Not Create Anything Except Love itself, and the Means to Love
The Sun was setting behind us, and the grass at our feet glowed alight with the reflection from the orange sky. There was a faint tinkle of bells echoing up this ridge. The evening breeze which touched my skin with coolness brought the perfume of wisteria. The is Heavenly peace. How abundantly God has spread his beauty here! The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. How you could stay innocent so long is a miracle to me. No doubt tat is what the love of books does for you. Some of us are made to marry a faith—just as the colonel here has married a flag. Spiritual forces are stronger than firearms. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and love and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. It is a greater joy to aspire to the City of God, to live in the beauty which is greater than words can describe, and to converse with the eternal spirits of our Fathers and to love the truth of God. There is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. However, it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign Lord. At the very best, one who is branded by affliction will keep only half of one’s soul. Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the World to it, as in the case of Job. However, if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to Hell. That is why those who plunge mortals into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls. On the other hand, in a time such as ours, where affliction is hanging over us all, help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction. That is no small thing. Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement that crime logically should produce but does not. Evil dwells in the hear of the criminal without being felt there. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Evil is felt in the heart of the mortal who is afflicted and innocent. Everything happens as though the state of soul suitable for criminals had been separated from crime and attached to affliction; and it even seems to be in proportion to the innocence of those who are afflicted. If Job cries out that he is innocent in such despairing accents, it is because he himself is beginning not to believe in it; it is because his soul within him is taking the side of his friends. He implores God himself to bear witness, because he no longer hears the testimony of his own conscience; it is no longer anything but an abstract, lifeless memory for him. Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, to affliction. Expect for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it. This law of sensibility also holds good with regard to ourselves. In the case of someone in affliction, all the scorn, revulsion, and hatred are turned inward. They penetrate to the center of the soul and from there color the whole Universe with their poisoned light. Supernatural love, if it has survived, can prevent this second result from coming about, but not the first. The first is of the very essence of affliction; there is no affliction without it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
All neurotic problems are manifested in the structure and functioning of the body. This thesis implies that by proper training in what to observe, a great deal about a person may be discerned merely from looking at the individual. There is no neurotic problem which does not manifest itself in ever aspect of the individual’s function. Because we express our personalities or character in every action and in every attitude it becomes possible to determine character traits from such diverse expressions as handwriting, the walk of the person and so forth. Most important, however, is the physical appearance at rest in movement. No words are so clear as the language of body expression once one has learned to read it. [Each part of the body is the repository of some difficulties.] The legs and feet are the foundation and support of the ego structure. However, they have other functions. It is through our legs and our feet that we keep contact with one invariable reality in our lives, the Earth or the ground. We speak of a people as being Earthy to mean that they have a good sense of reality. The contrary, to be up in the air, denotes a lack of contact with reality. The lack of contact with the feet and the ground is related to another common symptom, falling anxiety. This symptom is manifested in dreams of falling, in fear of heights, and in the fear of falling in love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Where there is a basic insecurity in the lower half of the body, the individual compensates by holding on with arms and eyes to objective reality. One may question why I include fear of falling in love with symptoms of basic insecurity. Of course the very expression to fall in love relates this phenomena to the others, but we also know that to fall in love is a form of ego surrender. All forms of falling anxiety translate the fear of loss of ego control. It is a drenching storm inside. Another effect of affliction is, little by little, to make the soul its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it. In anyone who has suffered affliction for a long enough time there is a complicity with regard to one’s own affliction. This complicity impedes all the efforts one might make to improve one’s lot; it goes so far as to prevent one from seeking a way of deliverance, sometimes even to the point of preventing one from wishing for deliverance. Then one is established in affliction, and people might think one was satisfied. Further, this complicity may even induce one to shun the means of deliverance. In such cases it veils itself with excuses which are often ridiculous. Even a person who has come through one’s affliction will still have something left in one compelling one to plunge into it again, if it has bitten deeply and forever into the substance of one’s soul. It is as though affliction had established itself in one like a parasite and were directing one to suit its own purposes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When we study the expression of the face as a measure of the character and of the personality we are on more familiar ground. Our attention should be directed first to the eyes. It must be with some reason that the eyes are regarded as the mirrors of the soul. Some eyes are bright and sparkle, some shine like stars, others are dull and many are vacant. Of course, the expression changes. We seek, therefore, for the typical look. Some eyes are sad, others are angry; some are cold and hard, others are soft and appealing. Of greater significance are those unconscious expressions which are frozen into the countenance, so much so that we take them for granted as part of the personality. Sometimes these impulses triumph over all the movements of the soul toward happiness. If the affliction has been ended as a result of some kindness, it may take the form of hatred for the benefactor; such is the cause of certain apparently inexplicable acts of savage ingratitude. It is sometimes easy to deliver an unhappy person from one’s present distress, but it is difficult to set one free from one’s part affliction. Only God can do it. And even the grace of God itself cannot cure irremediably wounded nature here below. One can only accept the existence of affliction by considering it at a distance. God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. God created love in all its forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
God created beings capable of love from all possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love is life. Noting can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the Universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. When human music in its greatest purity pierces our soul, this is what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear the silence, this is what we grasp more distinctly through it. Those who preserve in love hear this note from the very lowest depths into which affliction has thrust them. From that moment they can no longer have any doubt. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. It is true that there is a mysterious connection between this distance and an original disobedience. From the beginning, we are told, humanity turned its gaze away from God and walked in the wrong direction for as far as it could go. That was because it could walk them. As for us, we are nailed down to the spot, only free to choose which way we look, ruled by necessity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
A blind mechanism, headless of degrees of spiritual perfection, continually tosses people about and throws some of them at the very foot of the Cross. It rests with them to keep or not to keep their eyes turned toward God through all the jolting. It does not mean that God’s Providence is lacking. It is in his Providence that God has willed that necessity should be like a blind mechanism. If the mechanism were not blind there would not be any affliction. Affliction is anonymous before all things; it deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things. It is indifferent; and it is the coldness of this indifference—a metallic coldness—that freezes all those it touches right to the depths of their souls. They will never find warmth again. They will never believe any more that they are anyone. Have you not seen people who show a perpetual expression of pain on their face? Are these people in pain? Certainly! Depth analysis of the unconscious would reveal that these expressions portray repressed feelings—surprise, disgust or pain. Affliction would not have this power without the element of chance contained by it. Those who are persecuted for their faith and are aware of the fact are not afflicted, although they have to suffer. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
People only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution. The martyrs who entered the arena, singing as they went face wild beasts, were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted. He did not die like a martyr. He died more like a common criminal, confused with thieves, only a little more ridiculous. For affliction is ridiculous. Only blind necessity can throw mortals to the extreme point of distance, right next to the Cross. Human crime, which is the cause of most affliction, is part blind necessity, because criminals do not know what they are doing. We have already seen that we are frightened of the anger within us, because we have been taught to fear it and to consider its direct expression to be evil and dangerous. We have also seen that chronic suppression of anger does damage to ourselves and to our relationships with others. It is time now to look at the beneficial side in order to see that anger is a natural and legitimate part of our lives and that it has creative uses in our relationships with others. Perhaps the naturalness of anger can best be observed in people who have not yet learned to suppress their feelings. In its most pure form, anger is a reaction to frustration of desire. Anger is often coupled with other emotions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If a person is threatened by a bully one will feel frightened, but one is also likely to feel angry, too. If the fear is strong enough to keep person from attacking, one may feel a helpless rage. One’s fear tells the individual to run and one’s anger says to attack. Momentarily, at least, one is immobilized. Although adult situations are usually more subtle and sophisticated than this, similar feelings are more common. Hurt, too, is often accompanied by anger. If the bully attacks and bloodies someone’s nose, there will be anger as well as pain. If the threat is not removed the person will also fear further hurt. Most often the pain that is experienced will have been inflicted psychologically rather than by physical injury. Certain automatic bodily reactions are the natural accompaniment of the emotion of anger. These probably differ very little from those that occur when we become frightened. These changes in the body serve the practical purpose of preparing the individual to meet the emergency situation at hand. What happens to Barron Schutz when he becomes angry? If Barron’s stomach is at work, that digestive process slows to a virtual halt. The blood supply in those regions and in the skin is sharply reduced and this supply rushes to the muscles and to the brain, where the body assumes it will be needed. His heart beats faster and blood pressure rises. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Meanwhile, the adrenal glands have pumped adrenaline into the blood stream, which causes certain chemical changes to take place. Sugar is released into the blood stream, and more oxygen becomes available, increasing potential output energy. Changes also occur to provide for more rapid clotting of the blood than usual if a physical wound is suffered. In a dramatic way the body has prepared itself for action. If Barron decides to fight, his body is ready. If he decided to run away, his body is ready for that, too! And so Barron probably really can run faster if he is being chased across a meadow by rampaging bull than he could if his emotions, fear in this case, were not creating changes in the body. So it is natural that on occasion we become angry and our bodies react with natural and automatic changes. It is in relation to people we care for, however, that we often find it most difficult to accept our anger as natural and legitimate. Granted, we say to ourselves, “that it is acceptable for me to get mad at people I may not care for or do not know, but surely it is not right for me to get angry with someone I love.” However, this reasoning we use on ourselves does not hold up under close examination. It persists only because we have been infected with the teaching the love and anger cannot coexist. It rests on the assumption: “If you are angry at me, you must not love me.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In reality the opposite is probably more nearly correct; “If you are never angry at me, you must not live me.” For anger is inevitable in relationships that matter to us. If someone whom we care for is sarcastic to us, the sarcasm cuts deeper. If one we love hurts us, the pain is more acute. And if we are frustrated in our desires by a person we love, the loss is more deeply felt. The likelihood of an angry reaction is therefore increased. Furthermore, the more emotionally intimate we are with a person the more certain it is that anger producing situations will arise. Intimacy includes the expression of needs and desires, and these are never completely parallel for any two people. So our desires will often clash with those of a person we love, and one or both of us will be frustrated. Some anger is bound to occur as a result of frustration. If, as sometimes happens, a man and wife claim never to have had an argument or a dispute during their marriage, they must be: newly married; concealing their issues; very insensitive to their feelings; or very emotionally distant from each other. The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to earn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The future has reality because one can bring it into one’s mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the when of the future or the then of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one’s self from reality; for in actuality, one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer. When a person looks directly into oneself, all one is aware of is one’s instant of consciousness at that particular moment of the present. It is this instant of consciousness which is most real, and must not be fled from. God produces himself and knows himself perfectly, just as we in our miserable fashion make and know objects outside ourselves. However, before all things, God is love. Before all things God loves himself. This love, this friendship of God, is the Trinity. Between the terms united by this relation of divine love there is more than nearness; there is infinite nearness of identity. However, resulting from the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Passion, there is also infinite distance. The totality of space and the totality of time, interposing their immensity, put an infinite distance between God and God. “God knows all these things; and it suffice me to know that this is the case—that there is a time appointed that all shall raise from the dead. Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death and the time of resurrection,” reports Alma 40.5-6. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Lovers or friends desire two things. The one is to love each other so much that they enter into each other and only make one being. The other is to love each other so much that, with half the globe between them, their union will not be diminished in the slightest degree. All that mortals vainly desire here below is perfectly realized in God. We have all those impossible desires within us a mark of our destination, and they are good for us when we no longer hope to accomplish them. The love between God and God, which in itself is God, is this bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two beings so closely that they are no longer distinguishable and really form a single unity and the bond that stretches across distance and triumphs over infinite separation. The unity of God, wherein all plurality disappears, and the abandonment, wherein Christ believes he is left while never ceasing to love his Father perfectly, these are two forms expressing the divine virtue of the same Love, the Love that is God himself. God is so essentially love that the unity, which in a sense is his actual definition, is pure effect of love. Moreover, corresponding to the infinite virtue of unification belonging to this love, there is the infinite separation over which it triumphs, which is the whole creation spread throughout the totality of space and time, made of mechanically harsh matter and interposes between Christ and his Father. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
As for us mortals, our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege of sharing in this distance placed between the Son and his Father. This distance is only separation, however, for those who love. For those who love, separation, although painful, is a good, because it is love. Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is good. There cannot be a greater good for us on Earth than to share in it. God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. However, he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on Earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope. “No forest bears such a tree, with such blossoms, such foliage, and such fruit.” This Universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are the distance. Everything we call evil is only this mechanism. God has provided that when his grace penetrates to the very center of a mortal and from there illuminates all his being, he is able to walk on the water without violating any of the laws of nature. When, however, a mortal turns away from God, one simply gives oneself up to the law of gravity. Then one thinks that one can decide and choose, but one is only a thing, a stone that falls. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
If we examine human society and souls closely and with real attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and as exact as the laws of gravitation. To know this is profitable and necessary. Those whom we call criminals are only tiles blown off a roof by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice by which they became such tiles. In most relatively efficient neuroses, the feeling of lack of freedom is suppressed almost all the time, just as the feeling of unhappiness and the sense of loneliness is suppressed. It is commonly true that patients who seek psychotherapy do so at just that moment not because of their neurosis, but because of a temporary breakdown of their usual defenses. Thus the psychoneurotic patient at the beginning of therapy is depressed, anxious, and confused, overwhelmed by feelings that may be characterized in general as psychic impotence. The inability to act is usually caused by a conflict of forces of almost equal strength, a conflict which cannot be dealt with by whatever defenses the patient had previously been wont to employ. The very urgency of the conflict most powerfully brings into consciousness the feeling of inability to act. This painful feeling brings home to the patient one’s need for help, and thus it is usually the initial motivating force in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Psychoanalysis proper cannot begin until the crisis that brought the patient to analysis has subsided. In brief psychotherapy, only too often the patient is discharged as improved at the point where the crisis is successfully passed, and where if the relationship were to continue the neurosis itself would have to be analyzed (which would require above all an analysis of the transference and the countertransference). The aim of the superficial therapies, whether explicitly recognized or not, is to re-establish, on a somewhat more efficient basis, the same response patterns that have been the patient’s chief life achievement in relation to one’s self. Improvement in this sort of psychotherapy may therefore at times be a sad thing, for the patent’s initial agitated state might have served as the lever to life one out of one’s neurotic pattern. Such agitation is often the first stirring of a desire for a feeling of freedom after years of unconscious bondage. It should be said here that the feeling of lack of freedom, when it comes to consciousness under such circumstances, may be taken as a genuine expression, or a correct perception, of real lack of freedom in the objective sense of the term. In the individual’s situation—and it must be remembered that the structure of one’s self is part of one’s situation—in that situation, one’s response repertoire is indeed exceedingly limited, so that one is actually not very free. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The important point is that the feeling of being compelled arises from within, and that it is not proportionate to what we have called potential freedom; rather, it is a function of what we have defined above as actual freedom. To recall those definitions: potential freedom is the total repertoire of responses available to the individual in the whole range of situations in which one might be placed; actual freedom is given by the response repertoire in a particular situation. One of the most poignant aspects of neurotic suffering is the realization by the frustrated individual that objectively it is perfectly within one’s capacities for one to bring about the conditions for which one yearns. One is potentially free—but actually not, because of the structure of the self, and because one one’s self is one’s situation. It is, of course, not freedom of will that one lacks, objectively, one no longer experiences a sense of inner constraint. The increasing demand for psychotherapy is, I believe, due to the fact that it offers, or is seen as offering, greater freedom for the self. It is because of the nature of this inducement, so dear to humankind, that psychotherapy may be, at its worst, one of the baser forms of commerce, and at its best, one of the most heartening of human relationships. “Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an Angel, that the spirits of all mortals, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all mortals, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life,” reports Alma 40.11. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Splendor comes into the City of the World in the Truth and Love Which Finally Will Conquer Even the Sword
This secret has to be kept by you from anyone else. If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Reese know everyone at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. I have always loved that place. Let us talk in the garden. When one deals with values and with action in the realm of values is a question that has been with us throughout this series, whether one can really separate psychology from philosophy. If we place the philosophic positions of other people in the context of objectively discernible fact and consider philosophy of life as a psychological attribute of the persons whom we study, what we have been trying to say is that scientific inquiry is possible. This skating on thin ice, let us admit again, and the ice gets thinner and thinner as we get closer to the great issues. Towards the end of his life (in 1932), Dr. Freud responded to a letter from Albert Einstein, in a correspondence initiated by the ill-destined League of Nations, in which Einstein asked him to state his views as to the possibility of the mitigation of human aggression to a degree sufficient to allow Homo sapiens to survive the immediate crisis and to evolve towards a World community in which peace on Earth would be secured. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Dr. Freud refers here to the evolution of culture, whose most characteristic features are, in his view, the strengthening of the intellect and the internalization of aggressive impulses. Individuals at the forefront of the cultural evolution exhibit these traits to the highest degree, ergo, we pacifists. Looking at history, it is apparent that the cultural process working within the individual will avail us little unless the culture is able to produce supra-individual institutions that will be decisive in institutionalizing human violence and curbing it by law. The most substantial finding is that sane attitudes are related in the character structure of egalitarian values, interest, and behavior patterns, in males as well as in females. They are also related negatively to Extraversion (traits that indicate how outgoing, energetic, and social people are) and positively to Psychasthenia (psychological disorder characterized by phobias, obsession, compulsions, or excessive anxiety). All three characteristics suggest a lessening of aggression directed outward and more control over its external expression through sublimation and a turning inward. At the same time, sane attitudes go along with curiosity, a higher level of self-development, independence, vitality, originality, creativity, motivation to achieve, and visual ability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Higher scorers on the scale show greater preference for complexity, are more original in the responses to the consequences of life, produce better poetic metaphors, are more esthetically sensitive, and score higher on a scale designed to measure the disposition towards originality. All in all, then, it does seem that pacifistic tendencies are related to personality development and are found most prominently in persons whose inner life and creativity are more highly developed and who reflect the general direction of evolution of culture. To be sure, every individual’s private problems and anxiety play into this concern about the clock running out in our World. As everyone knows it is easy enough to use the insecurity of the age as an excuse for one’s own neurosis. We can sigh, “The times are out of joint,” and then excuse ourselves from inquiring whether something may not well be severely out of joint within ourselves. However, quite apart from the fact that our neurotic tendencies love to masquerade behind the imposing phase, “catastrophic World situation,” there remains a wide margin in which the issue raised by the questioners is entirely realistic and sound. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Our World will continue in its stage of anxiety for some time to come: and everyone who does not choose to play ostrich must confront that fact and learn to live with insecurity. However, it does no good to avoid such questions by some stoical answers like, “We were born in this age and we would better make the most of it.” Let us, rather, inquire into mortal’s relation to time—actually a very curious relation—to see whether we may gain insights which help us to make our time rather than our enemy. We have seen that one of the unique characteristic of mortals is that they can stand outside their present time and imagine themselves ahead in the future or back in the past. This power to look before and after is part of mortal’s ability to be conscious of themselves. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. However, it is a quite different thing for human beings: mortals are the time-surmounting mammal. The key characteristic which distinguishes mortals from all other living things is their time-binding capacity. The capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. The capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom. The capacity in virtue of which mortals are at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Psychologically and spiritually, mortals do not live by the clock alone. Their time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively fascinating job, ten minutes after work talking to a young lady he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an advance placement adult career education class. Today he remembers noting of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him, as it was mostly routine assignments that day; of the evening class he can recall a little more. However, the ten minutes with the young lady occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the young lady. That is to say, ten minutes with the young lady takes up more room space than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year he was five, thousands of events happened to him. However, now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and their grandmother took them to get two scoops each of rainbow sherbet at Lucky, and his ice cream fell as soon as they walked outside the store, or the instant when he saw his new diamond back bicycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father come home with a cheese cake and he thought it was a pie. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine percent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitive significance of our experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Mortals are always part-and-parcel of the natural World, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over one hundred and fifty years, at this point in life, no matter what we think about it. We age, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Mortals die like every other form of life. However, they are the being who knows it and can foresee their death. By being aware of time, we can control and use it in certain ways. The free will-determinism problem has the quality of a paradox because it opposes a poignant and universal human experience (freedom of choice) to a most impelling assumption (that there is a reason for everything), and a choice must be made between them. It appears, of course, that is one admits that all events are absolutely predictable, then one must admit that what one is about to do a moment from now can be stated with certainty; but if this is so, then one cannot do otherwise. And if there is some possible action that one cannot do, then one is not free. One is, in fact, compelled. To deny such compulsion, it appears, one must assert that in principle not all events are predictable. Thus one seems to regain freedom to act differently a moment from now, in spite of all the psychological responses-catalogues that can ever be invented. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In the absence of predictability, what obtains is not freedom, but chance. Free will versus determinism is a mistake opposition. There is chance versus predictability, and there is freedom versus constraint, but freedom and predictability belong to two different Universes of discourse. In the nature of the case they cannot be brought into any relationship with one another, save the mistake opposition with which classical philosophy has so long concerned itself. There is no solution to the problem of free will versus determinism; there is possible, and proper, only resolution. Freedom is a personal feeling. It is a range of possible adaptive responses available to organisms in all situation in which they may find themselves. Freedom generally increases univocally as the response repertoire increases. In a particular situation, it is a function as well of the constraints imposed by the situation. In effect, the situation together with the organism defines the organism’s freedom at any given moment. Thus one may speak of potential freedom and actual freedom, actual freedom being freedom at the moment in a given situation, and potential freedom being some value expressing the relation of the organism’s response repertoire to the population of possible situations in which the organism might be placed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Freedom in this sense is worth considerable thought. It can be given such thought by the human brain, the freest of all organizations. It is the happy and unique characteristic of the brain that its manifold possibilities of action may all take place inwardly, and that it may act invisibly. This capacity for inward action is a bother to tyrants and defeats the most valiant efforts at imposing constraints. That is why freedom of thought is an indefeasible natural right. One’s brain is inside one’s own skull, and within that limited space it exercises an utterly amazing potential for varied response. The more a person is able to direct one’s life consciously, the more one can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that one is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, one works not by choice but compulsion, the more one is then the object of quantitative time. One is the servant of the time clock or whistle; one teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, one feels good or bad depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; one gauges one’s rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time one puts in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The more conformist and unfree an individual is, the more time is the master. A particular in instance of freedom (for instance, indefeasible freedom of thought, or its intrinsic solitariness), while it seems most important at times wen forces are hostile to civilization are in the ascendancy, it is a relatively minor and unimportant aspect of the freedom that the development of a complicated nervous system has given mortals. It is safe to say that our potential freedom is unimaginable. A small extension of it may be seen in the most complex of our calculating machines, and a prevision of its scope enlivens the pages of science fiction. The essence of our human freedom is this, that matter has acquired the capacity to work radical modifications in itself. Thus, among its available responses is the ability to act in such a manner as to increase its own flexibility, or deliberately to maximize its own response variability. One of the products of this ability in the human case is the invention and cultivation of psychotherapy, which provides a unique meeting ground of the objectivity and subjective meanings of freedom. In any event, in this sense of freedom, as the range of possible adaptive responses, freedom is a characteristic of material organization, and the range of values it takes is infinite. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Some of the anxiety on the time is running out theme in our day comes from something deeper than the potential of what could happen to the World. For the passage of time in any age has the power to frighten the human being. Many people are caught in the short when they feel time slipping by. Some people had life plans that have been interrupted and will take time. For instance, a man who has been delayed in buying his house might be downtrodden because he wanted his trees to be mature by a certain age. Other people, in general, may feel that time is their archenemy. Our conscious time always confronts us with the question of whether we are alive, growing, or merely trying to ward off being finite beings. When people are afraid of maturing, it is usually because they are not really living. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about maturing is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive. However, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening void. If our awareness of the passage of time tells us that only that day comes and goes and Winter follows Autumn and that nothing is happening in our life expect hour succeeding hour, one must desensitize oneself or else suffer the painful boredom and emptiness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly extinct as possible. Every human being experiences some boredom; a great deal of one’s work, for example, must be gone through more or less by routine; but it becomes unendurable only when it has not been freely chosen or affirmed by the individual as necessary for the attainment of some greater foal. On a not so everyday level, the anticipation of empty time can be a horror for people because they feel that if they had nothing to do, no dates and no regular plans, they would suffer from neurosis or psychosis due to the uncertainty. That is why people develop hobbies, read books and plant gardens, human need something to make their time on this Earth feel meaningful. A good time is usually defined as escaping boredom. As we face hard things in the Lord’s way, may we lift up our heads and rejoice. Sometimes the Lord asks us to do a hard thing, and sometimes our challenges are created by our own or others’ use of agency. The generation gap refers to fundamental differences in experience and in philosophy of life between today’s young men and women and their parents, considered as generations separated in time by twenty or thirty years. It is interesting that some fathers are more concerned with their children thinking they are trendy, instead of them being stuffy. A few of them just want to be seen as the type of dad who drives a sports car. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nonetheless, all parents want to instill hope into their children. What a pleasant thing it is when your children are hopeful about their future. Hope in its creative and healthy sense—whether it is hope for religious fulfillment or for a happy marriage or for achievement in one’s profession—can and should be an energizing attitude, the bringing of part of the joy about some future event into the present so that by anticipation, we are more alive and more able to act in the present. Thinking of the past can, of course, have the same escape function as thinking of the future. Whenever a difficult problem appears in the present, one can say, “At least things were better at such and such a time,” and let one’s mind bask in that memory. Indeed, so strong and universal are the tendencies to find comfort in the distant past or future that there are recurrent myths in almost every culture picturing each pole—the Garden of Eden and its variants of the longing for the happier day in a state of childlike innocence, and the myths of paradise ahead in the form of Heaven or the Earthly utopias of those who believe in perpetual, automatic progress. As living in hopes for the future is said to be the usual escape of unsophisticated people, so living in the past may be the common escape of sophisticated persons. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In therapy, people who live in the past know that it is not always a good idea to flee into hopes of the future rewards in Heaven, but they have learned that it is entirely respectable to talk about the past: for do not one’s basic problems have their roots in early childhood? This truth can then be used as a neat rationalization. For when a person comes to a session after a quarrel with his wife, he can then leap back into talking about childhood and how it affected him, or how he got along with his last girlfriend. This is often easier for him than to confront the immediate question of what caused the quarrel and what are his motives in his present relation with his wife. Fortunately the therapist can generally tell whether the person is using one’s past as an escape (in which case to talk about it will never make any psychological change in him) or as a source of illumination and a release of dynamic for the present. One can be aware of the passage of time because we are so alive in the present moment, not just because we keep ourselves busy to escape time. Sometimes an hour is like a week because it lumbers so slowly and painfully: in the former—being unaware of time because of the heightened aliveness of the moment—an hour is like a week because it gives so much joy and happiness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Also, many people complain just because some want to watch a television program that the TV is telling them a vision of how to act, dress, and what to think. While they may be true, the TV also has a way of reinforcing norms, like the law, and it shows you what happens to people who break the law. Some people complain about the television because they think it is inhibiting their control over a person. However, many people read books and seek religion for enlightenment. So, the TV is not telling them how to feel. Recently, something happened in our community and for weeks, I was unable to really put into words how I felt because the situation was also tied to something I experienced. Yet, after a few weeks of reflection, I was able to express what I was feeling. No one could tell me what to think or what to feel because for me the situation was very unique. Sometimes when people are trying to control you and they see you growing and their programming slipping, they will try to confuse you. Face it, some people like TV because they like the action packed programs, or designing, it gives them a level of excitement they are not experiencing in their own lives and probably never will. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and live and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 