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Peruse How Infinite I am to No One that You Know!
I paced, having just risen from my secret hiding place, and I mourned bitterly for another true believer. You bet I have got on my black velvet frock coat (close-up: tapered at the waist, brass buttons) and my motorcycle boots, and a brand-new linen shirt loaded with lace at cuffs and throat (pity the poor slob who snickers at me on account of that!), and I have not cut my shoulder-length-blond mane tonight, which I sometimes do for variety, and I have chucked my violet glasses because who cares that my eyes attract attention, and my skin’s still dramatically tanned from the raw Sun of the Gobi Desert. An American Church is having its annual business meeting. Reports of the various church organizations read in monotonous tones suggest that the meeting is occurring more because someone believes it necessary rather than because of any vital interest. Sparks of life appear briefly. A momentary flurry arises over whether the women’s donation from the proceeds of their annual bazaar should be sent to foreign missions or put in the fund for a new carpet in the sanctuary. However, this sporadic flash hardly ruffles the surface as the meeting drones on drearily. Finally, the last report ends; the congregation stirs restlessly. The moderator now also appears anxious to be done. He asks routinely if there is other business as he gathers up his papers. He looks up, surprised, when a man at the back of the room stands up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The room rustles with curiosity as the man steps to the aisle and makes his way forward. Something about him commands attention. It is not the way he is dressed. His clothes are average enough—clean and neat, but with a careless air, as though he did not give much thought to them. It is more the man himself. His determined stride speaks of strength. His face is somewhat flushed. The room is quiet by the time he reached the front and turn around. Then he begins to speak: “I am sick and tired of this church—and you people! You are miserable frauds and hypocrites! You talk fine word about loving one another, then you cut each other to pieces behind each other’s backs. You do not even have the courage to let people know to their faces how you really feel about them. It is disgusting! What miserable frauds you are! Oh, you have a beautiful building here. And you are fine-looking and well-dressed people, but your church is dead inside, and you are dead inside, full of rottenness and pretense! You ‘fine Christians’ are just about as low as you can get!” If such an event really happened, can you imagine the shock and surprise of the congregation? At the very least it would be safe to say that no one in the room would any longer be bored! Most of those present would probably be critical. Some might say, “Well, there may be some truth in what he is saying. However, why does he have to get so worked up about it? That is not going to accomplish anything!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Above all else there would probably be a reaction of fear on the part of the audience. The intensity of the man’s anger would be frightening, for we are not used to hearing such feelings so clearly expressed, particularly in this setting. And there would be fear about what it would mean to the church, fear that the congregation would be split asunder by the angry blast and the reaction that would follow. And for those who would disagree with the man and feel their anger mount within themselves, there would be fear of their own feelings and how they might express them. For we have learned to be afraid of our anger. Yet it is an interesting, though usually ignored, fact that the founder of the Christian faith is portrayed in the New Testament as having become as angry with the religious leaders of his day as was this “fictional” character. And Jesus expressed his anger just as openly and as vehemently. The anger rings through unmistakably, especially when it is translated into the modern vernacular, as Phillips has done. Here are some of the phrases from the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Mathew that are attributed to Jesus: “Alas for you, you scribes and Pharisees, play actors. You blind leaders…you blind fools…you utter frauds…what miserable frauds you are…white-washed tombs, which look fine on the outside but inside are full of deadmen’s bones and all kinds of rottenness. You are a mass of pretense and wickedness…You serpents, you viper’s brood, how do you think you are going to avoid being condemned to the rubbish heap…On your hands is all the innocent blood spilled on this Earth.” (Philips) #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
It is not surprising that the church has tended to ignore the angry Jesus in its use of him as an example of a mature and creative person. For the Christian church, most other religious groups, and our culture in general have been mistrustful of feelings of anger and frightened of any spirit of freedom that would encourage its direct expression. The message comes to us in many ways and from many sources. We are encouraged to feel guilty of wrong doing, or immature, or temperamental and unstable when we are aware of feelings of anger, especially when we give in to these emotions and express them. Listen to some of the ways we persuade ourselves to avoid anger in various relationships. “Parents, never become angry with your children. Their personalities will be warped, and they will feel rejected. Above all, do not punish them while you are angry. If you have to punish them, do it on cold blood!” “Children, never get angry with your folks. You must respect them and to be angry is to be disrespectful. Furthermore, if you are angry at them, they will not love you.” “Husbands and wives, do not get mad at each other. A happy marriage comes only when you ignore the things that irritate you and choke down any anger you feel. Above all, never let the children hear you in any kind of disagreement.” “Bosses, do not tolerate anger from your employees. If you allow them to get away with any expression of anger, they will never respect you.” “Employees, never let the boss see you are angry at him or her. Swallow your anger. You may get ulcers, but you will keep your job longer.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
You see how we handle this business of anger? We say it is wrong to feel angry and dangerous to our relationships to express it. Thus we have made the suppression of anger in our society ideal. This attitude is expressed in a letter written to the editor of a magazine in which an article by the author of this book, “The Creative Use of Anger,” appeared. The correspondent wrote: “Perhaps I am psychologically abnormal, I do not know. But this I do know, that is, like the husband mentioned, I has scolded my wife so angrily as to hurt her and make her cry, I should feel that I had definitely sinned and ought to seek forgiveness both from her and from God; and the shame my behavior would have stayed with me a long time.” Self-expression is a popular word, but somewhat indefinite. One speaks of his better self, implying the existence of some other less good. Which one ought we to express? I, for one, feel that whenever an unworthy emotion (and I include here anger toward one’s nearest and dearest) is expressed in action, a person is really degrading himself. This is an excellent statement of the attitude that would be expected to develop from the explicit and implicit teachings of most representatives of the Christian church. “For verily, verily I say unto you, one that hath the spirit of contention is not for me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of people to contend with anger, one with another,” reports 3 Nephi 11.29. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
And a similar attitude tends to be adopted by most of us whether we are religiously oriented or not. One man was describing how he avoided express any anger or irritation toward his wife. When he was asked if he were afraid of his anger, his reply was immediate, “Of course I am. Everybody should be. When I’m angry I say things I don’t mean. And that’s not good.” And often we frown at or laugh at (which may be much worse) those who become concerned enough over matters to express anger. Often, for example, in public hearings on community issues the person who becomes emotionally involved enough to speak heatedly about an issue are subject them to ridicule; and their ideas are frequently discounted because they are expressed angrily. The implication is made that the person got carried away with his or her emotions. Therefore, what the person said must not have made sense. Yet in fact we often speak most lucidly in the heat of emotion. Somehow we have a sort of pseudoscientific attitude by which we fulfill our need to suppress anger. We have concluded that when the ideas are presented logically, rationally, and without emotion they must be objective and therefore nearer the truth than ideas about which we become excited and emotional. Keep in mind at all times, God is the only power and the only presence there is, and God is right where I am. I live and move and have my being in God. God’s being moves through me and manifests itself in what I am doing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
The Faculty of Wonder Tires Easily but the Grace of God is Capacity to Change!
I was graced by the divine and sacramental! People talk about the gift of faith, well, I am telling you it was more like miracle! It did sheer pleasure to my psyche. One of the first things necessary for a creative relationship to the inherited wisdom in the religious traditions is to remove religious discussion from such deteriorated forms as the debates over the belief in the existence of God. The tendency to make that issues central—as thought God were an object alongside other objects, whose existence can be emphatically proved or disproved as we prove of disprove Quadrilateral and triangle area theorems or if there is enough DNA in the average person’s body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back 17 times—shows our modern tendency to split up reality. It is noteworthy that in some ways the subjects who hold to a personally evolved religious belief are similar to the group of atheists and agnostics, while in other ways they are distinctly different. The ways in which they are similar are in their relatively high valuation of the thinking process and of intellectual achievement, and in the absence of ethnocentrism or authoritarianism in their make-up; the ways in which they are different are in their robust psychological health, their genuine independence, originality, and growth-orientation, and in their relatively high degree of desire for positions of community leadership and status, as contrasted with the degree of social isolation and preference for going-it-alone which marked the radically skeptical group. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
There is a good deal of psychological strength in the subjects we have interviewed, whatever their troubles may be. They are able to take account equally of the inner and the outer experience; while they are highly interoceptive and have much self-insight, they are also socially perceptive and are able to use techniques of manipulation and mastery in relation to the environment in order to achieve security and to attain gratification of the needs which the culture itself defines as gratifiable. They are both self-aware and aware of others. Their life experience is broad as well as deep. While they have had happy childhoods and feel very affectionate towards their parents, they at the same time are capable of experiencing considerable anxiety, for they do not utilize repression to deal with unpleasant memories or affects, but rather face things as they are, including their feelings and impulses. They are complex rather than simple psychodynamically, and they admit new experiences into their perceptual systems even at the cost of insoluble contradictions. The ability to do this is based in part on one’s faith that one can finally achieve a synthesis, that reality ultimately makes sense and that one can oneself discern that sense. Most important, as a result of this pattern of attributes, the person has great capacity for further growth, which involves somehow being able to leave oneself behind, to shed old coast, to molt, to metamorphose, to find a new order of selfhood in obedience to internal demands for change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
This capacity for self-renewal is related to the whole problem of precocity and impedance in the formation of the self; it is of the great importance in the psychology of individual development. It involves the way in which a person places oneself in the time span which is defined by oneself as process. The most distinctive characteristic of the self is its unceasing growth and change within the matrix of sameness given by memory. Memory seems to make the self timeless even while it presents to reflection the evidence for irreversibility of all that has occurred. The extent to which a person acts in the present seems to me an index of whether the self is perceived as continuing to evolve or perceived as static and essentially no longer alive. My guess is that perception of the self in relation to time is most crucial in determining attitude towards biological death, as well as the very experience of dying, which surely must show as much variation among people as does their experience of living. What this means in terms of religious belief is that belief is not a rigid doctrine, not a set of forever-prescribed particularities, not static abstraction at all, but a formative process with faith as its foundation and vision as its goal—faith in the intelligibility and order of the Universe, leading through necessary difficulties of interpretation and changing meanings to moments of spiritual integration which are themselves transient. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
To make God an entity, a being over against other beings, located in space Heaven only knows where, is a carry-over of a primitive view, full of contradictions and easily refutable. The existence of God implies as much atheism as to argue against it. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as to deny it. God is being itself, not a being. We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be one’s ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at the point where one has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for. We obviously do not mean that all religious traditions or attitudes are equally constructive: they may be destructive, as illustrated in the religious fervor of the Nazis, or in the Inquisition. The problem always remains for theology, philosophy and ethics, with the assistance of the sciences and history of mortals, to determine what beliefs are most constructive and most consistent with other truth about human life. Psychologically religion is to be understood as a way of relating to one’s existence. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” There is much less difference between a mystic’s faith in God [the indigenous convictions of the religious person rather than other-Worldly creeds] and an atheist’s rational faith in humankind than between the former and that of a Calvinist whose faith in God is rooted in the conviction of one’s own powerlessness and in one’s fear of God’s power. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
When one is able to relate creatively to the wisdom of one’s fathers in the ethical and religious traditions one finds that one discovers anew one’s capacity for wonder. It is self-evident that the capacity for active, responsive wonder has been largely lacking in modern society. This is one side of the vacuity and emptiness which so many people feel in our period. Wonder may be described in many ways, from two things incline the heart to wonder, the moral law within and the starry sky above, to the wonder which grips us as one aspect of the feelings of pity and terror which purge the soul when we see dramatic tragedy. Though certainly not the exclusive province of religion, wonder is traditionally associated with it: and I would consider wonder, when it appears as is so often the cause in scientists or artists, as the religious aspects of these other vocations. Those who take a rigid view either of religious or scientific truth become more dogmatic and lose the capacity to wonder; those who acquire the wisdom of their fathers without surrendering their own freedom find that wonder adds to their zest and their conviction of meaning in life. The importance of wonder underlies Jesus’s high regard for the attitudes of children: “Except ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” This statement has nothing whatever to do with childishness or infantilism; it refers to the child’s capacity for wonder, a capacity for wonder, a capacity found likewise in the most mature and creative adults, whether they are scientists like Einstein or artists like Matisse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Wonder is the opposite to cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant, responsive. It is essentially an opening attitude—an awareness that there is more to life than one has as yet fathomed, an experience of new vistas in life to be explored as well as new profundities to be plumbed. Nor is it an easy attitude to hold. The faculty of wonder tires easily. Life would seem a great deal fuller than it does if we understood this is the World that we must empathize with. We must give ourselves to it in a Universe of basic forms in which our own life is grounded. This is the challenge to our consciousness. Wonder is a function of what one holds to be of ultimate meaning and value in life. Though it may be cued off by a tragic drama, it is not a negative experience; since it is essentially an enlarging of life, the over-all emotion which accompanies wonder is joy. The highest to which mortal can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes one wonder, let one be content; nothing higher can it give one. Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The less affluent people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easy-going ways. Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The less affluent are too helpless, to exposed, to behave like us, even thought they are first class citizens. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sickness, and evils of social institutions. They can never see the World in the old way again, never experience life in the old way; once the old consciousness is shattered, there is no chance of building it up again. We have to present strong, solid forms on which life can look secure, we should not be lulled into failing to realize that in life wonder also goes with humility—not the pseudo-humility of submission, which generally is the reverse side of arrogance, but the humility of the generous-minded person who can accept the given just as one, in one’s own creative efforts, is able to give. The historical term grace has a rich meaning at this point, despite the fact that for many people the World has been so much identified with deteriorated forms of the grace of God that it is useless. One speaks of the graceful flight of a bird, the grace of a child’s movements, the graciousness of the generous person. Grace is something given, a new harmony which emerges; and it always inclines the heart to wonder. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
We must emphasize that in every use of these terms—wonder, humility, grace—the connotation is not that of the person being passive and acted upon, as in some traditional religious attitudes. There is a very common misconception in our society that one gives oneself over to creative ecstasy, or to the loved one, or to religious belief. It is as though one falls in love by way of gravitation, or is seized by the hounds of Heaven, or write music or paints in a state of being carried away. It is amazing both how prevalent these passive ways of thinking are in our culture, and how false they are. Any artist or writer or musician—those who are supposedly carried away—will tell you that in the creative experience there is a greatly heightened consciousness and very intense acidity on one’s own part. This is the opposite of the divide-and-conquer fragmentation which has characterized modern mortal’s relation to nature since Francis Bacon and has led us to the brink of catastrophe. We can, and must, will and love the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. There is a new language of myth and symbol which will be more adequate to love and will in the new conditions we must confront. It is the passion of the artist, of whatever type or craft, to communicate what one experiences as the subconscious and unconscious significance of one’s relation to our World. Communicate is related to commune, and, in turn, both are avenues to the experience of communion and community with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
We love and will the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the World, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it means to be fully related to one’s World. I do not imply that the World does not exist before we love or will it; one can answer that question only on the basis of one’s assumptions, and, being a Californian with inborn realism, I would assume that it does exist. However, no reality, no relation to me, as I have no effect upon it; I move as in a dream, vaguely and without viable contact. One can choose to shut it out—as New Yorkers do when riding the subway—or one can choose to see it, create it. In this sense, we give responsiveness which implies aliveness. And certainly the grace, or given quality of any experience is in direct proportion to how much one participates in it. A patient in therapy expressed it simply but beautifully, “The grace of God is the capacity to change.” What does this mean concerning our personal lives, to which, at last, we now return? The approach we are here recommending as the creative use of tradition makes possible a new attitude toward conscience. The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the Universe is known. It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of mortal that one can be conscious of oneself and one’s World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
For consciousness surprises the meaning in our otherwise absurd acts. Love, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the soul—that often nettlelike voice which is at the same time our creative power—leads us into life if we do not terminate these soulful experiences but accept them with a sense of the preciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of oneself, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action. We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History—that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow—has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. If our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground, what does it matter? The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it. For in every act of love and will—and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act—we mold ourselves and our World simultaneously. That is what it means to embrace the future. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
It is important as the creative use of tradition to take a new attitude toward conscience. As everyone know, conscience is generally conceived of as the negative voice of tradition speaking within one—the “thou-shalt-not’s” echoing down from Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of prohibitions which the society has taught its members for centuries. Conscience is then the constrictor of one’s activities. This tendency to think of conscience as that which tells the individual not to do things, is so strong that it seems to operate almost automatically. When I was discussing this point with a class of students in a college, one student volunteered that it is quite possible to use one’s conscience beneficially. When I agreed and asked him for examples, he offered, “When you don’t want to go to class, your conscience tells you to.” I pointed out that this actually was a negative sentence. He then searched his mind and came up with a second example, “When you don’t want to study, your conscience makes you.” He was at first entirely unaware that this example too was negative. Conscience in each case was seen as acting against what one supposedly wants to do; it was the taskmaster, the whip. The significant point is that the young man said nothing about conscience in his examples as a guide to help him get the most value from the class, or conscious as the voice of one’s own deepest purposes and goals in the enterprise of studying and learning. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Conscience is not a set of handed-down prohibitions to constrict the self, to stifle its vitality and impulses. Nor is conscience to be thought of as divorced from tradition, as, in the liberalistic period when it was implied that one decided every act de novo. Conscience, rather, is one’s capacity to tap one’s own deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity and awareness, in which tradition and immediate experience are not opposed to each other but interrelated. The etymology of the term reveals this point. Composed of the two Latin words meaning “to know” (scire) and “with” (cum), conscience is very close to the term consciousness. In fact in some countries, such as Brazil, the same word (“consciencia”) is used both for “conscience” and “consciousness.” Conscience is our ability to recall ourselves, the recall is not opposed to historical traditions as such, but only to the authoritarian use of the tradition. For there is a level on which the individual participates in the tradition, and on that level tradition assist mortals in finding one’s own most meaningful experience. We wish thus to emphasize the beneficial aspect of conscience—conscience as the individual’s method of tapping wisdom and insight within oneself, conscience as an opening up, a guide to enlarged experience beyond good and evil. This is the transmoral conscience. With this view it will no longer be true that conscience does make cowards of us all. Conscience, rather, will be the taproot of courage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
All a Little too Incredible–She Was Not Altogether in Love and Looking Around for a Philosophy Which Would Bring Contentment!
She was painfully confused, trying to crush her sobs, trying to crush her rage against me. The word “crisis” is Greek in origin, and in that language its primary meaning is “decision.” In medical pathology, a crisis is that point in the course of a disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. In general, a crisis is a turning point, the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. In speaking of “the crisis in belief,” I refer to a point in the course of individual development at which the person must decide for oneself whether the picture one has been given of the nature of the World is a true one. It is the point at which one is called upon to think for oneself about the important matters of cosmology and ethics. It is time of decision about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the coerciveness of moral law, the place of mortals in nature, the freedom of the individual will, and all other great issues with which philosophy deals. Not all of us are philosophers, of course, but if we are human we must have a philosophy. Our intellect demands that experience should be accounted for; the need for things to be intelligible is a basic human need. Thus we are all, willy-nilly, philosophers of a sort, in the sense that we tell ourselves one story or another about most of the enduring issues with which systematic philosophy deals, and without which we cannot face life with any sense that it has meaning and worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The crisis in belief need not occur at any special age, and in fact it need not occur very conspicuously at all. For most people, however, it comes with adolescence, and it is ushered in partly by the challenge that the newly awakened and intense pleasures of the flesh and aggressive urges of puberty offers to morality and the civilized code of the pleasures of the flesh. It is a function as well, I think, of the growth of intelligence, which is beginning to reach full power concurrently with physiological maturation. It comes at that period when the mind, like the body, is getting ready to leave home in search of a new home of its own. Less dualistically, we may say that the maturing human form, freeing itself, under the push of natural development, of the habitat of its childhood, emerges into a new World in which it is no longer provided for and ministered to, but in which it must seek its own sustenance and meaning, and must choose anew for itself. With choices comes responsibility, self-valuation, and self-affirmation or self-rejection. The crisis in belief is often a time of categorical repudiation or total acceptance, of radical chance of rigid stasis. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a time of the greatest psychological danger, in which the integrity of the self is challenged, and in which old selves die and new selves are born. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As psychologist interested in the way in which psychological forms develop, and therefore, I shall add, intensely interested in the individual life, we assessors necessarily pay a great deal of attention to that part of the individual’s history in which one was faced with a serious crisis of development. The work of assessment requires us to understand how a person came to one’s beliefs about the nature of the World and one’s own place in it, and how solidly founded and ready for action one’s philosophy of life really is. I need hardly say that in order to arrive at such an understanding we must not only inquire deeply into one’s beliefs on great issues, but must synthesize what we know of the nature and genesis of those beliefs with what we have been able to understand about one’s entire character and life history. Moral posture and beliefs about the cosmos are themselves frequently determined at least in part by psychodynamic forces, and a complete personality formulation gives an account not only of what actions our philosophy determines, but what forces our philosophy is determined by. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The question of the existence of God is of course of central importance, in terms both of its implications for the nature of belief or disbelief in Providence, in Heavenly justice and mercy, in life after death, and in the efficacy of prayer, and hence in the dependability of a benevolent supernatural power. It is designed to elicit opinions and feelings and determinism, theism, good and evil, and the like. One problem, for example, describes events leading up to a criminal action, in which the external and internal determinants of the person’s behavior were made manifest. This problem served as the point of departure for discussion of individual responsibility in affairs in which individual appeals compelled by forces within and without to act in an apparently irresponsible way. Another problem concerned a man shipwrecked along on a desert island, with certain knowledge that he could never get off it. The question then was, could such a man, being part of no human community, do an evil action? This immediately led into the difficult problem of the locus of ethical sanctions, whether in society or in the individual, which in turn, of course, is central to the psychological problem of the internalization or externalization of the superego, with all its implications for the management of aggression and sexuality, and anarchic impulse in general. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There was this woman who was rated by the assessment staff as being exceptionally well adjusted, and indeed her life seemed agreeably proportioned with secure community position, healthy and happy children, a professionally successful husband, and constructive social service activities through which she expressed something of her individuality and in which she felt worthwhile. This woman said that she decided to drop religion early in college, having reached a conclusion that it was all a little too incredible. Chapel services were compulsory at the college at that time, and she always went to services, taking along an interesting non-religious book to read during the sermon. Shortly after graduation she married a man of exceptional eligibility in terms of the status symbols of that time and place, but with whom, she confessed she was not altogether in love. She had two children, and while they were still very young, she began to feel quite unhappy, always worn-out and cross. She began, she says, “looking around for a philosophy which would bring contentment.” She found it in Lecomte du Nouy’s book, Human Destiny, which she says enabled her to feel justified in returning to church membership and to religious belief. She now believes in a personal God, to whom she prays and in whom she finds support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Of her belief, she says, “It’s satisfactory enough, and it fills a definite need. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether I just thought it all up to fill a gap in my life.” She does not believe in the after-life. However, she says that her unbelief in this respect is not complete or final; I may some day, in the future, come to believe in an after-life as well.” The implication was that if she needed to believe it, she would believe it. That she suspects that she has perhaps made rather too much of a good thing out of the flexibility is indicated, however, in her Thematic Apperception Test (which is a psychological personality test) stories, several of which communicate a sense of shallowness (as she sees it) and a lack of profound meaning in her life. On Card 19, for example, she tells this story, which purports to deal with a single day in a girl’s life, but which suggests the emotional tone of the subject’s own life in its totality, as she perceives it: Virginia has had a thrilling say. She has had a good start on learning to ski. She emerged with no broken bones or even sprains, though she had a glorious day of climbing, sliding, leaping, staggering, and falling with her legs, skis, and ski poles all mixed up. The air was so clear, so wonderful—not as cold as all her friends had told her the horrid north would be. And how nice Johnny Evans was. So friendly, no more and no less. Everyone laughed a lot, and they the most of all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Better get ready, now! The day is by no means over. Square dancing tonight, with Johnny and all the others, then the long ride home, and serious business—job hunting in a day or two. “How silly I was,” thought Virginia, “to be so childishly frightened about my luck up north. It’s just like anywhere!” But will Virginia find her grandfather’s watch with the lost ruby of the Whitehall family? Or trace her friend Johnny’s surprising ancestry? Read the December issue of Bang to find out!!! This story, like all complex symbolic productions, may be interpreted at many levels of meaning. I find it most touching and poignant, and to interpret it is in some sense a shame. Yet: she tells us that she has emerged happily from the first years of her feared adulthood (the horrid north) with no damage done (no broken bones, or even sprains; in fact, it has been a glorious and exciting and lucky day up north). However, the day is not yet over; indeed, it is “by no means over.” There are things not yet found our; Johnny, for instance, though is so nice and friendly (no more and no less) has a surprising ancestry (where did the beasts begin?). And then there is the lost ruby which should pass on from generation to generation, encased in a patriarchal time-piece (this jewel of sexuality, agent of transmission of the matter of life through the generations). And fear with it, that true generation has not passed through her, or seized her for its fulfillment. And the final sentence: “Read the December issue of Bang to find out”: the sum of the tale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
A “bang” is, of course, what one gets out of life, and December is the last issue of the year. The final crisis of selfhood is still before her, and the very facility of her adjustment seems to represent the greatest danger to her integrity. So far as religion is concerned, I vaguely believe this woman would have evolved a very different interpretation of experience out her transitory atheism if she had had the courage to sound her own depths instead of accepting pragmatically what seemed to satisfy her immediate needs. As things stand, I believe that she perceives herself unconsciously as having forfeited profound experiences in the interests simply of facile adjustment. (Which is not to say that she is right in his self-perception; the story is a deeply experienced one.) I should perhaps pause at this point to make it plain, if it is not already so, that we are not here concerned with the validity of religious beliefs in their cognitive aspect. Rather, we are concerned with the depth of feeling with which a cognitive belief is experienced and with the question of integration or dissociation of such feelings in the structure of the self. Quite another aspect of this problem is the deepening of religious faith in persons who have not experienced doubt, but who have rather experiences semi-mystical confirmation, or even transfiguration of their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In general, however, it should be noted that I am addressing myself to these problems as a psychologist interested in inner experience, and not as a philosopher interested in discerning the truth about the outer cosmos (if there can be such a true difference). Speaking as a psychologist, then, what I find primarily in this subject in both these ways of resolving the crisis in belief (i.e., in the atheistic resolution and in the repudiation of a transitory atheism in favor of a return to religion) is an acceptance of emotional polarities as being genuine oppositions which necessitate a choice between them. This slavery to the antinomies shows itself wherever repudiation is necessary to the maintenance of some way of living, whether it be in matter of private philosophy, religious belief, ethnic group-membership, affairs of the heart, allegiances to opposed scientific theories, esthetic preferences, or psychodynamic mechanisms. Rebellion is a form of submission, suppression of impulse is a form of belief. Essentially what I think we have observed in this crisis is not resolution at all, in the sense of estrangement of a higher-level integration, but rather perpetuation of the conflict through acceptance of polarities as real, and deferment of the decision to a later point in life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Women who have indeed settled the crisis belief communicate quite a different sense of selfhood from the case we have considered, and they have much greater serenity and spontaneity, and freedom of both feeling and thought, in their make-up. I need hardly say that in the assessment of the strength of any personality it is most important to know what is settled and what is unsettled, which crises are past and which are present or still ahead. Our fear of freedom also expresses itself in other ritualistic and compulsive behavior. So, for example, when a person—like Lady Macbeth—has a compulsion to wash one’s hands many times a day, the behavior not only provides a symbolic way of dealing with guilt feelings, but is also gives the person something with which to be preoccupied. It is almost as though he has an unconsciously concluded that “idle minds [and hands] are the devil’s workshop” and has substituted a meaningless activity to keep us both busy. All of us probably do some of this sort of thing in one way or another, f it is only making a game of stepping on every crack (or avoiding stepping on any cracks) in the sidewalk. Some executives become busier and busier, having to work longer and longer hours. Although they may not be consciously aware of it, they may be doing this because they feel much more comfortable and safe at work than they do in their free time when they could be with their families or engaged in other exciting, but frightening, activities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Extreme emphasis on cleanliness and its preservation often performs similar functions. One young woman described how her mother had set aside the living room of the hose so that no member of the family entered it except on Christmas and Easter. Although there was no physical barrier to the room, even the family dog avoided it, because he somehow got the message that to enter it was to invite disaster. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “the cleaning lady was a very important part of our household because she got to go in there very week!” One wonders how the parents feel about their perfectly preserved living room with its unmarred furniture now that the children are married and gone. It certainly represents some lost opportunities in living. However, living is frightening. Fear of freedom can always be expressed in other specific fears that limit our freedom. Many such fears have been catalogued and given phobia names. There is fear of open places, closed places, high places, crowds, snakes, spiders, heart attack, death, being alone, and so forth. All of us experience some of these fears. They may be very mild or very intense. There may be considerable grounds for them in reality, or they may be quite unrealistic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Much can probably be said about the symbolic meaning and origin of these fears in our lives, but their function appears to be that of limiting our freedom. Any one of these fears, if taken seriously, can limit our activities. And even if we attempt to ignore them and act in spire of them, they are likely to enter our minds and keep us from enjoying freedom. A young married woman tells how she becomes very uneasy whenever she goes a few miles from home. And she remains anxious until she returns. It is easy to see how she might live out her life in a geographical box if she does not find relief from this fear. She might well deprive herself of a whole World of adventure. A young executive was bothered daily by the fear that his children would die. Every morning, before leaving on the long commuting trip to his office, he would have to go into each child’s room and check to make sure each was breathing. During the working day the fear would frequently recur and he would call home to check up on things. To go out of town on a business trip of several days would be almost intolerable. This he kept himself in bondage. He was too preoccupied with his fear to relax with his children or fully express his love for them or allow himself the freedom to enjoy them while he had them. Fatherhood was more frightening than it was fun. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Love and will take place within the forms of the society. These forms are the myths and symbols viable at that period. The forms are the channels through which the vitality of the society flows. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. And the present revolt against forms only proves the point in reverse: in our transitional age, we are hunting, exploring, reaching about, struggling to assert whatever we can find in the experiment for some new forms. In homely illustration, Duke Ellington recounts that when we writes music, he must keep in mind that his trumpeter cannot hot the very high notes securely, whereas the trombonist is very good at them; and writing under these impediment, he remarks, “It’s good to have limits.” Not only with strength and passion, but other forms of love as well: full satisfaction means the death of the human being; love runs itself out with the death of lovers. It is the nature of creativity to need form for its creative power; the impediment thus has a beneficial function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
These forms of the society are molded and presented first of all by the artist. It is the artists who teach us to see, who break the ground in the enlargement of our consciousness; they point the way toward the new dimensions of experience which we have, in any given period, been missing. This is why looking at a work of art gives us a sudden experience of self-recognition. Giotto, precursor to that remarkable birth of awareness known as the Renaissance, saw nature in a new perspective and for the first time painted rocks and trees in three-dimensional space. This space had been there all the time but was not seen because of medieval mortal’s preoccupation with their vertical relationship to eternity reflected in the two-dimensional mosaics. Giotto enlarged human consciousness because one’s perspective required an individual mortal standing at a certain point to see this perspective. The individual was now important; eternity was no longer the criterion, but the individual’s own experience and one’s own capacity to look. The art of Giotto was a prediction of the Renaissance individualism which was to flower a human years later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The new view of space pictures by Giotto was basic for the new geographical explorations of oceans and continents by Magellan and Columbus, which changed mortal’s relation to their World, and for the explorations in astronomy by Galileo and Copernicus, which changed mortal’s relations to the Heavens. These new discoveries in space resulted in a radical upheaval of mortal’s image of oneself. Ours is not the first age to be confronted with loneliness arising from mortal’s discovery of new dimensions of external space and similarly requiring new extensions of one’s own mind. The psychological upheaval and spiritual loneliness were shaped mainly by its consequence. On beholding the blindness and misery of mortals, on seeing all the Universe unknow, and mortals without light, left to themselves, as it were astray in this corner of the Universe, knowing not who has set one here, what one is here for, or will become of one when one dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will awake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. Just as mortals of the past were able to find the new planes of consciousness which did, to some extent, fill the new reservoirs of space, so in our day a similar shift is necessary. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have know these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
What Does Tradition Have to Teach Me About Human Life in My Particular Time and with My Problems?
In life, we have to find things we enjoy to stay happy and make things beautiful. The overall picture from the life-history interview would seem to support the generalization that aggressiveness in persons of excellent ego-strength stems from life circumstances marked by relatively greater discord in the home during childhood and by friction in significant personal relations. The first and most obvious consideration in the relationship of rebelliousness to mortality and psychological health is one which by now has passed from iconoclastic protest to virtual stereotypes. Nonetheless, it should not be disregarded. It is simply this: rebellion-resistance to acculturation, refusal to adjust, adamant insistence on the important of the self and of individuality—is very often the mark of a healthy character. If the rules deprive you of some part of yourself, then it is better to be unruly. The socially disapproved expression of this is delinquency, and most delinquency certainly is just plain confusion or blind harmful striking out at the wrong enemy; nut some delinquency has affirmation behind it, and we should not be too hasty in giving a bad name to what gives us a bad time. The givers to humanity often have profound refusal in their souls, and they are aroused to wrath at the shoddy, the meretricious, and the unjust which society seems to produce in appalling volume. Society is tough in its ways, and it is no wonder that those who fight it tooth and nail are tough people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If it recognized the potential value of the wayward characters who make its business for it, I think that much of the research and of the social action in relation to delinquency would be wiser. A person who is neither shy nor rebellious in one’s youth is not likely to be worth a farthing to oneself nor to anyone else in the years of one’s physical maturity. A second consideration which is certainly no news to most people, but which tends to get lost to psychologists who use phrases like guilt feelings, hostility, and anxiety, is that the healthy person psychologically is usually virtuous in the simple moral sense of the term. Psychologically healthy people do what they think is right, and what they think is right is that people should not lie to one another or to themselves, that they should not steal, slander, persecute, intrude, do damage willfully, go back on their word, fail a friend, or do any of the things that put them on the side of death against life. This probably sounds like old-time religion, and in fact I am willing to be straightforwardly theological about this. “It may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his work, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round,” reports Alma 37.12. #RandolpHarris 2 of 17
I think there is an objective character to guilt, and wen a person is false to one’s nature or offends against the nature of others then one is in sin and the place in which one has one’s existence is well descried by the word “hell.” I take “sin” ere to be descriptive of the state of separation from the most basic sense of selfhood, or what some existentialist philosophers have called “the grounds of being.” In whatever terms it is put, the fact is that a person is most alive and is functioning in such a way that one knows who one is and you know who one is and one knows who you are when one’s thoughts and actions are in accord with one’s moral judgment. The corollary is that when one does what one thinks is wrong one gets a feeling of being dead, and if you are steeped in such wrongful ways you feel very dead al the time, and other people know that you are dead. There is such a thing as the death of the spirit. Many of the people whom we know as patients in our mental hospitals or as prisoners in our jails are n a condition of spiritual death, and their only hope is that someone can reach out to them, break through the walls of their isolation, recognize them. I think that too much has been made of the word love in this connection, for usually it connotes a feeling on the part of the person who is to give love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The essence of the act of love as I understand it is the action of attention, and the affect that accompanies it in the person who is paying attention may be love, hate, sadness or what you have. Love pushes us toward this new dimension of consciousness because it is based on the original we experience. Contrary to the usual assumption, we all begin life not as individuals, but as we; we are created by the union of male and female, literally of one flesh. However, the individual person is a human because one can accept the crumbling of the first freedom, painful as it is, can affirm it, and can begin one’s pilgrimage toward full consciousness. A real fight is an act of attention, a genuine condemnation is an action of attention, an understanding of final defeat is an act of attention. These as well as their absolute counterparts are on the side of life, and the person who experiences them is in communication with other living beings and offers to them the possibility of community. The sort of philosophy of psychotherapy that prescribes blandness, nonjudgmentalness, and essential indifference on the part of the psychotherapist is simply a form of human debasement. Paying attention, caring, and being there yourself is all that counts. When discussing psychotherapy as relationship, recall that one of the therapists there was clearly an incompetent by all standards—AMA, APA, and probably the Bureau of Internal Revenue as well. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Everything this one therapist did was wrong. After about six months of his residency, however, it became apparent that many of his patients were unaccountably getting better. Among his aberrant behavior were such gross actions as telephoning a patient’s foreman at work and telling him to stop bullying the patient, suggesting an unusual technique in pleasures of the flesh to another patient whose wife was apparently frigid, and bluntly suggesting to a third patient that he should give up his job as an automobile repairman and get into the dispensing of food. The climax of the latter case was especially gruesome to the clinic, for the patient opened a doughnut shop of his own and on his final appointment appeared with a dozen doughnuts of his own making which he presented as a gift to the therapist, who without any insight at all offered them around to various other therapists and his supervisor, all to whom had difficulty swallowing them. Goodness knows, I am not suggesting, in recalling the case of this incompetent fellow, that all psychotherapists go forth and do likewise, for he was he and we are we. However, I will say that he was alive, even though so obviously misguided; to his patients, the only thing that was of consequence was that he cared about them and that he though there was something different they could do which would be right. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Religious ideology is needed in order to keep people from losing discipline and this threatening social coherence. Fear of freedom also expresses itself in various legalistic approaches to life. We see or perceive what we want or need to perceive, and our nervous system can come to act as if the other sensation did not exist. This phenomenon is called perceptual vigilance (or perceptual set). We are on guard, or ready, to concentrate on certain kinds of stimuli and filter out those that we do not want or need to receive. This selective perception can work for one in many cases (like looking for a particular shirt in your closet and not paying attention to the others), it can work against one when our own security needs are so strong tat they distort or limit our perceptions of the World and people around us. However, generalization is not always a bad thing to do. The ability to generalize is useful in forming concepts—a vital part of thinking and reasoning. Even though it is unscientific or silly, we generalize about people all the time. This is the cause for a lot of serious conflicts between people. When we generalize about people and then use that generalization as the image or symbol for a whole group, we are stereotyping. Stereotyping is a handy way of lumping things together for easy reference; we all do it at one time or another. Sometimes stereotypes are creations of an entire society or nation. We have a great propensity for regulating life in minute detail and insofar as possible deciding in advance what is right and what is wrong or what is socially acceptable or unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
And if we are successful in doing this, usually with the assistance of religious groups or social class, then we can know in almost every situation what we should do. Then we no longer have to think or feel. We can rather automatically do what we know is right; or, failing that, we suffer the appropriate guilt for the sin or social blunder that we have committed. This makes for a safe, regulated kind of life. However, it also tends to be a joyless life from which most of the spontaneity and creativity has been removed. Although it is often maintained that a sense of responsibility demands a clear-cut view of right and wrong, it is more likely that such legalistic approaches actually undermine personal responsibility. For there are regions of human behavior and action that may not be so clear as to what is the right decision in ethical situations. And when we ignore these unobscured areas, arbitrarily seeing all factors as absolutes, we take ourselves off the hook of wrestling with the subtleties of the situation. We are in a position where we can uphold the right and denounce the evil. Some people live up to stereotypes because it is easier or more profitable to go along with what is expected. People who are firm believers in Christ as the great lover, the self-sacrificing God, can turn this belief, in an alienated way, into the experience that it is Jesus who loves them for them. A new set of higher expectations are being created for people. These, too, are beginning to fulfill themselves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
In society, the great medieval thinkers held that all people are equal in the sight of God and that even the humblest has an infinite worth. In economics, they taught that work is a source of dignity not of degradation, that no mortal should be used for an end independent of one’s welfare, and that justice should determine wages and prices. In politics, they taught that the function of the state is moral, that law and its administration should be imbued with Christian ideas of justice, and the relations of ruler and ruled should always be founded on reciprocal obligation. The state, property, and the family are all trusts from God to those who control them, and they must be used to further divine purposes. Finally, the mediaeval ideal included the strong belief that all nations and peoples are part of one great community. Above nations is humanity. However, the concepts may differ, one belief defines any branch of Christianity: the belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior who gave his life out of love for his fellow creatures. He was the hero of love, a hero without power, who did not use force, who did not want to rule, who did not want to have anything. He was a hero of being, of giving, of sharing. These qualities deeply appealed to the Roman poor as well as to some of the rich, who choked on their selfishness. Jesus appealed to the hearts of the people, even though from an intellectual standpoint he was at best considered to be naïve. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
This belief in the hero of love won hundreds of thousands of adherents, many of whom changed their practice of life, or become martyrs themselves. The greatest achievement was to dedicate one’s life to God. Because Jesus loves us for who we are, the belief in him becomes the substitute for one’s own act of loving. In a simple, unconscious formula: Christ does all the loving for us; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are saved because the alienated faith in Christ is a substitute for the imitation of Christ. Human beings are so deeply endowed with a need to love that acting as wolves causes us necessarily to have a guilty conscience. Our professed belief in love anesthetize us to some degree against the pain of the unconscious feeling of guilt for being entirely without love. However, the soul cannot live without love and friendship. Being able to relax in the presence of the beloved and accept the other’s being as being, is simply liking to be with the other, living to rest with the other, liking the rhythm of the walk, the voice, the whole being of the other. This gives a width to the soul; it gives it time to grow; time to sink its roots down deeper. We understand that we are not required to do anything for the beloved except accept him, her, or them, and enjoy being in their company. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms. This is why religion makes so much of acceptance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
We are the independent people who, often taking our powers too seriously, continuously act and react, unaware that much of the value in life comes only if we do not press, comes in quietly when it is not pushed or required, comes not from a drive from behind or an attraction in front, but emerges silently from being together. Sometimes it seems love is honored as a kind of vestige of bygone periods when people had time for friendships. We now find ourselves so rushed, going from work to meetings to a late dinner to bed and up again the next morning, that the contribution to love to our lives is lost. Or we get it mistakenly connected with homosexuality; American men are especially afraid of male friendship lest it have in it some trace of the homosexual. However, at least, we must recall that the importance of love is very great in helping us to find ourselves and begin the developing of identity. Love, in turn, needs altruism. We have to have an esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it; disinterested love, typically, the love of God for mortals. Charity, as the word is translated in the New Testament, is a poor translation, but it does contain within it the element of selfless giving. It is an analogy—though not an identity—with the biological aspect of nature which makes a person defend their youth, and the human being love his or her own baby with a built-in mechanism without regard for what that baby can do for him or her. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We are aware that no human being’s motivations are purely disinterested, that everyone’s motivations are, at best, a blending of these different kinds of love. Just as I would not like someone to love me purely ethereally, without regard for my body and without any awareness of whether I am male or female, I also do not want to be loved only for my body. A child senses the lie when he is told that adults do something only for your good, and everyone dislikes being told he or she is loved only spiritually. Each kind of love, however, presupposes care, for it assets that something does matter. In normal human relations, each kind of love has an element of other types of love, no matter how obscured it may be. Yet, we have lost much of our creative relationship to the wisdom of the past. History is our social, communal body: in it we live, move and have our being; and to cut one’s self off from it, to hold it is inconsequential, is about as sensible as to say, “My physical body is bunk.” It shuts that person off from a creative relationship to an important segment of the wisdom of thy fathers. This situation is unfortunate not only for the society but also for the person one’s self for it robs that individual of an important part of one’s historical body, and thus contributes much to the diffuse perplexity and feelings of rootlessness of individuals of our day. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Another very common way of keeping tight reins on freedom is by overplanning and overorganizing life. Many a housewife or househusband, for example, finds it difficult—if not almost impossible—to drop everything on a moment’s notice and go on a picnic with the family. Perhaps there are dirty dishes in the sink, a roast simmering in the oven, or a pie cooling on the windowsill or a disarray in the house and she or he is certain that one could not relax and enjoy one’s self if one left these jobs undone. And there is every likelihood that one might not, for many find it difficult to enjoy the spontaneity that can enrich life. The freedom appears to be too frightening. It will come as no surprise to some to hear that family vacation are sometimes unhappy occasions despite the high hopes entertained when the family stated out, car loaded down, for distant destination. One couple who had experiences such disappointments made another attempt after some months in psychotherapy. The therapist was delighted when he received a picture postcard from Canada with a very brief message: “Having wonderful time! Why?” Well, why not? Likely there are a couple of reasons why we often manage to be miserable on vacations. For one thing the family is together—let that read TOGETHER—more than at any other time, and that physical closeness that creates the possibility of emotional closeness is probably frightening to us, with the effort to eliminate this frightening possibility, manages in one way or another to get on the nerves of everyone else. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The other reason is that we are confronted with all that freedom. We have two weeks in which we can do as we please and go where we please. No alarm clocks jangling, no school bells telling us to move from one class to another, no time clocks to punch, no precise hour when dinner must be on the table, no projects to be completed by such-and-such time. We are free, and it scares us! So how do we meet this crisis in freedom? Many of us meet it with a frenzy of planning. We go to the drawer, pull out maps, and make an itinerary. “Now let’s see, we’ll sleep here the first night, then go over there, eat lunch in this town, spend an hour on this beach, and drive on to that place before dark, and….and, oh yes, we’d better call the BMW automobile club and have them make all the reservations along the way for us so there won’t be any hitches in THE PLAN.” Planning, organization, and reducing some routine tasks in life to habit can perform the useful function of permitting the individual to live a freer and more creative life. If, for example, a housewife or househusband can sit down and plan a week’s menus for the family so that one can do one’s shopping in a single trip, a lot of time will be saved and needless last-minute worry eliminated about “What in the World are we going to eat tonight?” She or he has gained some free time by her or his planning. If one becomes a slave to one’s menus, however, it is quite another story. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
If one is no longer free to change one’s mind for a personal or family whim, one has sacrificed one of the pleasures of spontaneous living. One’s rigidity becomes one’s defense against freedom, which frightens the individual. Every home and almost every work situation provides countless opportunities to overplan and overorganize our lives. Many a businessman or businesswoman has spent one’s life tending to details without ever asking one’s self how relevant and how necessary the details are. The freedom to see creative ways of changing one’s routines and expanding one’s productivity with all of the necessary risks involved may have been too frightening. It is important, therefore, whether we are intellectuals or sophisticates or merely alert human beings seeking bearings in a confused and perplexed time, to ask “How can one relate to the inherited traditional so that one’s own freedom and personal responsibility are not sacrificed in the process? One principle, to start with, is clear: the greater a person’s awareness of one’s self, the more one can acquire the wisdom of our fathers to make it ours. It is the persons who are weak in the sense of their own personal identity who are overcome by the power of tradition, who cannot stand in its presence, and who therefore either capitulate to it, cut themselves off from it, or rebel against it. One of the distinguishing marks of strength as a self is the capacity to immerse one’s self in tradition and at the same time be one’s own unique self. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
This is what the classics, in literature or ethics or any other field, should do for one. For the essence of a classic is that it arises from such profound depths in human experience that, like the works of Isaiah, The House of Mirth, A Brave New World, it speaks to us who live centuries later in vastly different cultures as the voice of our own experience, helping us to understand ourselves better and enriching us by releasing echoes within ourselves which we may not have known were there. “Deep calleth unto deep,” as the psalmist puts it. One need not go along literally with Jung’s concept of archetypes or the collective unconscious to agree that the deeper one goes into one’s own experience (let us say in confronting death, or experiencing love, or in the elemental relations in the family), the more one’s experience has in common with similar experiences of other mortals in other ages and cultures. This is why the dramas of Sophocles, the dialogues of Plato, and the paintings of reindeer and bison on the cave walls in Southern France by anonymous Cro-Magnon mortals some twenty thousand years ago many speak more powerfully and elicit greater response in us than the bulk of the writings or pictures of five years ago. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, the more profoundly one delves into one’s own experience, the more original are one’s reactions and productions. Here is the seeming paradox, which no doubt everyone knows to be true in one’s own experience, that the more profoundly one can confront and experience the accumulated wealth in one’s tradition, the more uniquely one can at the same time know and be one’s self. The battle, therefore, is not between individual freedom and tradition as such. The issue, again, is how the tradition is used. We must ask, “What does the tradition have to teach me about human life, in my particular time and with my problems?” Then we are using the wealth of wisdom accumulated through historical tradition for our own enrichment and guidance as a freedom. For instance, when the United States of America entered World War I on 6 April 1917, baseball became the national pastime because people used it as a means to distract themselves from the war. Baseball even boosted morale of American forces overseas. The American military created 77 baseball diamonds in France, and on any given day some 200 games were played throughout the country. Many baseball fans are familiar with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Green Light” letter, in which he encouraged baseball owners and executives to keep baseball going in the states to keep Americans happy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Other efforts were made to distract Americans from the war and make them feel safe like some of the architecture in Oakland, California USA. On Picardy Drive in East Oakland, in the 1920s Storybook houses were built to make people feel like they were entering a fairytale. Picardy Drive was developed by builder Robert Cleveland Hillen and architect Walter W. Dixon, whose houses have been called modest mansions for the whimsical glory and romantic style, which made them feel like castles. To be a vital part of the marvelous work and a wonder of these days, you must submit your will to God, letting it be swallowed up in his will. As you press forward with steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and love of God and of all people feasting upon the Word of Christ. We must keep searching diligently for blessings and salvation, praying always, and believing, then as the Lord promises that all thing shall work together for your good. Let this desire inspire you to greet each new morning with enthusiasm and let it fuel your thoughts and actions throughout each day. If you do this, you will be blessed amid a World that need love and guidance, and you and your loved ones will be secure and happy. This will allow us the spiritual power to handle life with faith and trust in God. And is you are looking for more new story book houses, check out one of my favorite builders Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
God Tolerates Us–We are What We are Devoted to and What We are Devoted to is What Motivates Our Conduct
Did I really not believe in those things which I saw? Or had I simply found that cosmos to be unendurable? I did not know. I wanted to be a saint! As we grow, we learn to adapt to stress, to cope with our World and to protect the fragile parts of our psyche. The ego is the center of our conscious life and is often at odds with the show, the forbidden, unwanted, unacknowledged, unconscious aspect of the psyche. Ego-strength is, first of all, a function simply of intelligence. Since comprehension of experience depends mostly on the degree of organization in the central nervous system, the scope of the ego will vary with the quality of the brain. Scope does not depend solely upon cognition, however. Psychodynamics enter chiefly in relation to the mechanism of repression. Repression—when I do not want to face a problem situation, I may choose to deal with it through repressions—pushing it out of my mind, pretending it does not exist. Repression can help us to cope with things that otherwise would be too difficult to face. Repression operates in the service of homeostasis, and so serves an economic function that is indispensable in maintaining the organism in an integral form in its environment. However, repression may be so extensive as to become a false economy; when broad areas of experience are lost to consciousness through repression, the ego may be said to be less strong (i.e., less able to adapt) as a consequence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
To state the mater absolutely, ego-strength requires a flexible repression mechanism, so that the person may be said to be optimally open to the experience, though capable of excluding phenomena that cannot be assimilated to the structure of the self. Physiological stability and regularity of physical functioning is the biological matrix in which the ego thrives, or attains maximum strength. Generally speaking, the ego is at its strongest in the years of physical maturity, granting good bodily health. Ego-strength is increasing as the organism grows towards maturity, levels off in the prime of life, and declines thereafter with increasing age. The crucial years in determining ego-strength are the first five years of life. Severe ego-dysfunction in those years is virtually irreversible. In the normal course of development a regular sequence of ego-crises and ego-achievement may be discerned. The first achievement of the ego in relation to experience is the attainment of a stable and facile distinction is the primary mark of functional psychosis, in which the introjection and projection no longer operate under the control of the ego. Paranoias and psychotic depressions and excitements are the diagnostic syndromes consequent upon such ego failure. A strong ego, on the other hand, consistently recognizes the independent and autonomous existence of objects other than itself, and also is able to take a reflective attitude toward its own existence and the laws of its being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Building upon this basic distinction of inner and outer sources of experience, the ego gradually attains mastery of bodily functions involving intake and output, which includes experiencing the erotic component is such functions. Such later character trains as the ability to get and to give good things, to hold on to what one wants and to let go when necessary, to be able to rise to the occasion, to make things go, to build and to conserve, to understand and to predicts, all have their beginnings in the early years when the most important ego-crises occur. The later achievements of the normal ego involve primarily the synthesis of these earlier acquisitions of mastery; the most important outcomes have to do with personal identity in work and in live, and finally with the individual’s participation in community experience, which would include some understanding of mortals in relation to nature, and of nature itself. The polarity which is shown ontologically in the process of nature is also shown in the human being. The paradox of love is that it is the highest degree of awareness of the self as a person and the highest degree of absorption in the other. The fact is that love is personal. It brings a heightened consciousness of relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Love contributes to the deepening of consciousness. The care which comes out of an awareness of the other’s needs and desires and the nuances of one’s feelings. The experience of concern emerges from the fact that people are able to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, are no longer isolated. Love creates a new field of magnetic force, a new being. Another aspect of the deepened consciousness comes from the affirmation of the self in love a it provides a sound and meaningful avenue to the sense of personal identity. When we know we are loved, we experience vigor and vitality which comes not from triumph or proof of one’s strength but from the expansion of awareness. However, even in our increased self-awareness it is possible to experience a poignant reminder that none of us ever overcomes our loneliness completely, but through acceptance of the spirit, the soul is replenished and a sense of our own personal significance is fortified, then the psyche is about to accept these limitations laid upon us by our human finiteness. That is why there is an enrichment and fulfillment—so far as this is possible—of personality. Beginning with the expansion of awareness of our own selves and our feelings, this consists of experiencing our capacity to give pleasure to others, and thereby achieving an expansion of meaning in the relationship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Love carries us beyond what we were at any given moment; I become literally more than what I was. Another aspect of new consciousness is possessed in the curious phenomenon that being able to give to others affirmation that they are worthy of life and essential to God’s plan. Some people feel that the one who loves us, will do many things necessary to show us that this is so; the actions are not the cause, however, but part of the total field. As we all know, the love experience is filled with pitfalls and disappointments and traumatic events for most of us. We have a great propensity for regulating life in minute detail and insofar as possible deciding in advance what is right and what is wrong or what is socially acceptable. And if we are successful in doing this, usually with the assistance of a religious or social class, then we can know in almost every situation what we should do. Then we no longer have to think or feel. We can rather automatically do what we know is right; or, failing that, we suffer the appropriate guilt for the sin or social blunder that we have committed. This makes for a safe, regulated kind of life. However, it also tends to be a joyless life from which most of the spontaneity and creativity has been removed. Although it is often maintained that a sense of responsibility demands a clear-cut view of right and wrong, it is more likely that such legalistic approaches actually undermine personal responsibility. For there are always areas of life, which are not always transparent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
When we ignore that fact that thing may not always be what they seem, arbitrarily seeing all factors in absolutes, we take ourselves off the hook of wrestling with the subtleties of the situation. We are in a position where we can uphold the right and denounce the evil. The relation between social character and social structure is never static, since both elements in this relationship are never-ending processes. A change in either factor means a change in both. Many political revolutionaries believe that one must first change the political and economic structure radically, and that then, as a second and almost necessary step, the human mind will also change: that the new society, once established, will quasiautomatically produce the new human being. They do not see that the new elite, being motivated by the same character as the old one, will tend to recreate the conditions of the old society in the new sociopolitical institutions the revolution has created; that the victory of the revolution will be its defeat as a revolution—although not as a historical phase that paved the way for the socioeconomic development that was hobbled in its fully development. On the other side are those who claim that first the nature of the human beings must change—their consciousness, their values, their character—and that only then can a truly human society be built. The history of the human race proves them wrong. Purely physical change has always remained in the private sphere and been restricted to small oases, or has been completely ineffective when preaching of spiritual values was combined with the practice of the opposite values. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The social character as a further and significant function beyond that of serving the needs of society for a certain type of character and satisfying the individual’s character-conditioned behavioral needs. Social character must fulfill any human being’s inherent religious needs. However, people’s religion may be conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love, of domination or of solidarity; it may further their power of reason or paralyze it. They may be aware of their system as being a religious one, different from those of the secular realm, or they may think that they have no religion, and interpret their devotion to certain allegedly secular sims, such as power, money, or success, as nothing but their concern for the practical and the expedient. The question is not one of religion or not? but of which kind of religion?—whether it is one that furthers human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyzes human growth. A specific religion, provided it is effective in motivating conduct, is not a sum total of doctrines and beliefs; it is rooted in a specific character structure of the individual and, inasmuch as it is the religion of a group, in the social character. Thus, our religious attitude may be considered an aspect of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our conduct. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their official beliefs for their real, though secret religion. If, for instance, a mortal worships power while professing a religion of love, the religion of power is one’s secret religion, while one’s so-called official religion, for example Christianity, in only an ideology. The religious need is rooted in the basic conditions of existence of the human species. Ours is a species by itself, just as is the species chimpanzee or horse or swallow. Each species can be and is defined by its specific physiological and anatomical characteristics. As being highly evolved, humans are no longer ruled by instincts alone. It is generally accepted that as higher beings human behavior is less determined by phylogenetically programmed instincts. The process of ever-decreasing determination of behavior by instinct can be contributed to a large and more complex brain structure; especially neocortex which is three times the size of that of primates, and a truly fantastic number of interneuronal connections. Considering these data, the human species can be defined as the beings who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination has reached the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brain a maximum. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
This combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal brain development has never occurred before in any living beings that we know of besides mortals. Lacking the full capacity to act by the command of instincts while possessing the capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination—new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primates—the human species needed a frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive. Without a map of our natural and social World—a picture of the World and of one’s place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion—human beings would be confused and unable to act purposeful and consistently, for there would be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that permits one to organize all the impressions that impinge upon each individual. Our World makes sense to us, and we feel certain about our ideas, through the consensus with those around us. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. However, the map has never been entirely wrong—nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living. Only to the degree that the practice of life is freed from its contradictions and its irrationality can the map correspond to reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The impressive fact is that no culture has been found in which such a frame of orientation does not exist. Neither has any individual. Often individuals may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that they respond to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as their judgment guides them. However, it can be easily demonstrated that they simply take their own philosophy for granted because to them it is only common sense, and they are unaware that all their concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference. When such persons are confronted with a fundamentally different total view of life, they judge it as crazy or irrational or juvenile, while they consider themselves as being only logical. The deep need for a frame of reference is particularly evident in youth. At a certain age, many youngsters will often make up their own frame of orientation in an ingenious way, using the few data available to them. However, a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective—not only our proclaimed—values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning to life. Socioeconomic structure, character structure, and religious structure are inseparable from each other. If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology. We have to look behind it for the real religious structures, even though we may not be conscious of it as such—unless the human energies inherent in the religious structure of character act as dynamite and tend to undermine the given socioeconomic conditions. However, as there are always individual expectations to dominant social character, there are also individual exceptions to the dominant religious character. They are often the leaders of religious revolutions and the founders of new religions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The religious orientation, as the experiential core of all high religions, has been mostly perverted in the development of these religions. The way individuals consciously conceive of their personal orientation does not matter; they may be religious without considering themselves to be so—or they may be nonreligious, although considering themselves Christian. We have no word to denote the experiential content of religion, aside from its conceptual and institutional aspect. Hence, we can never be sure what denotes religious in the experiential, subjective orientation, regardless of the conceptual structure in which the person’s religiosity is expressed. Rationalization is one of the more popular concepts of psychology and has found its way into everyday language. If I want very much to buy a very expensive stereo but cannot afford it, I might immediately begin listing all the stereo’s weaknesses and the reasons why it is just as well that I cannot buy it. And I may be told by a friend, “Stop rationalizing about the situation!” As long as we do our part, the Lord will bless us with prosperity and with the wisdom to keep our mind focused on what matters most in life. “However, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” reports Matthew 6.33. Those who seek riches to build up their own egos will find their treasure to be slippery and easily lost in unwise ways. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
God is not telling us that we should not be prosperous or the prosperity is a sin. On the contrary, he has always blessed his obedient children. However, God is telling us that we should seek prosperity only after we seek, find, and serve him. Then, because our hearts are right, because we love God first and foremost, we will choose to invest the riches we obtain in building his kingdom. If one choses to seek riches for the sake of riches, one will fall short. One will never be satisfied. One will be empty, never finding true happiness and lasting joy. The trial of your faith in the next few years will likely not be that you lack the material things of this World. Rather it will be in choosing what to do wit the temporal blessings one receives. To the extent that an adult person has achieved some freedom and identity as a self, one has a base from which to acquire wisdom in the past traditions of one’s society and to take it one’s own. However, if this freedom is missing, traditions block rather than enrich. They may become an internalized set of traffic rules, but they will have little or no fructifying influence on one’s inward development as a person. Whatever view we hold, it must be shown why every person has a wish to make some other kind of otherness one’s own: Perhaps, in fact, we are never alone. God has saved for the final inning some of his strongest souls, who will help bear off the kingdom triumphantly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Beside Your Twinkling Door is All the Golden Presence of Time and Eternity
It was an engine of great and continuous healing. However, what drew her through the World were project yet unrevealed for which she had the wealth, the knowledge, the laserlike vision, the nerve and the personal energy. Some people tend characteristically to isolate affect and avoid psychological self-examination; they tend to be strangers in their own life. This, indeed, has implications for social communities as well as individuals, inasmuch as it suggests that the organization that fosters prejudice might well be forfeiting the kind of emotional flexibility that is necessary if time of crisis it is to cure its own ills. Everyone alive has troubles and problems, and as we learned from our studies of sound individuals, the most important consideration in determining personal effectiveness is not the amount of trouble or misfortune (within limits) a person encounters, but how one responds to the vicissitudes and challenges of life. This capacity to meet problems without being dismayed or overwhelmed, to endure suffering and face great loss without foundering, is an aspect of psychological strength and vitality that deserves special study. Believe it or not there are people who envy the mental salubrity of psychoneurotic patients who are about to improve. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
That is because the greater vividness of psychopathology often tends to obscure the egosynthetric or constructive forces in the behavior of a psychologically disturbed individual, so that a prognostic evaluation is generally more difficult to make than a diagnostic evaluation. From time to time, people give in to madness as if it were strong drink, drawing in memories of guilt, all judgment and sense of proportion last, murmuring confessions of unworthiness and half-explored plots of escape that would seal them off from all expectations. Nevertheless, in spite of the saliency of psychopathology in the clinical picture, it may be presumed that the patient has certain latent strengths which will gradually show themselves, particularly as the psychological crisis that brings one to therapy subsides. What the item content of the prediction generally ascribed to a well-functioning ego, ad that latent egostrength is the most important determinant (within the patient) of response to brief psychotherapy. At precious moments people regard their sanity as their State of Grace, and the therapist is the Demon who has brought them back to it. Another tendency which is nourished by religious dependency is that of getting one’s feeling of worth, prestige and power through identifying with someone else. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
This usually takes form of identifying with an idealized figure of minister, priest, rabbi, bishop, or whoever above one in the hierarchy as prestige and power. Again this tendency is not confined to religion; it is present in business, politics and other aspects of community life. It is a regular phenomenon in psychotherapy called transference, and shows itself, among other ways, in the patient’s needing to build the therapist up and to get the prestige from the fact that the therapist is well known. However, in therapy it is regarded as a problem to be eventually worked though so that the individual will come to see one’s therapist as the real person one is, and obtain one’s own feelings of worth and prestige from one’s own activities rather than the therapist’s. This tendency in religion seems to rest on a deeper level than in some other areas of social living. It of course receives reinforcement from deteriorated interpretations of vicarious suffering and atonement. It is as though everyone were trying to live vicariously through someone else, until no one knows where he or she him or herself is. It is amazing how easily the Christian teaching of love can deteriorate into everyone’s agreeing, “If you take responsibility for me, I will for you.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The neurotic uses of religion have one thing in common: they are devices by which the individual avoids having to face one’s loneliness and anxiety. God is made into a cosmic papa. Religion in this form is a rationalization for covering up the realization—a realization which contains a good deal of terror for those who take it seriously—that the human beings is in the depths of one’s self basically alone, and that there is no recourse from the necessity of making one’s choices ultimately alone. However, if the need to escape terror and loneliness are the main motives for turning to God, one’s religion will not help one toward maturity or strength; and it will not even give one security in the long run. Despair and anxiety can never be worked through until one confronts them in their stark and fully reality. Tis truth is obviously just as valid psychologically. Maturity and eventual overcoming of loneliness are possible only as one courageously accepts one’s aloneness to begin with. It often occurs to me that the reason Dr. Freud was able to work with such courage and unswerving purpose throughout the last forty years of his life was that he won the battle of being able to grow and work alone in the first solitary ten years, when, after he had separated from Dr. Breuer, he pursued his explorations into psychoanalysis with neither colleague nor co-worker. Dr. Freud was so prolific that many believed he was a prophet of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
It seems to me, further, that what Dr. Freud went through is the battle the creative ethical figures like Jesus win in the wilderness, that the real meaning of the temptations with which Jesus wrestled was not in the desire for bread or power, but in the temptation, as put in the words of the Devil in the story, to throw himself down from the mountain to prove that God was protecting him: He will give his Angels charge of you; they will bear you on their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. When one has been able to say “No” to the need that one be “borne up,” when, in other words, one is able not to demand one be taken care of, when one has the courage to stand alone, one can then speak as one with authority. And did not Spinoza’s refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean his winning the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all tie, could not have been written? “So powerful was the Spirit of God; and thus it had wrought upon them” reports 1 Nephi 17.52. The person knows that virtue is happiness, not a claim check for it; the love of God is its own reward, and beauty and truth are to be loved because they are good, and not because they will redound to the credit of the artist or scientist or philosopher who loves them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Spinoza of course does not at all mean to imply the martyr-like, sacrificial, masochistic attitude for which his sentence might be mistake. He rather is stating in its most unequivocal form the basic characteristic of the objective, mature, creative person (in hos words the blessed and joyful person), namely the capacity to love something for its own sake, not for the sake of being taken care of or gaining a counterfeit feeling of prestige and power. Certainly loneliness and anxiety can be constructively met. Though this cannot be done through the deus ex machina of a cosmic papa, it can be achieved through the individual’s conforming directly the various crises of one’s development, moving from dependence to greater freedom and higher integration by developing and utilizing one’s capacities, and relation to one’s fellows through creative work and love. This does not imply that there is no such thing as authority in religion or any other field. It does not imply that the question of authority should first be put the other way around, that is, as the question of personal responsibility. For authoritarianism (the neurotic form of authority) grows in direct proportion to the degree in which the individual is trying to avoid responsibility for meeting one’s problems one’s self. In therapy, for example, it is precisely the times when the patient feels some special or overpowering anxiety that one seeks to make an authority of the therapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And the fact that at these times one tends to identify the therapist with God and one’s parent presents another proof for the contention above: that one is searching for someone to whom one can hand one’s self over for care. Fortunately it is not difficult to demonstrate that the therapist is not God—and it is a red-letter day in a patient’s therapy when one discovers this fact and is not frightened. Instead of trying to argue with one’s self or others on the merits of various authorities, therefore, it is better initially to confront one’s self, in self-scrutiny, with the question: “What anxiety makes me now wish to run to the wings of an authority, and what problem of my own am I trying to evade?” The upshot of this discussion is that religion is constructive as it strengthens the person in one’s own dignity and worth, assists one in one’s confidence that one can affirm values in life, and helps one in the use and development of one’s own ethical awareness, freedom and personal responsibility. Thus religious faith or practices like prayer cannot be called good or bad in themselves. The question is, rather, how much one’s freedom, a way of becoming less of a person; or how much it is a way of strengthening one in the exercise of one’s own responsibility and ethical power. The person praised in Jesus’ parable in Matthew was not the one who was afraid and buried one’s talent, but the persons who courageously used their talents; and these, the good and faithful persons, were given more power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
One of our most deep-rooted ideals is our desire for freedom, both at a personal and a collective level. Words such as those from the New Testament—“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” (John 8.32)—strike a deeply emotional chord in most of our hearts. Yet, while all of us pay lip service to freedom and our desire for it, we are also very much afraid of it. We talk about personal freedom, but we tend to shy from it. Amanda was married to a man who had always tended to be exceedingly critical of her. He made unreasonable demands of her and attempted to dominate her entire life. She in turn tended to play a weak, helpless role in relationship to him. In general, she did little to oppose his bullying attitudes. When he was around, at least, she was the obedient slave; and he was the ruthless tyrant. Things began to change, however, after Amanda sought help through psychotherapy. Out of a growing sense of her own value as a person she began to stand on her own feet. She started doing things she did not think he would tolerate. She refused to accept unjust criticism. When he falsely accused her, she fought back. To her amazement he did not react with the brutality that she expected. Instead he showed that he felt more respect and warmth toward her than he ever had when she was so compliant. As her self-respect grew, his respect for her also appeared to grow. Gradually, she became aware of the exhilarating fact that she was not enslaved. She was much more free to do as she wished than she ever thought she could be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, at this point Amanda had a very interesting reaction. When she spoke of it, she said, “You know, I have the funniest feeling. Now that I have this freedom to do everything I have ever wanted to do, I do not know what to do with it. I guess I am frightened. It is almost as though I needed him to criticize me, and act like t dictator, and make me feel trapped!” Maybe Amanda was codependent or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The conclusion that we are afraid of freedom seems inescapable when we examine the lengths to which we go to enslave ourselves. For example, men and women who see a therapist for help with personal or family problems often spend much time trying to convince their counselor and themselves that they are not free to do what they want to do. Listen to what some of them say, and you will probably recognize some of you own feelings. A mother says, “I can’t do the thing I’d really like to do. I feel it’s my duty to spend my free time with my youngsters.” A husband says, “If I were ever really myself and told my wife how I really feel about her, she would leave me in a minute.” Nearly everyone says, “If I said the things I really want to say to people, no one would like me. Or, “I can’t let people see what I’ like because then they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” And everyone says, “I have so many things I just have to do, that I’m never free to do the thing I want to do.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A working wife says, “I’d like to quit my job, but I don’t see how we could get along.” A nonworking wife (an unemployed wife, that is!) says, “I really want to work, but I feel it’s my duty to stay at home.” Perhaps it can be summed up by stating that we all have a tendency to say in one way or another, “Poor me, I’m just a helpless victim of circumstances.” My, how we kid ourselves! For when we are realistic about it, we have to recognize that there are few if any things that we have to do. We do what we do and avoid doing what we do not do because we choose it that way. We always have alternatives. So it is with the trapped feeling in marriage. One man said to his wife, “If it weren’t for you and the kids, I’d go to the beach and become a surfer.” He was considerably shook up when his wife replied, “Well, if that’s what you want, why don’t you want, why don’t you go ahead. Nothing’s really preventing you!” Later, in telling about it, he said, “You know, she was right! If I really wanted to, I could leave her and head for the beach. But when I no longer felt trapped, I realized I don’t really want to be a beach bum. In fact, the whole idea is rather distasteful!” As long as he could maintain the fantasy that he was trapped, this man could ignore the frightening fact that he loves his wife and children and is staying married by choice rather than because he must. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The old cliché is true. We do not have to do anything but die and pay taxes. (And, of course, we can refuse to do the latter if we are willing to suffer the consequences!) We always have alternative courses of action, but we constantly try to convince ourselves otherwise. We must be terribly frightened of discovering that we are free to do pretty much what we want to do. Our fear of freedom expresses itself in many ways. Our resistance to change is probably one such expression. For example, during the times recorded in the New Testament early Christians apparently found it very difficult to give up the old ceremonial laws that had been traditional with Judaism for centuries. One would think that this would have been easy for Christians to do. They had embraced a young faith that said it was no longer necessary to perform the many daily ritualistic laws that virtually enslaved those who seriously tried to follow them. The reluctance to give up such observances seems hard to understand unless we see that it must have been terribly frightening o people suddenly to have almost unlimited freedom. And no doubt the same sort of thing happens constantly today in both our institutional and our personal lives. In religious, political, educational, economic, and social life, we probably cling to many time-consuming rituals and customs that no longer have any relevance to life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
These irrelevant rituals and customs probably serve mainly to keep our daily lives somewhat predictable and provide the security of a self-limited freedom. Much of the tension between generations likely results from the resistance to change that parents express. Most changes, like the more extensive use of the BMW M5, for example, seem to us parents to be in the direction of granting our children more freedom. We are frightened of freedom for ourselves; we are also afraid of our children having it. Religious impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one. The starting point of these reflections is the statement that the character structure of the average individual and the socioeconomic structure of the society of which he or she is a part are interdependent. I call the blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socioeconomic structure social structure. The socioeconomic structures of a society molds the social character of its members so that they wish to do what they have to do. Simultaneously, the social character influences the socioeconomic structure of society, acting either as cement to give further stability to the social structure or, under special circumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social structure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
You will have some promptings of the Spirit that will be unusual for you. The reason that will happen is because all of God’s children are precious to the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be afraid of the future. Do not let anything that is going on in the World, that is happening now, slow you down from our progress in mortality. Everything may not by lined up like you expect, but fret not. Always remember that God—the Creator of the Universe, the architect of our salvation is in control. We should replace fear with faith—Faith in God and the power of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. Many of the amazing discoveries made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields of endeavor were the result of the Spirit whispering insights into and enlightening the mind of truth-seeking individuals and these innovations will continue to happen in the future. With these discoveries and advances will come new employment opportunities and prosperity for those who work hard and especially for those who strive to keep the commandants of God. This has been the case in other significant periods of national and international economic growth. Many of these discoveries will happen on a divine timetable and will quicken the World of God in building his kingdom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Was Promised I Would be Taken Care of if I Was Obedient: Look How Obedient I Have Been, so Why am I Not Take Care of?
I hope we have given you what you need. As for the files, I will see that they are all copied and delivered to you wherever you like. They will prove our efforts to track down ever lead. Poor prognosis in mental health is generally associated with subclinical psychotic trends, which refer to a more sever ego dysfunction than first clinical impression seems to indicate. Depression and anxiety are salient features of the clinical picture in almost all patients who seek psychotherapy in the outpatient clinic; but the patients who fail to improve are those in whom paranoid and schizoid features underlie the psychoneurotic symptoms. A reasonable guess would be that their personal difficulties are more chronic and characterologically based, in contrast to the more accurate and situation-linked problems of the patients who improve. In one study, the expectation was that above 70 percent of patients would improve. Actually, 75 to 80 patients showed improvement. What was noticed in the relationships is it seems that the patients who are most likely to get well are those who are not very sick in the first place. Another way of putting this is to say that patients who are more integrated to begin with are better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to solve whatever problems brought them into therapy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A corollary is that the potential gains from therapy should increase as therapy progresses, at least up to the point where the critical problem for the patient is to become genuinely independent of the therapist. By that time, of course, the therapeutic process has become internalized, and personality problems have been brought into the ego, to be dealt with rationally and objectively. Another escape hatch from feeling hatred toward one’s self is the attempt to win acceptance from others by pleasing them. It is important to examine this tendency closely because it is subtle and therefore often misunderstood. In the initial stages, at least, the children who are its victims are frequently mistake as healthy, well-adjusted children. When they are caught in the bind of increasing feelings of worthlessness and self-hate, some children will, in their effort to escape, make desperate attempts to win acceptance by attempting to meet what they perceive to be the requirements of their parents. They attempt to please and thereby win their parents’ love. One might tend to assume that such an individual would come out all right. After all, one would think that the child, by attempting to please, would win expressions of love and acceptance and no cycle of rejection would result. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Unfortunately, it usually does not work that way, for parents whose children take this approach to dealing with self-hate have probably created the youth’s feelings of rejection and worthlessness by making unrealistic demands on the individual and by encouraging the youth to feel that their acceptance of him or her is conditional upon one’s performance. It is as though the child feels the parents are saying to the individual, “We will love you if you and when you live up to our standards.” Under these circumstances the youth’s efforts to win acceptance and a feeling of self-worth by attempting to please his or her parents are almost certain to fail for two reasons. First of all, the child’s performance will probably never be quite good enough. It is clear that the parents have considerable doubt about their own adequacy as parents and are afraid of the open expression of love, otherwise they would not have needed to make their love seem to hinge on the child’s (even applies to adult children) behavior. These same qualities will make it difficult for the parents to respond with real enthusiasm even to excellent accomplishments. One woman, Jane, in an effort to gain her mother’s approval, got a job at a law firm. She dressed like them, spoke their jargon, and catered to the partners. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The young lady was excited to tell her mother that she was an associate at a law firm, and she was fairly successful at this. She could hardly wait until the next weekend to visit with her parents, because she was eager to tell them of her success. She walked into the house bubbling over with the exciting news. Her mother’s only reaction was, “Why couldn’t you have becoming a partner?” Since she was exposed to such attitudes of her parents all of her childhood, it is no wonder that now, fifteen years after that incident, she still tried to prove her worth to the World, her parents, and, most of all, to herself. The second reason why efforts to win acceptance through pleasing are doomed to failure is that the individual’s self-hate is increased, because one feels a loss of freedom to be a genuine individual in one’s own right. When a child grows up with a feeling that one must strive at all times to perform adequately and that love will be given and withdrawn on the basis of one’s performance, one never feels free to be one’s self. One resents others and one’s self because one is not becoming an independent person who is loved and respected because of is rather than because of what one does. Jane is in the predicament a lot of adults are in. Jane was reared in a strict, religious household in which great emphasis was put on her career success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Jane became so involved in the need to please by being successful in her career at the law firm that she began overworking herself very early in her legal career. Whenever she took on another case, she knew she could not handle with the heavy load she already had, Jane would suffer a great deal of anxiety about the possibility of not having enough times. On several occasions—when she saw no way of successfully handling her case load in the time constraints—she went to the yoga studio and deliberately twisted and twirled in such a way that she became physically ill. It would then be necessary for her to all in sick at work and dump her case load on someone else, thus avoiding the necessity of admitting she took on too much. Jane went through terrifying torments of guilt and self-hate, since she lived in a household where lying and cheating would be considered a great sin. Jane felt that God condemned her. It is no surprise that she also believed no one could possibly love her for herself—and certainly could not love her as she had become—if they really knew her. Yet on the surface Jane managed somehow to appear to live a successful and happy life. She was able to conceal her self-torment from others. She appeared to win a good deal of acceptance, but all the time her self-loathing was being reinforced. It was not until she was in her forties and had a family of her own that she was able through psychotherapy to share these feelings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Only when Jane was able to finally share her feelings could she experience relief from the feeling of being a fraud and discover that people’s love for her was not based on the image of herself that she had so carefully constructed in order to win acceptance. Jane is an extreme example, to be sure, but there are many people who are caught in some form of the attempt to win acceptance through pleasing. Sometimes it is the quiet one in a classroom who never gives the teacher or anyone else any trouble, but who also never seems to be able to join in the fun in a spontaneous way and who is terribly afraid of making a mistake. Adults who have an obsession with keeping things organized or clean or who demand perfection of themselves in other ways likely developed the pattern trying to please parents. When these people became parents themselves they, too, because of their own fears and feelings of self-hate, may become subtly rejecting, giving the feeling to their children that they must perform at a certain standard if they are to win mother’s or dad’s love. The cycle ensues: Feelings of rejection, become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate, and there is an escape through attempting to win acceptance, and there is further rejection (he or she never quite measures up to what I expect), and then there are more feelings of worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is appropriate here to speak of the harmful effects that a certain kind of religious training can have on children’s lives. Although they make speak of love as being of first importance in human affairs, churches often become preoccupied with rigid rules of conduct, betraying a deep mistrust of spontaneity in behavior. The church then tends to condemn any failure to measure up to its standards. Under these circumstances the churches create a community where the members do not experience of love for each other but rather in which they feel on guard and constantly in danger of condemnation. These attitudes, of course, extend into the family lives of members of the religious group. The result is that some religious families are among the most psychologically damaging to their children. Perhaps much of the damaging effect comes because of the confusing message that the judgments and the condemnation are a result of the love of the parents for the child. Such parents often say, “We only say these things to you because we love you so much and want you to be happy.” And the fact that the parents are sincere and do not recognize that their need to judge, condemn, and mistrust themselves, and resulting fears only makes the message that much more subtle and more difficult for the child to cope with. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Ashely is a young woman who grew up in this kind of religious family. Her father was an attorney, and he was also a perfectionist and a stanch religionist. Ashley was always made aware that it was very important to him that she succeed in her schooling. In fact she felt that her father’s love was dependent on her achievement. Although she was a very bright girl, Ashley did not respond favorably to these demands. She did not do well in school and dropped out of college, an action of which her father strongly disapproved. Not long thereafter, however, she—on her own initiative—became a skilled legal secretary as a result of her own initiative. She thoroughly enjoyed her work and made a good living for herself. Instead of being delighted about her success, her father continued to express his disappointment and criticize her for not having made full use of her talents by securing a college degree. Whatever she did, it was never quite good enough. It is not surprising that Ashley, having been exposed all her life in her religious home to such demands, has also tended to see God as demanding an impossible kind of perfection from her. She never thinks of God loving her just as she is. God is made into the image of her father. It is not unusual at all in such circumstances that we come to imagine that God embodies the criticism we feel of ourselves and that which we eel from our religious parents. We become paranoid about God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This feeling is illustrated by another woman who dreamed one night that Jesus was looking at her in a very stern and condemning manner. Gradually, in the dream, the face of Jesus changed into the face of her mother, who did indeed tend to be very critical of her, but subtly so an in the name of religion. In families like this the force of religion and the religious community often feed into and become an important part of the cycle of rejection. The child initially feels rejection from parents who themselves are full of self-hate and fears and therefore are unable to express their love as openly as they might. As the child grown old enough to be impressed with somewhat more sophisticated ideas, religious teaching, formal and informal, may enter in to fortify these feelings of rejection. The subtlety of the teaching varies a great deal according to the orientation and the sophistication of the religious group. However, the child is likely to receive the message that one is evil by nature and that one dare not trust one’s feelings or impulses. One is likely to feel, even though one may be assured that it is not true, that not only one’s parents but also God and the members of one’s religious community will not like the individual if one does not meet prescribed standards of behavior. These are ideal conditions for the flourishing of feelings of worthlessness of self-hate, which are often accompanied by strong feelings of guilt, often of a generalized unspecific nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Eventually the child seeks one or more ways of escape from the self-hatred in the form of some actual or fantasied, neurotic or delinquent behavior. However, there is no escape. If one’s feeling or behavior is detected, one feels condemned by parents and the religious community. If one is not found out, one is in the position—which may be even more psychologically dangerous—of feeling. “They’d sure condemn me if they really knew me.” In either case one feels condemned by a critical God who sees all and knows one’s innermost thoughts. And so the cycle is completed as these further feelings of rejection intensify one’s feelings of worthlessness. The cycle goes this way: Feelings of rejection by parents (increased by the feeling that one is evil by nature in God’s sight), giving way to feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate, leading an escape hatch (neurotic or delinquent behavior or fantasies), which become further feelings of rejection (my parents and my religious community condemn me or would if they really knew me. In any case God does know me and condemns me) and this opens to greater feelings of worthlessness. So our personality problems and difficulties with others have their origins in our childhood experiences. Our fear of love arises out of feelings of rejection and the subsequent feelings of worthlessness and self-hate that begin when we are children. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Because childhood experiences are recognizes as being crucial importance, the professions that offer psychological help are often accused, and perhaps with some justification, of teaching people to blame their parents for their problems. While there is no doubt that parents play an important role in child development, it is a waste of time to attempt to pin responsibility on them. It is much more helpful to see the problem in terms of the universality of the fear of love. As parents we are afraid of emotional closeness, even with our children. Perhaps this is not so surprising since no one matters more to us and, therefore, no one has greater power to hurt us. Consequently, we resist letting them see our genuine selves—how lonely, frightened, and capable of being hurt we are. Our children experience this withholding of ourselves and our genuine feelings of rejection. In any discussion of religion and personality integration, the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Dr. Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. Any area in life may be used as a compulsive neurosis: philosophy may be a flight from reality into a harmonious system as a protection from the anxiety and disharmonies of day-to-day life or it may be a courageous endeavor to understand reality better. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Science may be used as a rigid, doctrine of faith by which one escapes emotional insecurity and doubt, or it may be an open minded search for new truth. Indeed, since faith in science has been more acceptable intelligent circles in our society and therefore is less apt to be questioned, it may well be that in our day this faith more frequently plays the role of a compulsive escape from uncertainties than does religion. Dr. Freud, however, was correct technically—as he so often was—in that he asked the right questions with respect to religion: does it increase dependency and keep the individual infantile? Nor are those on the other side correct who say glibly and with comfort to the masses that religion makes for mental health. Some religion certainly does and some decidedly does not. All of these blanket statements would relieve us of the much more difficult question of penetrating to the inner meaning of the religious attitudes, and assessing them not as theoretical beliefs but as functioning aspects of the person’s organic relation to one’s life. For example, a mother and daughter had agreed when the daughter was very young that her life was always to be directed by the will of God. And the will of God, it was further agreed, was to be revealed to the daughter through the mother’s prayers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
One can well shudder to think how thoroughly this would open the girl to domination in every act and thought by the mother! How then could the girl’s own capacity to choose be anything but stifled—which the girl painfully discovered when, in her late twenties, she was caught in an insoluble dilemma because she could not make an autonomous marriage decision. This example may seem extreme, since the mother and daughter belonged to a conservative evangelical sect and the pattern is not covered over by sophisticated rationalizations. It illustrates that when a person sees one’s self as the mouthpiece or partner of God, as did the mother, there is no limit to the possibilities of arrogating to one’s self power over others. This use of religion comes out frequently and vividly when a person in therapeutic sessions is struggling to establish some freedom from parental control. The parents then often, with various degrees of subtlety, make their central stand on the argument that it is the younger person’s religious obligation to remain under the parents’ direction, that it is in effect God’s will that one continue under the parents’ control. In letters which persons in therapy often receive from parents at such times, the parent of course quotes such Biblical passages as “Honor thy father and thy mother,” rather than the later ethic of Jesus as shown in the New Testament passage we quoted above, “a person’s foes shall be those of one’s own household (Matthew 10.34-39).” #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Most parents would insist verbally, of course, that they wish only to have the child fulfill his or her own potentialities. They are often quite unaware of the unconscious needs to hang on to the younger person. However, the fact that they so often behave as though the son’s or daughter’s fulfillment were to be achieved only by remaining under their control reveals something quite different from their conscious intentions. The son’s or daughter’s becoming free often stirs up some deep anxiety in the parent, an anxiety which shows how difficult it is for parents in our society really to be in the indigenous potentialities of the child (perhaps because it is so hard for them to believe in their own potentialities), and how strong is the tendency of all entrenched authority to keep its power even at the price of breaking the other person into submission. The conflicts are made more complex because the younger person struggling for autonomy has often been inculcated with a deep sense of doom if one does not obey parental percept. And one is already generally fighting considerable anxiety and guilt feelings within one’s self over one’s effort to be free. Often at this stage persons have dreams in which they are guilty yet not guilty—guilty, yet having to go ahead. One such person dreamed that he was being cited as guilty by Senator McCarthy in the Senate, though he knew within himself that he really was not guilty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The problem of being prey to someone else’s power is reinforced, of course, by one’s own infantile desires to be taken care of. Thus there are tendencies within one’s self to give one’s self over to the dominating person. About half my own psychotherapeutic work over the past ten years has been with persons from specifically religious backgrounds and in the religious professions, and about half with person of no specific religious background or interest. There are some illuminating psychological effects of religious training in our society. There is an attitude—the strong interest in doing something about one’s problems—it is a function of the person’s confidence in meaning and value in life, is one constructive contribution of a mature religion and, generally has an energizing influence of therapy. However, the attitude of the divine right to be taken care of is quite something else. It is one of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity in therapy as well as in life in general. It is generally difficult for such people to see their demand to be taken care of as a problem to be analyzed and overcome, and they often react with hostility and a feeling of being ripped off when their right is not honored. Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early says when they sang the song in Saturday or Sunday school to the present vulgarized from of the same idea in many movies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, on a deeper level, the demand to be take care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons had to give up so much. They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his or her master. So they are being ripped off of the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist of God—does not extend them special care. They have been taught that happiness and success would follow their being good, the latter generally interpreted as being obedient. However, being merely obedient, as we have shown above, undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength. By being obedient to external requirements over a long period of time, one loses one’s real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished. And since happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, the person who surrenders one’s ethical autonomy has relinquished to the same degree one’s power to attain virtue and happiness. No wonder one feels resentful. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
When we look at how the obedience morality, the emphasis on being good by subordinating one’s self, got its power in modern culture, we can see more concretely what these people have had to give up. It takes its modern form largely from patterns copied from the development of industrialism and capitalism in the last four centuries. Now the subordination of the person to mechanical uniformity, the arranging of one’s life to fit the requirements of work and parsimony, did bring financial and, as a result, social success during the major part of the modern period. One could argue persuasively that salvation follows obedience, for if one was obedient to the demands of work in an industrial society, one tended to accumulate money. Anyone who has read of the business acumen of the Early Quakers and Puritans, for example, knows how well these economic and moral attitudes worked together. The Quaker dollar was a concrete solace for the great resentment engendered in the middle class because of the emotional privations they suffered in this obedience system. However, time change, as we have indicated, and in our day early to bed and early to rise may make a mortal healthy, but there is no guarantee that it will make one wealthy and wise. Ben Franklin’s precepts, tithing and daily fidelity to routine work, no longer ensure success, and this is why some are trying to Make America Great Again so people have an opportunity at the American Dream, which is a product of capitalism and freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The religious person, furthermore, particularly if one is a minister or otherwise engaged in professional religious work, has had to give up a realistic attitude toward money. One is not supposed to require that one be paid such and such a salary. In many religious circles it is considered undignified to talk about money, as if being paid, like toilet activities, is a necessary part of life but the ideal is to act as though it does not really occur. Labor groups, adapting to the changing economic times of mass industry, have recognized that God does not send the pay check by raven’s mouth as food was sent to Elijah of old, and they have learned though their unions to bring pressure to bear to get adequate wages. However, people in religious professions cannot strike for higher wages. Instead the church is supposed to take care of the minister financially and otherwise; one is given discounts on the railroad and in department stores; tuition in seminaries is lower than in other graduate schools—all of which is not calculated to increase the minister’s self-respect or others’ respect for one in our particular society. The fact that the religious person is not supposed to take active steps to ensure one’s financial security is another evidence of the underlying assumption in our society that material security will somehow come automatically if one is good, an assumption closely connected with the belief that God will take care of you. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Thus it is easy to see why the person in our society who is taught to be good by subordinating oneself, and only discovers sooner or later that one does not even get economic rewards for doing so, let alone happiness, should have so much resentment and anger. It is this buried resentment which gives the dynamic to the demand to be take care of. It is as though the person were silently saying, “I was promised I would be taken care of if I was obedient: look how obedient I have been, so why am I not taken care of? The belief in the divine right to be take care of often brings with it the feeling that one has a right to exercise power over others. That is to say, if one believes that persons should be under the power of others, one will not only submit one’s self to some more powerful persons for the purpose of getting care, but one will feel it is one’s duty to take care of—and to exercise power over—some person subordinate to one on the scale. This tendency is illustrated in its more sadistic form in the statement of one man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man with whom he lived even to the extent of taking the latter’s pay check every Saturday and putting him on an allowance, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
We should not abuse the soul of other individuals. Freedom and light have never been easy to attain or maintain. Since the War in Heaven, the forces of evil have used every means possible to destroy agency and extinguish light. The assault on moral principle and religious freedom have never been stronger. Our primary purpose must be to seek truth and light. My personal experience of living and interacting with people all over the World has caused me to be optimistic. I believe that light and truth will be preserved in our time. In all nations there are large numbers who worship God and feel accountable to God for their conduct. Some people accept the proof that there is no Hell in the hereafter and no demons to burn them or in other ways give them eternal punishment, so they do not fear death, and this is why they abuse the scriptures. Other people are concerned with being good and death because of their own deep human feelings and their own active sympathy for human kind, including themselves. Most people are still also respectful of basic moral values. It is a symbol of them trying to hang on to their loved ones—the most powerful symbol that mortal’s life transcends all the natural explanations. The majority of people, even some who have different beliefs than us, aspire to be good and honorable. The Light of Christ, which is distinct from the Holy Ghost, is vivid proof that the meaning of life is informing our conscious with love and a message of inevitable salvation. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Aliveness is Conducive to Joy, as the Wise think about Life—The Past is Such a Curious Creature
We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not image it. Aliveness is conducive to joy. Many people read the word joy as pleasure, but the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, particularly so in reference to the distinction between the being and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the differences, since we live in a World of joyless pleasures. What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in different ways, considering its popular thought, it seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied. Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in having social success, earning more money, winning a lottery; the conventional pleasures of the flesh; eating to one’s heart’s content; winning a race; the state of elation brought about by drinking, trance, elicit substances; the pleasures in satisfying one’s sadism, or one’s passion to alter what is alive. Of course, in order to become rich of famous, individuals must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the sense of birth within. When they have achieved their goal they may be thrilled, intensely satisfied, feel they have reached a peak. However, what peak? Maybe a peak of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or orgiastic state. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, they may have reached this state driven by passions that, though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. However, they are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures. In this respect, modern society is in the same position the Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins. Moses said: “You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things,” reports Deuteronomy 28.47. Joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a peak experience, which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one’s essential human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have not increased. One has made the attempt to break through the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has unified all one’s energies—expect reason and love. One has attempted to become superhuman, without being human. One seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has changed within oneself. As is to be expected, joy must play a central role in those religious and philosophical systems that proclaim being as the goal of life. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin. Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourself. Our human center does not lie in ourselves, but in the authority to which we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own productive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing approval by the authority. We have a leader (secular or spiritual, king/queen or God) in whom we have faith; we have security as long as we are humble. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The submission to God is not necessarily conscious as such, it can be mild or severe, the psychic and social structure need not blind us to the fact that we live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian structure of our society. By submission or by domination or by trying to silence reason and awareness—these ways succeed only for the moment, and block the road to a true solution. There is but one way to save ourselves from this Hell: to leave the prison of our egocentricity, to reach out and to one ourselves with the World. If egocentric separateness is the cardinal sin, then the sin is atoned in the act of loving. The very word atonement expresses this concept, for it etymologically derives from atonement, the Middle-English expression for union. Since the sin of separateness is not an act of disobedience, it does not need to be forgiven. However, it does need to be healed; and love, not acceptance of punishment, is the healing factor. The concept of sin as disunion has been expressed by some of the church fathers, who followed Jesus’ nonauthoritarian concept of sin, and suggests where there are sins there is diversity. However, where virtue rules there is uniqueness, there is oneness. Through Adam’s sin the human race, which should be a harmonious whole without conflict between mine and thine, was transformed into a dust cloud of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Similar thoughts concerning the destruction of the original unity in Adam can also be found in the idea that the fact of salvation appears necessary as the regaining of the lost oneness, as the restitution of the supernatural oneness with God and at the same time the oneness of mortals among each other. The concept of sin and repentance tells us that we shall be as Gods for an examination of the whole problem of sin. In the having mode, and thus the authoritarian structure, sin is disobedience and is overcome by repentance: punishment, renewed submission. In the being mode, the nonauthoritarian structure, sin is unresolved estrangement, and it is overcome by the full unfolding of reason and love, by at-onement. One can indeed interpret the story of the Fall in both ways, because the story itself is a blending of authoritarian and liberating elements. However, in themselves the concept of sin as, respectively, disobedience and alienation are diametrically opposed. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel seems to contain the same idea. The human race reached here a state of union, symbolized by the fact that all humanity has one language. By their own ambition for power, by their craving to have the great tower, the people destroy their unity and are disunited. In a sense, the story of the Tower is the second Fall, the sin of historical humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The story is complicated by God’s disapproving of the people’s unity and power being used to attack him. “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech,” reports Genesis 11.6-7. Of course, the same difficulty already exists in the story of the Fall; there God is afraid of the power that man and woman would exercise if they ate of the fruit of both trees. There are two escae hatches that it is well to examine in more detail because they play so important a part in many families, spiritual or human. One of these is the attempt to escape from feelings of self-hate by hating others. This involves a mental process psychologist call projection. When a motion picture projector casts a picture on a screen, what the view sees is not determined primarily by the screen, although its quality can affect the image. The picture comes from within the projector, although the viewer may become so lost in the drama unfolding on the screen that one is no longer consciously aware of the source of the image. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the phenomenon of projection, psychologically speaking, the individual is both the projection machine and the viewer. In other words, a person sees what he or she projects onto the screen. In many ways, by using various scientific methods, psychologists have shown that all of us do a great deal of projecting, some of us more than others. In other words, when we look out at the World around us our view of reality is more or less distorted by the image we project, without conscious awareness, from our own minds. So, for example, psychologists have demonstrated that if we are shown a broken line drawing suggesting some image with which we are familiar, we have a tendency to complete that image in our mind when we look at the incomplete drawing. Projection is an important consideration here, because we have a tendency to project onto others qualities or feelings that we cannot accept ourselves. Thus, for example, a person who cannot accept his or her own feelings about pleasures of the flesh may feel that every man or woman who glances at him or her is out to seduce one. Since the feeling that we hate ourselves is such a threat to us, we cannot accept it in ourselves. Projection of self-hate onto others becomes one readily available way of avoiding these feelings. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
It is no surprise, then, that some children faced with frequent situations in which they feel rejected by others learn to avoid the feelings of worthlessness and self-hate by this means. Instead of being aware of the feeling, “I hate myself,” such a child will feel “They hate me!” It is only a small step further, of course, for the child’s reaction to be “Since they hate me, I hate them.” The child then has a target toward which to express all of the hostility seething within one—hostility because one feels worthless and because one has been rejected. When we project feelings we do not choose our targets indiscriminately. They usually make some kind of sense. A natural target for the child is the parents from whom one has felt rejection. And it is the child whose parents have been overly punishing and who have severely restricted the child’s freedom who most often tends to develop the reaction “My parents hate me, therefore I hate them!” When the child yells out one’s anger toward one’s parents or rebels against their directives, one is likely to meet more severe punishment and restriction. As a result, one feels more rejection and slips deeper into feelings of self-hate that is again converted into “You hate me, so I hate you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
If this cycle is not broken, the hatred of others often widens in scope to people outside the family circle as the child grows older. Often those in positions of authority, who are probably unconsciously identified with the parents, become the great target of increasing hatred; and so the child may get into difficulty with school officials and later with the police. Thus the rebellion against parents who do not seem to care can spread to rebellion against a society that does not seem to care. And if a person becomes a parent, he or she will probably be too emotionally disadvantaged and frightened to express his or her love to one’s children. One, too, will probably be punitive and hurtful. And thus, unless the cycle is broken, the blight of self-hate perpetuates itself from one generation to another. Feelings of rejection become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate becomes escape by hating others instead of one’s self, and further rejection (he or she has gotten into one scrape after another. Punishment does not seem to help. He seems hopeless!) and this all cycles back around to create more feelings of worthlessness. In psychotherapy, we want to know, “Did the patient improve or not?” where the word “improve” means some fairly general changes in state from bad to good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Some example changes used to measure the patient are such as these: (a) the patient feels better, is more comfortable, takes more interest in life, and the like; (b) important interpersonal relations are straightened out a bit; (c) physical symptoms have been relieved or cured; (d) important health-tending decisions have been made; (e) there has been an increase in insightful remarks and behavior. Each therapist then makes a formal presentation before these two judges of every case one has handled; prior to the presentation the judges have read all of the material concerning the patient that has been recorded in the clinical chart. In the instruction to the judges it is emphasized that the crucial variable is not the general level of functioning of the patient at the conclusion of therapy, but rather the change in state that had occurred between beginning and end of therapy. Further, it is made clear to the judges that part of their function is to evaluate the therapist’s involvement in one’s own account of the therapeutic process, and to weigh that factor in coming to a best estimate as to the degree of change that has actually occurred. On the basis, then, of two main sources of information (formal presentation of the case by the therapist, and an evaluation from the clinical chart), the expert raters assign cases, first of all, into two main categories, those who have shown definite improvement and those who had failed to improve or who have improved only slightly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
It is of some interest to examine the kinds of incidents and outcomes that the judges considered indicative of improvement or lack of it. Here a case of improvement: A man who entered therapy in a very depressed, anxious physically upset state, and whose troubles centered on his relations with his foreman on a construction job (a relationship in which was outwardly submissive and cooperative but inwardly enraged finally learned to stand up to the foreman and express his feelings. There was clear advance in his feelings of independence and esteem, and toward the conclusion of the therapy the patient left the former job and started a business of his own. Here is a case where no improvement was seen: A man with a history of homosexuality attempted to seduce his male therapist, who responded with anger as well as some anxiety. The patient had to be transferred to another therapist. The kind of outcomes in improvements are generally when the patient reports feelings of well-being at the conclusion of therapy, in contrast to depression and anxiety at its start. Specific symptoms, such as headaches, frigidity, or impotence, gastric disturbances, menstrual difficulties, skin disorders, and so forth, tend to be relieved or totally cleared up; in some cases there are significant changes in the direction of more mature interpersonal relations, especially with patents, parent-substitutes, or spouses. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The failures in psychotherapy could often be traced to the inability of the therapist to handle some particularly difficult problems. Perhaps with more experienced psychotherapists some of the patients who did not improve would have made some progress; however, there seems little doubt that the cases that were marked down as therapeutic failures were basically more difficult problems. Generally, more disturbed individuals do not improve. As stated in the past, the fear that one may lose one’s possessions is an unavoidable consequence of a sense of security that is based on what one has. I want to carry this thought a step further. It may be possible for us not to attach ourselves to property and, hence, not fear losing it. However, what about the fear of losing life itself—the fear of dying? Is this a fear only of older people or of the sick? Or is everybody afraid of dying? Does the fact that we are bound to die permeate our whole life? Does the fear of dying grow only more intense and more conscious the closer we come to the limits of life by age or sickness? We need of large systematic studies by psychoanalysts investigating this phenomenon from childhood to golden years and dealing with the unconsciousness as well as the conscious manifestations of the fear of dying. These studies need not be restricted to individual cases; they could examine large groups, using existing methods of sociopsychoanalysis. Since such studies do not now exist, we must draw tentative conclusions for many scattered data. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Perhaps the most significant datum is the deeply engraved desire for immortality that manifests itself in the many rituals and beliefs that aim at preserving the human body. On the other hand, the modern, specifically American denial of death by the beautification of the body speaks equally for the repression of the fear of dying by merely camouflaging death. It is not just woman any more, men in the entertainment industry are buying lace front wigs and caking on makeup to try and appear twenty to thirty year young than they are. However, there is only one way—taught by the Buddha, by Jesus, by the Stoics, by Master Eckhart—to truly overcome the fear of dying, and that way is by not hanging onto life, not experiencing life as a possession. Yet, it takes a cute young lady on TV to remind people of these Biblical principals before they manifest them. Nevertheless, the fear of dying is not truly what is seems to be: the fear of stopping living. Death does not concern us, since while we are, death is not yet here; but when death is here we are no more. To be sure, there can be fear of suffering and pain that may precede dying, but this fear is different from that of dying. While the fear of dying may this seem irrational, this is not so if life is experienced as a possession. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The fear, then, is not of dying, but of losing what I have: the fear of losing my body, my ego, my possessions, and my identity; the fear of facing the abyss of nonidentity, of being lost. To the extent that we live in the having mode, we must fear dying. No rational explanation will take away this fear. However, it may be diminished, even at the hour of death, by our reassertion of our bond to life, by a response to the love of others that may kindle our own love. Losing our fear of dying should not begin as a preparation for death, but as the continuous effort to reduce the mode of having and to increase the mode of being. The wise think about life, not death. The instruction on how to die is indeed the same as the instruction on how to live. The more we rid ourselves of the craving for possession in all its forms, particularly our ego-boundness, the less strong is the fear of dying, since there is nothing to lose. Research in psychotherapy by Harris and Christiansen declares that there is so significant relationship between improvement and intelligence. The Harris-Christiansen sample consisted of already hospitalized persons who were given psychotherapy because of delayed recovery from physical infirmary, surgery, or accident, whereas almost all patients in the present study had elected on their own initiative to seek psychotherapy at the clinic, and in their waking hours wen about business of life in an upright position. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
This difference might well account for the IQ difference between the samples, as well as for the fact that these self-referred patients were a good standard deviation above the general population mean in intelligence. Simply being aware of the fact that psychotherapy is to be had and that it makes sense to seek it when you are in personal difficulties is probably related beneficially to general intelligence and cultural sophistication. It is also to be expected on theoretical grounds that greater effectiveness of cortical functioning should be associated with a factor of modifying ability in personality and structure. Intelligence certainly involves the ability to cognize relationships adequately, including emotional relationships, and to correct one’s cognitions on the basis of new evidence. It would seem that in this sample, at any rate, the more intelligent patients were better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to induce desired personality changes. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all people. And since there are endless ways of being honest and dishonest, one definition of honest is: Honesty implies freedom from lying, stealing, cheating, and bearing false witness. “Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from deceitful tongue,” reports Psalms 102.2. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Freedom is Not Gained at a Single Bound, it Must be Achieved Each Day
Ahhhhh, gambling debts, millions, how does one do that, but it was only the tip of it, she had been in much deeper, flying back and forth to Europe, stashing the wealth for the wrong man. When she fired a gun, she emptied it. Making a living. Her partner had vanished. She knew she was next. Did not care anymore. All that money gone to waste. Lots of there there, but who cares? Sometimes dark dreams no doubt have many meanings, but certainly their chief mood and meaning are disillusion. Disillusions pass just as illusions do, and often both illusion and disillusion are necessary steps in our understanding of reality. The dream might tell sometimes one is feeling and that is reflected in an aspect of the current reality. Out of this feeling came a recognition of the urgent need for some research, with its own particular sort of siren song: “Let us get some facts to go on.” It has been discovered the people with a strong sense of pride in themselves and in their heritage, at the beginning of therapy, even thought obscured by the usual clinical overlay of anxiety and depression, are usually better off and are predicted to display improvement by the end of therapy. These same patients, however, even if they are just on the list and do not receive psychotherapy, will still show improvement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The reason being is it is predicted that they have a favorable reaction to stress and challenge in many different situations. Many behaviors that appear to change as a result of psychotherapy are actually influenced little or not at all by the therapy, and the observed changes are produced by endogenous processes of a counteractive sort which are set in motion within the reasonably strong individual after some trauma has produced a temporary regression. To say this, however, is by no means to say, as some psychologists have said in interpreting these results and others like them, that “psychotherapy is no blessed good,” or words to that effect. Science by its method limits itself to appearances of a public or potentially public sort, and in the interests of verification insists upon objectification. This works quite so well, yet well enough for many purposes—even when the objects do have feelings. However, if the questions I am asking myself is “Why was I ever born?” or “Why live?” there are no objective answers that can be satisfying to me within the realm of science. The “question” is a feeling which cannot be “answered,” but which can only give way to another feeling, “How good it is to be alive!” And the human transaction that enables the one feeling to give way to the other is a transaction between subjects, the objective indices of which are extremely subtle and highly valuable at best. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
One can make tape-recordings, take motion pictures, count heart beats, measure muscle potentials, note the number of minutes spent together, ask questions (True-False questions, open-ended questions, questions in disguise), get interpretations of inkblots, or do any number of those tricks of the trade with which we are all familiar. They avail little, for the vitalizing transaction is a matter of feeling, having an existence and known only in the subject, or, as I prefer to say, in the realm of my spirit. For instance, once, I told a therapist I want a really big house so I could spend all day cleaning it. She assumed my house was a mess. The actual reason is because have you notice how many miles you walk in a standard size 2,000 square foot house when you are cleaning it? Sometimes, by the time I was done cleaning I had walked between 3-7 miles inside the house. So, if I had a house three times that size, chances are I would get even more exercise in the safety of my home. And there is always something in a house that needs to be cleaned from the base boards, the walls, light switches, tile and wood floors, the carpets need to be vacuumed, laundry always needs to be done, closets and drawers need to be organized. In the cleanest houses in America, there is always work to do, but in a one bedroom apartment, most are so small there is not much room to walk around. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
People you talk to and vent to cannot always understand what you are saying because they have filters, and even though the privacy laws prevent therapist from sharing or disclosing your information, can you really trust anyone with details of your lives when you know nothing about them, their record and the professional standards? And there is no telling what they are compiling in their notes about you after you leave their office, and I would just hate from the information to land up in a newsroom or a police station when it is someone’s interpretation anyway. We are not really living in the most ethical times and everyone is looking to make money anyway they can. People are willing to sacrifice their careers, families, freedom and homes to become famous, even if it is through illegal means because they figure the payoff is much more worth what they are enduring at the time, which makes one wonder….how much do people really love their families, God, and having a good reputation is the allure of money is more appealing? One of the troubles of the sometimes scientist who is also sometime psychotherapist is that one’s sentiments are mixed, and are especially mixed when one undertakes to do research on psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
From the point of view of the subject, then, the essence of the beneficence that psychotherapy may bring is entirely of the spirit. The appearances that may accompany such spiritual beneficences are variable and elusive, and the superficies of adjustment to any given cultural norm may yield a rather bad fit to the behavior of the person who has benefited from psychotherapy. And to make matters even more difficult for thee research psychologist, the moment of genuine encounter, the vitalizing transaction, may pass almost unnoticed at the time. It is ephemeral, as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation, the fecundating act; it has its begin in the imagination and the spirit, while the dull machinery of routine thought chugs monotonously along and the inertia that makes us think the same thought in just the same way so many thousands of times over continues its hebetudinous reign. In almost all appearance we remain the same, even though we are different. To put the matter commonly, I have never known any case, no matter how successful, with treatment both thorough and inspired and with real movement felt by the patient and therapist, in which at the conclusion of the work the patient was not readily recognized by friends and neighbors, and in a million ways, some of them measured by the best psychological tests, just about the same. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day. The basic step in achieving inward freedom is choosing one’s self. This is the stage of affirming one’s responsibility for oneself and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence: it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes the one exists in one’s particular spot in the Universe, and one accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what is mean by the will to live—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is oneself, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make one’s basic choices oneself. We can see more clearly what choosing oneself and one’s existence means by looking at the opposite—choosing not to exist, that is to commit suicide. The significance of suicide lies not in the fact that people actually experience death by suicide in any large numbers. It is indeed a very rare occurrence except among those who are usually extremely distressed. However, psychologically and spiritually the thought of suicide has a much wider meaning. There is an such thing as psychological suicide in which one does not take one’s own life by a given act, but dies because one has chosen—perhaps without being entirely aware of it—not to live. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
There have been cases were people are going through so much hardship and they have been told that they are going to die and they make up their mind not to live and let go and shortly after they pass away. There have been other cases where the lives of persons who have dedicated themselves to certain tasks, such as taking care of a sick loved one or finishing an import film or work. They keep going under difficult circumstances as though they had determined they had to live; and then when the task is completed, when success is attained, they proceed to die as though by some inner decision. Soren Kierkegaard wrote twenty books in fourteen years, completed them at the early age of forty-two, and then—we almost say in conclusion—he took to his bed and died. Aaliyah did in interview at the age of 22, on MTV Diaries, talking about how she wanted to be remembered after she died, and a few months later her plane crashed and she died. These ways of choosing not to live show how crucial it can be to choose to live. I think that is why people do not like to think about death, talk about it, or speak ill of the dead. It makes them feel that they become more vulnerable and could be the next on the grim reaper’s list. It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose one’s own existence, until one has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that one could wipe out one’s existence but chooses not to. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Since one is free to die, one is also free to live. The mass patterns of routine are broken: one no longer exists as an accidental result of one’s parents having conceived one, of one’s growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, begetting new children, growing old and dying. Since one could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its special element of freedom. People often actually go through the experience of experiencing death by psychological suicide in some sector of their lives. For instance, a woman believes she cannot live unless a certain man loves her. When he marries someone else, she contemplates suicide. In the course of her meditating on the idea for some days, she fantasies, “Well, assume I do it.” However, then, she suddenly thinks, “After I have done it, it would still be good to be alive in other ways—the Sun still shines, water is still cool to the body, one can still make things,” and the suggestion creeps in that there may still be other people to love. So she decides to live. Assuming the decision is made for beneficial reasons rater than just the fear of dying or inertia, the conflict may actually have given her some new freedom. It is as though the part of her which clung to the man did not experience death by suicide, and as a result she can begin life anew. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Or a young man feels he can never be happy unless he gains some fame. He begins to realize that he is competent and valuable, let us say as an assistant professor; but the higher he gets on the ladder the clearer he sees that there are always persons above him, that many are called but few are chosen, that very few people gain fame anyway, and that he may end up just a good and competent teacher. He might then feel that he would be as insignificant as a grain of sand, his life meaningless, and he might as well not be alive. The idea of experiencing death by suicide creeps into his mind in his more despondent moods. Sooner or later he, too, thinks, “All right, assume I have done it—what then?” And it suddenly dawns on him that, if he came back after the death by suicide, there would be a lot left in life even if one were not famous. He then chooses to go on living, as it were, without the demand for fame. It is as though the part of him which could not live without fame does experience death by suicide. And in killing the demand for fame, he may also realize as a byproduct that the thing which yield lasting joy and inner security have very little to do with external and fickle standards of public opinion anyway. He may then appreciate the more then flippant wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s remark, “Who the hell wants fame over the week-end? I want to write well.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
And finally, as a result of the partial suicide, he may clarify his own goals and arrive at more of a feeling for the joy which comes from fulfilling his own potentialities, from finding and teaching the truth as he sees it and adding his own unique contribution arising from his own integrity. In contemporary society the having mode of existing is assumed to be rooted in human nature and, hence, virtually unchangeable. The same idea is expressed in the dogma that people are basically lazy, passive by nature, and that they do not want to work or to do anything else, unless they are driven by the incentive of material gain, or hunger, or the fear of punishment. This rigid doctrine is doubted by hardly anybody, and it determines our methods of education and work. However, it is little more than an expression of the wish to prove the value of our social arrangements by imputing to them that they follow the needs of human nature. To the members of many different societies of both past and present, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness would appear as fantastic as the reverse sound to us. The truth is that both the having and the being modes of existence are potentialities of human nature, that our biological urge for survival tends to further the having mode, but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities inhere in human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We human beings have an inherent and deeply rooted desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be related to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness. The truth of this statement is proven by so much evidence. We would emphasize again that the actual process of these partial psychological studies is much more complex than these illustrations imply. Actually some people—perhaps most people—move in the opposite direction when they have to renounce a demand: they retreat, constrict their lives and become less free. However, we wish only to make clear that there is a beneficial aspect to partial suicide, and that the dying of one attitude or need may be the other side of the birth of something new (which is a law of growth in nature not at all limited to human beings). One can choose to terminate a neurotic strategy, a dependency, a clinging, and then find that one can choose to live as a freer self. The woman in our example would no doubt find with clearer insight that her so-called live for the man for whom she would have experienced death by suicide was really not love at all, but clinging parasitism balanced by desire to have power over the man. A dying to part of oneself is often followed by a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, one’s responsibility for oneself takes on a new meaning. One accepts responsibility for one’s own life not as something with which one has been saddled, a burden forced upon one: but as a something one has chosen oneself. For this person, oneself, now exists as a result of a decision he or she, oneself, has made. To be sure, any thinking person realizes in theory that freedom and responsibility go together: if one is not free, one is an automaton and there is obviously no such thing as responsibility, and if one cannot be responsible for oneself, one cannot be trusted with freedom. However, when one has chosen oneself, this partnership of freedom and responsibility become more than a nice idea: one experiences it on one’s own pulse; in one’s choosing oneself, one becomes aware that one has chosen personal freedom and responsibility for oneself in the same breath. The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into self-discipline. One accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take one’s own life?—but because one has chosen with greater freedom what one wants to do with one’s own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values one wishes to achieve. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This self-discipline can be given fancy names—it is loving one’s fate and obedience to the laws of life. However, whether bedecked by fancy terms or not, it is, I believe, a lesson everyone progressively learns in one’s struggle toward maturity. We cannot will potency; we cannot will to love. However, we can will to open ourselves, participate in the experience, allow the possibility to become a reality. The belief that people do not want to make sacrifices is notoriously wrong. When Churchill announced at the beginning of the Second World War that what he had to demand from the British was blood, sweat, and tears, he did not deter them, but on the contrary, he appealed to their deep-seated human desire to make sacrifices, to give of themselves. The reaction of the British—and of the Germans and the Russians as well—toward the indiscriminate bombing of population centers by the belligerents proves that common suffering did not weaken their spirit; it strengthened their resistance and proved wrong those who believed terror bombing could break the morale of the enemy and help finish the war. It is a sad commentary on our civilization, however, that war and suffering rather than peacetime living can mobilize human readiness to make sacrifices, and that the times of peace seem mainly to encourage selfishness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Fortunately, there are situations in peacetime in which human striving for giving and solidarity manifest themselves in individual behavior. The workers’ strikes, especially up to the period of the First World War, are an example of such essentially nonviolent behavior. The workers sought higher wages, but at the same time, they risked and accepted severe hardships in order to fight for their own dignity and the satisfaction of experiencing human solidarity. The strike was as much a religious as an economic phenomenon. While such strikes still do occur even today, most present-day strikes are for economic reasons—although strikes for better working conditions have increased recently. The need to give and to share and the willingness to make sacrifices for others are still to be found among the members of certain professions, such as nurses, physicians, lawyers, fire fighters, law enforcement, ambulatory care. The goal of helping and sacrificing is given only lip service by many, if not most, of these professionals; yet the character of a goodly number corresponds to the values they profess. We find the same needs affirmed and expressed in many communities throughout the centuries, whether religious, capitalist, or humanist. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
We find the wish to give in the people who volunteer their blood (without payment), in the many situations in which people risk their lives to save another’s. We find the manifestation of the will to give in people who genuinely love. False love, for instance, shared mutual selfishness make people more selfish (and this is the case often enough). Genuine love increases the capacity to love and to give to others. The true lovers live the whole World, in his or her live for a specific person. Conversely, we find that not a few people, especially younger ones, cannot stand the luxury and selfishness that surround them in their affluent families. Quite against the expectations of their elders, who think that their children have everything they wish, they rebel against the deadness and isolation of their lives. For the fact is, they do not have everything they wish and they wish for what they do not have. Some people can no longer stand the life of idleness and injustice they have been born into, these young people leave their families and join the poor, living with them, and helped to lay one of the foundations to help them establish communities. However, out of the backlash to their luxury lives, some of these idealistic and sensitivity young, lacking in tradition, maturity, experience, and political wisdom, become desperate, narcissistically overestimate their own capacities and possibilities, and try to achieve the impossible by the use of force. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Forbidden Fruit a Flavor Has that Lawful Orchards Mocks
We have time so things do not happen all at once. For the longest time she did not answer. I felt I could say no more. My heart ached as much as it had ever ached. We lay so near to one another, so bound in one another’s limbs, so warm and belonging to each other that the night had gone quiet of all its random sounds for us. At last she stirred ever so faintly, ever so tenderly. Although there are many theories concerning personality development, there is rather general agreement on at least one important point—the significance of early family life. The emotional environment created by parents (or parent substitutes) is of crucial importance. And although there may be great disagreements as to details, there is general consensus that in families that are relatively healthy in their emotional attitudes, children generally develop a high degree of their potential, while in relatively unhealthy families children are likely to realize less of their potential and often tend to develop personality problems. Thinking in opposite extremes is always risky, and so it is ere. There are, of course, no completely healthy or unhealthy families. Rather we might think of a long life or scale along which families could theoretically be places as relatively healthy or unhealthy. And no family would be found at either extreme. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
This discussion will probably be most meaningful to us if we think of it as it applies to our own personal lives. For must of us it will be helpful to think of ourselves in two roles. One role is that of one’s own childhood: “What effects did the family situation in which I lived as a child have upon my personality? How are these influences affecting my relationships with other people, including my own family, now?” The second role that might well be kept in mind is our relationship to our children (or future children): “Am I emotionally equipped to be an effective parent? How can I become better able to meet the emotional needs of my children?” While it is important to see that our childhood family had a profound influence on our present degree of maturity, which in turn will have a great deal to do with the quality of our relationships with our children, it is also important to know that we can change and reach higher levels of maturity. If this were not true, there would be little purpose in discussing personal and family life; and the future would look bleak indeed. Every family tends to develop repeated patterns of behavior. The parent will do something to which the child’s response by repeating his or her original action in an ever more forceful way. Like a snowball rolling downhill, this circular pattern gains size and momentum with each repetition of the cycle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
One is tempted to use the phrase vicious circles in regard to many of these patterns, for it is most easy to see them in operation in negative aspects of personality development and in the growth of our fear of love, but as we shall see later there can be healthy cycles also. Unhealthy cycles begin with feelings of rejection in family life. Since parents are the primary influence in the family, it is basically the relationship of children with their parents that is under consideration, even though children often feel rejected by brothers or sisters. It can be safely assumed, however, that in early childhood the existence of such feelings can be traced back to the parents, for it is they who establish the emotion tone of the home. It is no accident that the phrase feeling of rejection rather than simply the word rejection is used. There is an important distinction, for while it can be shown that children often experience feelings of rejection it often remains a question whether the rejection really exists. There are probably a few parents who are so hostile and unfeeling in their relation to their children that they do not want to express feelings of affection. More often parents are crippled by personality problems, are frightened of their love, and so are unable to communicate their love freely. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
When parents have emotion damage of their own to work through, they behave toward their children in ways that appear to be rejecting. Unfortunately, feelings of rejection are damaging even though the parent does not mean to be rejecting. First of all, every child experiences some feelings of rejection from parents or, in those instances where the child is not reared by his or her natural parents, from those who become substitute parents and who are primarily responsible for the child’s early experiences. A child reared in an orphanage and foster homes, for example, may have frequently changing series of parents, a process that in itself may feel like abandonment and rejection to the child. However, whatever our family circumstances were, each one of us experienced some of these feelings of rejection, and our children will experience some from us. This is only to ay that no parent is perfect. As we discuss these cycles of rejection we are talking about all of us, and we are talking about our children. The degree to which children feel rejected will vary, of course, for parents differ in their maturity and in their ability to express love. However, every one of us is involved, for feelings of rejection are part of the universal dilemma of being human and rearing child in an imperfect World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Secondly, there are many kinds of rejection that children encounter. Perhaps the most easily recognizable is that which is accompanied by open hostility toward the child. Most of us have known parents who could not speak to a child without speaking in anger. One such couple seemed unable even to call their children in from playing in the backyard without using a tone of voice seething with hostility. Such parents are often overly severe in punishment and no doubt take out on the child their feelings of frustration in other areas of life. More basically, they are so frightened of genuine emotional involvement that they seem unable to experience their love for their children. We can understand more clearly what freedom is if we first look at what it is not. Freedom is not rebellion. Rebellion is a normal interim move toward freedom: it occurs to some extent when the little child is trying to exercise his or her muscles of independence through the power to say “No”; it occurs more clearly when the adolescent is trying to become independent of parents. In adolescence (as possibly in other stages too) the strength of the rebelliousness against what the parents stand for is often excessive because the young person is fighting one’s own anxiety at stepping out into the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
When parents say, “Don’t” the child often must scream defiance at them, because that “don’t” is exactly what one feels the craven side of oneself is saying, the side of oneself which is tempted to take refuge behind the walls of parental protection. However, rebellion is often confused with freedom itself. It becomes a false port in the storm because it gives the rebel a delusive sense of being really independent. The rebel forgets that rebellion always presupposes an outside structure of rules, laws, expectations—against which one is rebelling; and one’s security, sense of freedom and strength are dependent actually on this external structure. They are borrowed, and can be taken away like a bank loan which can be called in at any moment. Psychologically many persons stop at this stage of rebellion. Their sense of inner moral strength comes only from knowing what moral conventions they do not live up to; they get an oblique sense of conviction by proclaiming their atheism and disbelief. Many adults are against external compulsions on love, against rigidly curtailing free development of children. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
And some people think the parent should not interfere with what their children are doing, and, in the extreme forms of their doctrines, the child must be allowed to do anything he or she wished. It was not seen, at one time, that such structureless living actually increased children’s anxiety. It also was not see that the parent must obviously take a good deal of responsibility for the child’s actions, and that absolute freedom consists of the parent’s doing this in the context of a genuine respect for the child as a person, actually and potentially, that one gives all realistic room for the potentialities of the child to develop, and that one cannot require the child to falsify one’s wants and emotions. Since the rebel gets his or her sense of direction and vitality from attacking the existing standards and mores, one does not have to develop standards of one’s own. Rebellion acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs, to the state were one can lay new foundations on which to build. The negative forms of freedom confused freedom with license, and overlooked the fact that freedom is never the opposite of responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Another common error is to confuse freedom with planlessness. Some individuals these days argue that if the system of economic laisse-faire is so successful and working in California (which boasts of being the World’s fifth largest economy has a budget surplus of $14 billion)—letting everyone do as they wish—were altered as history marches on, our freedom would vanish with it. The argument goes like this: Freedom is like a living thing. It is invisible. And if the individual’s right to own the means of production is take away, one no longer has the freedom to earn one’s living in one’s own way. Then one can have no freedom at all. Well, if these writers were right it would indeed be unfortunate—for who then could be free? Not you nor I nor anyone else except a very small group of persons—for in this day of giant industries, only the minutest fraction of citizens can own the means of production anyway. Laissez-faire was a great idea, as we have seen, in earlier centuries: but times change, and almost everyone nowadays earns their living by virtue of belonging to a large group, be it an industry, or a university, or a corporation, or a club. It is a vastly more interdependent World, this “One World” of our twentieth century, than the World of the entrepreneurs of earlier centuries or of our own pioneer days; and freedom must be found in the context of economic community and the social value of work, not in everyone’s setting up own’s own factory or university. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Fortunately, if we keep our perspective, this economic interdependence need not destroy freedom. The pony express was a great idea, also, back in the days when sending a letter from coast to coast was an adventure. Also, keep in mind that new inventions do not always replace the old one. Although we now have vacuums, the old fashion straw broom with a sturdy wooden handle is still thriving. However certainly we are thankful—complain as we may about mail service these days—that now when we write a letter to a friend on the coast, we do not have to give more than a passing thought to its method of travel; we drop it in the box with an air-mail stamp and forget about it. We are free, that is, to devote more time and concern to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned about how the letter gets there. We are more free intellectually and spiritually precisely because we accept our position in economic interdependence with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
I have often wondered why there is such anxiety and such an outcry that freedom will be lost unless we preserve the old laissez-faire practices. Is not one of the reason the fact that modern mortals have so thoroughly surrendered inward psychological and spiritual freedom to the routine of their work and to the mass patterns of social conventions that one feels the only vestige of freedom left to one is the opportunity for economic aggrandizement? Has one made the freedom to compete with one’s neighbor economically a last remnant of individuality, which therefore must stand for the whole meaning of freedom? That is to say, if the citizen of the suburbs could not buy a new car each year, build a Mc Mansion, and paint it a slightly different color from his or her neighbor’s, might one feel that one’s life would have to purpose, and that one would not exist as a person? The great weight placed on competitive, laissez-faire freedom seems to me to show how much we have lost a real understanding of freedom. To be sure, freedom is indivisible: and this is precisely why one cannot identify it with a particular economic doctrine or segment of life, least of all a segment of the past; it is a living thing, and its life comes precisely from how the whole person relates oneself to the community of one’s fellow people. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Freedom means openness, a readiness to grow; it means being flexible, ready to change for the sake of greater human values. To identify freedom with a given system is to deny freedom—it crystallizes freedom and turns it into a rigid doctrine. To cling to a tradition, with the defensive plea that is we lose something that worked well in the past we will have lost all, neither shows the spirit of freedom nor makes for the future growth of freedom. We shall keep faith with those courageous mortals, the pioneer industrialists, the mortals of the commerce and the capitalists of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in the Western World, as well as with the independent frontiers people of our own country, if we emulate their courage, dare to think boldly as they did, and plan the most effective economic measures for our day as they did for theirs. Mortals have always lived in a social World, and that World conditions our psychological health. We simply propose that our social and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize oneself, to develop and use one’s potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from one’s fellow mortals. The good society is, thus, the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people—freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but absolutely, as the opportunity to realize ever greater human values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Freedom follow that collectivism, as in fascism and communism and socialism, is the denial of the values we recognize as freedom, and must be opposed at all costs. However, we shall successfully overcome them only as we are devoted to absolute ideals which are better, chiefly the building of a society based on a genuine respect for persons and their freedom. The living human being is not a dead image and cannot be described like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be described at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing my own or another’s psychical structure. However, the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are entirely alike. Only in the process of mutual alive relatedness can the other and I overcome the barrier of separateness, inasmuch as we both participate in the dance of life. Yet our full identification of each other can never be achieved. Even a single act of behavior cannot be fully described. One could write pages of descriptions of the Mona Lisa’s smile, and still the pictured smile would not have been caught in words—but not because her smile is so mysterious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Everybody’s smile is mysterious (unless it is the learned, synthetic smile of the marketplace). No one can fully describe the expression of interest, enthusiasm, biophilia, or of hate or narcissism that one may see in the eyes of another person, or the variety of facial expressions, of gaits, of postures, of intonations that exists among people. The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental characteristic is that of being active, not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers. To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which—though in varying degrees—every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated personality, to be interested, to list, to give. Yet none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone; it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. It the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the structure of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules. (Of course, in the being mode there is also thinking that is alive and productive.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Perhaps the being mode may best be described in a symbol. A blue glass antique Victorian chandelier appears to be blue when light shines through it because it absorbs all other colors and this does not let them pass. This is to say, we call the chandelier blue precisely because it does not retain the blue waves. It is named not for what it possessed but for what it gives out. Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is of nonbeing, for instance, stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by sitting on it, by holding onto our ego and our possessions—can the mode of being emerge. To be requires giving up one’s selfishness, by humbling oneself before God. However, most people find giving up their having orientation too difficult; any attempt to do so arouses their intense anxiety and feels like giving up all security, like being thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim. They do not know that when they have given up their attachment to solely focusing on the material World, they can begin to use their own proper forces and walk by themselves with full faith in the Lord. What holds people back is the illusion that they cannot walk by themselves, they have would collapse if they were not supported by the things they have. However, the reason we are alive today is because God willed it to be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
People who do not walk in faith are like children who are afraid that they will never be able to walk, after they have fallen for the very first time. However, nature and human help prevent human beings from becoming lost. Those who believe that they would collapse without using the crutches of having also need human help, in addition to God’s guidance. When one is caught in a whirlpool of emotion, it is difficult to find a way out alone. When answers to urgent prayer do not seem to come, it can be that we do not understand some truths about prayer, or because we do not recognize answers when they come. Our Heavenly Father did not put us on Earth to fail but to succeed gloriously. It may seem paradoxical, but that is why recognizing answers to prayer can sometimes be very difficult. Some face life with only their own experience and capacity to help them. Others, seek, through prayer, divine inspiration to know what to do. When required, they qualify for power beyond their own capacity. Communication with our Heavenly Father is a scared privilege. It is based upon unchanging principles. When we receive help from out Heavenly Father, it is in response to faith, obedience, and the proper use of agency. We are here on Earth to gain experience we can obtain in no other way. We are given the opportunity to apply the truth so we can grow, develop, and gain spiritual maturity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 