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Love’s Depth is Often Tested in Crisis: Such Creativity is as Close as Mortals Ever Get to becoming Immortal
I know you have survived centuries. You have even survived yourself. You went into a desert place like Christ. You did not die because your blood is too strong. You are afraid you cannot die. Everything you have believed in has been shattered You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Mutuality, the giving-taking circle, replenishes and nourishes and assists the growth of each person in any relationship. What becomes of reason, conscience and religion in an alienated World? Superficially seen, they prosper. There is hardly any illiteracy to speak of in the Western countries; more and more people go to college in the United States; everybody reads the newspaper and talks reasonably about World affairs. As to conscience, most people act quite decently in their narrow personal sphere, in fact surprisingly so, considering their general confusion. As far as religion is concerned, it is well known that church affiliation is higher than ever, and the vast majority of Americans believe in God—or so they say in public-opinion polls. However, one does not need to dig too deeply to arrive at less pleasant findings. If we talk about reason, we must decide what human capacity we are referring to. As I have suggested before, we must differentiate between intelligence and reason. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee—who puts the two sticks together in order to get to do the job—uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, figuring out how to do things. Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulations: intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival. Reason, one the other and, aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality which surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence. However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict (considering that prediction often depends on recognition of forces which operate underneath the surface), and prediction sometimes is necessary even for physical survival. “Therefore, go to your homes, and ponder upon the things which I has said, and ask the Father, in my name that you may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again, reports 3 Nephi 17.3. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Reason requires relatedness and a sense of self. If I am only the passive receptor of impressions, thoughts, opinions, I can compare them, manipulate them—but I cannot penetrate them. I deduce the existence of myself as an individual from the fact that I think. I doubt, so hence I think; I think, hence I am. The reverse is true, too. Only if I am I, if I have not lost my individuality in the It, can I think, that is, can I make use of my reason. It might be maintained that the reasoning necessary for the knowledge of God is, as a matter of fact, too difficult for frail and mortal human beings to manage. Closely related to this the lacking sense of reality which is characteristic of the alienated personality. To speak of the lacking sense of reality in modern mortals is contrary to the widely held idea that we are distinguished from most periods of history by our greater realism. However, to speak of our realism is almost like a paranoid distortion. What realists, who are playing wit weapons which may lead to the destruction of all modern civilization, if not of our Earth itself! If an individual were found doing that, he or she would be locked up immediately, and if one prided oneself on one’s realism, the psychiatrists would consider this an additional and rather serious symptom of a diseased mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, quite aside from this—the fact is that modern humans exhibit an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought. One has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with one’s artificial, prettified picture of a pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads and paper. Indeed, one is so far away from human reality, that one can say with the inhabitants of the Brave Knew World: “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Another factor in contemporary society already mentioned is destructive to reason. Since nobody ever does the whole job, but only a fraction of it, since the dimension of things and of the organization of people is too vast to be understood as a whole, nothing can be seen in its totality. Hence the laws underlying the phenomena cannot be observed. Intelligence is sufficient to manipulate properly one sector of a larger unit, whether it is a machine or a state. However, reason can develop only if it is geared to the whole, if it deals with observable and manageable entities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Just as our eyes and ears function only within certain quantitative limits of wave length, our reason too is bound by what is observable as a whole and in its functioning. To put it differently, beyond a certain order of bigness, concreteness is necessarily lost and abstractification takes place; with it, the sense for reality fades out. The first one to see this problem was Aristotle, who thought that a city which transcended in number what we would call today a small town was not livable. In observing the quality of thinking in alienated mortals, it is striking to see how one’s intelligence has developed and how one’s reason has deteriorated. Mortals take their reality for granted; they want to eat it, consumer it, touch it, manipulate it. Mortals do not even ask what is behind it, why things are as they are, and where they are going. One cannot eat the meaning, one cannot consume the sense, and as far as the future is concered—apres nous le deluge! Even from the nineteenth century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity, if by this we mean the opposite to reason, rather than to intelligence. In spite of the fact that everybody reads the daily paper religiously, there is an absence of understanding of the meaning of political events which is truly frightening, because our intelligence helps us to produce weapons which our reason is not capable of controlling. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Indeed, we have the know-how, but we do not have the know-why, nor the know-what-for of what we are creating. We have many persons with good and high intelligence quotients, but our intelligence tests measure the ability to memorize, to manipulate thoughts quickly—but not to reason. All this is true notwithstanding the fact that there are mortals of outstanding reason in our midst, whose thinking is as profound and vigorous as ever existed in the history of the human race. However, they think apart from the general herd thought, and they are looked upon with suspicion—even if they are needed for their extraordinary achievements in the natural sciences. The new automatic brains are indeed a good illustration of what is meant here by intelligence. They manipulate data which are fed into them; they compare, select, and eventually come out with results more quickly or more error-proof than human intelligence could. However, the condition of all this is that the basic data are fed into them beforehand. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
What the electric brain cannot do is think creatively, even with its algorithms and predictions, the computer cannot arrive at an insight into the essence of the observed fact, to go beyond state with which it is fed. It cannot feel and ask questions for further understanding. It does not have emotions. It does not care. It cannot put itself in one’s situation and consider some circumstanced may cause some people to work ten times harder than the average person their age, or that recalling certain things can be painful. The computer does not care. The machine can duplicate or even improve on intelligence, but it cannot simulate reason, and it can be hacked and manipulated and cause great harm and bodily damage to many without being held responsible because it is not a unique biological unit. Therefore, the machine can repeat the same mistake over and over without people demanding it to be dismantled, or greater control placed over it because statistically, it proves well and is better than a human. Ethics, at least in the meaning of the Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition, is inseparable from reason. Ethical behavior is based on the faculty of making value judgments on the basis of reason; it means deciding between good and evil, and to act upon decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Use of reason presupposes the presence of self; so does ethical judgment and action. Furthermore, ethics, whether it is that of monotheistic religion or that of secular humanism, is based on the principle that no institution and no thing is higher than any human individual; that the aim of life is to unfold mortal’s love and reason and that every other human activity has to be subordinated to this aim. How then can ethics be a significant part of a life in which the individual becomes an automaton, in which one serves the big It? Furthermore, how can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience by its very nature is nonconforming; it must be able to say this “no” it must be certain in the rightness of the judgment on which the no is based. To the degree to which a person conforms one cannot hear the voice of one’s conscience, must less act upon it. Conscience exists only when mortals experience themselves, as mortal, not as a thing, as a commodity. So calling a person by their title kind of robs them of their humanity and turns them into an object, and that can lead to condescendence, depending on what the individual does for a living and how society views their career or lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Concerning things which are exchanged on the market there exists another quasi ethical code, that of fairness. The question is, whether they are exchanged at a fair price, no tricks and no force interfering with the fairness of the bargain; this fairness, not good and evil, is the ethical principle of the market and it is the ethical principle governing the life of the marketing personality. The principle of fairness, no doubt, makes for a certain type of ethical behavior. You do not lie, cheat nor use force—you even give the other person a chance—if you act according to the code of fairness. However, to love your neighbor, to feel one with him, or her, or them, to devote your life to the aim of developing your spiritual powers, is not part of the fairness ethics. We live in a paradoxical situation: We practice fairness ethics, and profess Christian ethics. Must we not stumble over this obvious contradiction? Obviously, we do not stumble. What is the reason? Partly, it is to be found in the fact that the heritage of four thousand years of the development of conscience is by no means completely lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
On the contrary, in many way the liberation of mortals from the powers of the feudal state and Church, made is possible for this heritage to be brought to fruition and in the period between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first century it blossomed as perhaps never before. We still are part of this process—but given our own twenty-first century condition of life, it seems that there is no new bun which will blossom when this flower has wilted. Another reason why we do not stumble over the contradiction between humanistic ethics and fairness ethics is based in the fact that we reinterpret religious and humanistic ethics in the light of fairness ethics. A good illustration of this interpretation is the Golden Rule. In its original Jewish and Christian meaning, it was a popular phrasing of the Bible maxim to love thy neighbor as thyself. In the system of fairness ethics, it means simply when you exchange, be fair. Give what you expect to get. Do not cheat! No wonder the Golden Rule is the most popular religious phrase of today. It combines two opposite system of ethics and helps us to forget the contradiction. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While we still live from the Christian-humanistic heritage it is not surprising that the younger generation exhibits less and less of the traditional ethics and that we come across a moral barbarism among our youth which is in complete contrast to the economic and educational level society has reached. Today, while revising this manuscript, I read two items. One in The New York Times, regarding the fact of the murder of a man, cruelly trampled to death by four teenagers of average middle-class families. The other in Time magazine, a description of the new Guatemalan chief of police, who as former chief of police under the Ubico dictatorship had perfected a head-shrinking steel skull cap to pry loose secrets and crush improper political thoughts. His picture is published with the caption “For improper thought, a crusher.” Could anything be more insanely insensitive to extremes of sadism than this flippant line? It is surprising when in a culture in which the most popular news magazine can write this, some teenagers have no scruples about beating a man to death? Is the fact that we show brutality and cruelty in comic books and movies, because money is made with these commodities, not enough of an explanation for the growing barbarism and vandalism in our youth? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Our movie censors watch that no sexual scenes are shown, since this could suggest illicit sexual desires. How innocent would this result be in comparison with the dehumanizing effect of what the censors permit and the churches seem to object to less than to the traditional sins. Yes, we still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent and will be replaced by the ethics of the Brave New World, or 1984, or New Jack City or Minority Report unless it ceases to be a heritage and is re-created in our whole mode of life. At the moment, it seems that ethical behavior is still to be found in the concrete situation of many individuals, while society is marching toward barbarism. Much of what has been said about ethics is to be said about religion. Of course, speaking of the role of religion among alienated mortals, everything depends on what we call religion. If we are referring to religion in its widest sense, as a system of orientation and an object of devotion, then, indeed, every human being is religious, since nobody can live without such a system and remain sane. Then, our culture is as religious as any. Our gods are the machine, and the idea of efficiency; the meaning of our life is to move, to forge ahead, to arrive as near to the top of the pyramid as possible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, if religion we mean monotheism, then, indeed, our religions is not more than one of the commodities in our show windows. Monotheism is incompatible with alienation and with our ethics of fairness. It makes mortal’s unfolding, one’s salvation, the supreme aim of life, an aim which never can be subordinated to any other. Inasmuch as God is unrecognizable, indefinable, and indefinable—which means he is not and can never be considered a thing. The fight between monotheism and idolatry is exactly the fight between the productive and the alienated way of life. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life, with the solution to it; we start out with the conviction that there is no purpose except to invest life successfully and to get it over with without major mishaps. That is why people try to live right and obey God’s commandments. The majority of us believe in God, take it for granted the God exists. The rest, who do not believe, take it for granted that God does not exist. Either way, God is taken for granted. Neither belief nor disbelief cause any sleepless nights, nor any serious concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In fact, whether a mortal in our culture believes in God or not makes hardly any difference either from a psychological or from a truly religious standpoint. In both instances one does not care—either about God or about the answer to the problem of one’s own existence. Just as humanly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that God is there, God runs the show (although it probably would run without God too), you never see God, but you acknowledge God’s leadership while you are doing your part and paying your fair share or what seems to be more than fair. The religious renaissance which we witness in these days is perhaps the worst blow monotheism has yet received. Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of the Man upstairs, to teach to pray in order to make God your partners in business, to sell religions with the method and appeals of a new BMW or Buick? In view of the fact that the alienation of modern mortals is incompatible with monotheism, one might expect that ministers, priests and rabbis would form the spearhead of criticism of modern Capitalism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
While it is true that from high Catholic quarters and from a number of less highly placed ministers and rabbis such criticism has been voiced, all churches belong essentially to the conservative forces in modern society and use religion to keep mortals going and satisfied with a profoundly irreligious system. The majority of them do not seem to recognize that this type of religion will eventually degenerate into overt idolatry, unless they begin to define and then to fight against modern idolatry, rather than to make prenouncements about God and thus to use God’s name in vain—in more than one sense. The courage to be in all its forms has, by itself, revelatory character. It shows the nature of being, it shows that the self-affirmation of being is an affirmation that overcome negation. In a metaphorical statement (and every assertion about being-itself is either metaphorical or symbolic) one could say that being include nonbeing but nonbeing does not prevail against it. Including is a spatial metaphor which indicates that being embraces itself and that which is opposed to it, nonbeing. Nonbeing belongs to being, it cannot be separated from it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
We could not thing being without a double negation: being must be thought as the negation of the negation of being. This is why we describe being best by the metaphor power of being. Power is the possibility a being has to actualize itself against the resistance of other beings. If we speak of the power of being-itself we indicate the being affirms itself against nonbeing. In our discussion of courage and life we have mentioned the dynamic self-affirmation of being—itself wherever it spoke dialectically, notably in Neoplatonism, Hegel, and the philosophers of life and process. Theology has done the same whenever it took the idea of the living God seriously, most obviously in the trinitarian symbolization of the inner life of God. In spite of the static definition of substance (the name for the ultimate power of being), it unites philosophical and mystical tendencies when we speak of the love and knowledge with which God loves and know himself through the love and knowledge for finite beings. Nonbeing (that in God which makes his self-affirmation dynamic) opens up the divine self-seclusion and reveals him as power of love. Nonbeing makes God a living God. Without the No he as to overcome in himself and in his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless. There would be no revelation of the ground of being, there would be no life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, where there is nonbeing there is finitude and anxiety. If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself, we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself. Wherever philosophers or theologians have spoke of the divine blessedness they have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) spoken of the anxiety of finitude which is eternally taken into the blessedness of the divine infinity. The infinite embraces itself and the finite, the Yes includes itself and the No which it takes into itself, blessedness comprises itself and the anxiety of which it is the conquest. All this is implied if one says that being includes nonbeing and that through nonbeing it reveals itself. It is a highly symbolic language which mist be used at this point. However, its symbolic character does not diminish its truth; on the contrary, it is a condition of its truth. To speak unsymbolically about being-itself is untrue. The divine self-affirmation is the power that makes the self-affirmation of the finite being, the courage to be, possible. Only because being-itself has the character of self-affirmation inspite of nonbeing is courage possible. Courage participates in the power of being which prevails against nonbeing. One who receives this power in an act of mystical or personal or absolute faith is aware of the source of one’s courage to be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mortals are not necessarily aware of this source. In situations of cynicism and indifference one is not aware of it. However, it works in one as long as one maintains the courage to take one’s anxiety upon oneself. In the act of the courage to be the power of being is effective in us, whether we recognize it or not. Every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be. The content may hide or distort true being, the courage in it reveals true being. Not arugments but the courage in it reveals true being. Not arguments but the courage to be reveals the true nature of being-itself. By affirming our being we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not. If we know it, we accept acceptance consciously. If we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Love’s depth is often tested in crisis. In addition to courage, there must be caring for us to manifest our true divine heritage. We must care, be concerned, about other people’s well-being, their growth, their health, their ups and downs. A deeply felt and often expressed statement, verbal or not, that we convey to each other when we love is “I care about you, how you are, what happens to you, about protecting you, about seeing your grow and become everything you can be.” And it goes a bit further: “I hurt when you hurt: I feel your joy, your sorrow, your ecstasy, your loss, your fear, and your confidence.” The caring aspect of love is seen most vividly in the love expressed by a mother for her child. You birth the baby, carrying him or her on your hip like the child is apart of you and watch the being grow. The child is not yet a full partner in the love relationship; he or she is a recipient of the mother’s affection, concern and tenderness. What satisfies the mother, though, is response. The child can smile when filled or comfortable. One can gurgle and good and wave his or her arms when he or she see her coming. These simple expressions are sufficient for most of us. However, in a mature and authentic love relationship, if one person is inadequate or poorly equipped in responding, the other person may find that one cannot continue giving. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
When it comes to romance, there is good basis in mortal’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. This holds in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted. Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two…He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divines mortals and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. Eros is not a god in the sense of being above mortals, but the power that binds all things and all mortal together, the power informing all things. It means to give inward from, to seek out by the devotion of love the unique form of the beloved person or object and to unite one’s self with that form. Eros also incites mortals in the yearning for knowledge and drives one passionately to seek union with truth. Through eros, we not only become poets and inventors, but also achieve ethical goodness. Love, in the form of eros, is the power which generates, and this generation is a kind of eternity and immortality—which is to say that such creativity is as close as mortals ever get to becoming immortal. #RandolpHarris 20 of 20
Triumph May be of Several Kinds as Long as God has Mercy on the Soul
I felt a physical push, as though she had stretched out her two hands and laid them on my chest and tried to move me back from where I stood. Her face was engraved with a hostile beauty. She tossed her hair just slightly, let it stroke her cheeks. We have avoided the concept of faith in our description of the courage to be which is based on mystical union wit the ground of being as well as in our description of the courage to be which is based on the personal encounter with God. This is partly because the concept of faith has lost its genuine meaning and has received the connotation of belief in something unbelievable. However, this is not the only reason for the use of terms other than faith. The decisive reason is that I do not think either mystical union or personal encounter fulfills the idea of faith. Certainly there is faith in the elevation of the soul above the finite to the infinite, leading to its union with the ground of being. However, more than this is included in the concept of faith. And there is faith in the personal encounter with the personal God. However, more than this is included in the concept of faith. Faith is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. The courage to be is an expression of faith and what faith means must be understood through the courage to be. We have defined courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of non-being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The power of this self-affirmation is the power of being which is effective in every act of courage. Faith is the experience of this power. However, it is an experience which has a paradoxical character, the character of accepting acceptance. Being-itself transcends every finite being infinitely; God in the divine-human encounter transcends mortals unconditionally. Faith bridges this finite gap by accepting the fact that in spite of it the power of being is present, that one who is separated is accepted. Faith accepts in spite of; and out of the in spite of of faith the inspire of of courage is born. Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. One who is grasped by this power is able to affirm oneself because one knows that one is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be. This decisive for a period in which, as in our own, the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is dominant. Certainly the anxiety of fate and death is not lacking in our time. The anxiety of fate has increased with the degree to which the schizophrenic split of our World has removed the last remnants of former security. And the anxiety of guilt and condemnation is not lacking either. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
It is surprising how much anxiety of guilt comes to the surface in psychoanalysis and personal counseling. The centuries of puritan and bourgeois repression of vital strivings have produced almost as many guilt feelings as the preaching of hell and purgatory in the Middle Ages. However, in spite of these restricting considerations one must say that the anxiety which determines our period is the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness. One is afraid of having lost or of having to lose the meaning of one’s existence. The expression of this situation is the Existentialism of today. Which courage is able to take nonbeing into itself in the from of doubt and meaninglessness? This is the most important and most disturbing question in the quest for the courage to be. For the anxiety of meaninglessness undermines what is still unshaken in the anxiety of fate and death and of guilt and condemnation. In the anxiety of guilt and condemnation doubt has not yet undermined the certainty of an ultimate responsibility. We are threatened but we are not destroyed. If, however, doubt and meaninglessness prevail one experiences an abyss in which the meaning of life and the truth of ultimate responsibility disappear. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Both the Stoic who conquers the anxiety of fate with the Socratic courage of wisdom and the Christian who conquers the anxiety of guilt with the Protestant courage of accepting forgiveness are in a different situation. Even in the despair of having to die and the despair of self-condemnation meaning is affirmed and certitude preserved. However, in the despair of doubt and meaninglessness bot are swallowed by nonbeing. The question then is this: Is there a courage which can conquer the anxiety of meaninglessness and doubt? Or in other words, can the faith which accepts acceptance resist the power of nonbeing in its most radical form? Can faith resist meaninglessness? Is there a kind of faith which can exist together with doubt and meaninglessness? These questions lead to the last aspect of the problem discussed in these lectures and the one most relevant to our time: How is the courage to be possible if all the ways to create it are barred by the experience of their ultimate insufficiency? If life is as meaningless as death, if guilt is as questionable as perfection, if being is no more meaningful than nonbeing, on what can one base the courage to be? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
There is an inclination in some Existentialists to answer these questions by a leap from doubt to dogmatic certitude, from meaninglessness to set of symbols in which the meaning of a special ecclesiastical or political group is embodied. This lead can be interpreted in different ways. It may be the expression of a desire for safety; it may be as arbitrary as, according to Existentialist principles, every decision is; it may be the feeling that the Christian message is the answer to the question raised by an analysis of human existence; it may be a genuine conversion, independent of the theoretical situation. In any case it is not a solution of the problem of radical doubt. It gives the courage to be to those who are converted but it does not answer the question as to how such a courage is possible in itself. The answer must accept, as its precondition, the state of meaninglessness. It is not an answer if it demands the removal of this state; for that is just what cannot be done. One who is in the grip of doubt and meaninglessness cannot liberate oneself from this grip; but one asks for an answer which is valid within and not outside the situation of one’s despair. One asks for the ultimate foundation of what we have called the courage of despair. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
There is only one possible answer, if one does not try to escape the question: namely that the acceptance of despair is in itself faith and on the boundary line of courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to despair about the meaning of life. However, as long as this despair is an act of life it is beneficial in its negativity. Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it. Religiously speaking, one would say that one accepts oneself as accepted in spite of one’s despair about the meaning of this acceptance. The paradox of every radical negativity, as long as it is an active negativity, is that it must affirm itself in order to be able to negate itself. No actual negation can be without an implicit affirmation. The hidden pleasure produced by despair witnesses to the paradoxical character of self-negation. The negative lives from the benefits it negates. The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of nonbeing. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We have seen that one who has the courage to affirm one’s being in spite of fate and guilt has not removed them. One remains threatened and hit by them. However, one accepts one’s acceptance by the power of being-itself in which one participates and which gives one the courage to take the anxieties of fate and guilt upon oneself. The same is true of doubt and meaninglessness. The faith which creates the courage to take them into itself has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute. It is undefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness. Nevertheless, even absolute faith is not an eruption of subjective emotions or a mood without objective foundation. An analysis of the nature of absolute faith reveals that following elements in it. The first is the experience of the power of being which is present even in face of the most radical manifestation of nonbeing. If one says that in this experience vitality resists despair one must add that vitality in mortals is proportional to intentionality. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning. The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience of being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible. There is a third element in absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. However, there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the power of acceptance. To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be. This faith transcends both the mystical experience and the divine-human encounter. The mystical experience seems to be nearer to absolute faith but it is not. Absolute faith includes an element of skepticism which one cannot find in the mystical experience. Certainly mysticism also transcends all specific contents, but not because it doubts them or has found them meaningless; rather it seems them to be preliminary. Mysticism uses the specific contents as grades, stepping on them after having used them. The experience of meaninglessness, however, denies them (and everything that goes with them) without having used them. The experience of meaninglessness if more radical than mysticism. Therefore it transcends the mystical experience. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Absolute faith also transcends the divine-human encounter. In this encounter the subject-object scheme is valid: a definite subject (mortal) meets a definite object (God). One can reserve this statement and say that a definite subject (God) meets a definite object (mortal). However, in both causes the attack of doubt undercuts the subject-object structure. The theologians who speak so strongly and with such self-certainty about the divine-human encounter should be aware of a situation in which this encounter is prevented by radical doubt and nothing is left but absolute faith. The acceptance of such a situation as religiously valid has, however, the consequences that the concrete contents of ordinary faith must be subjected to criticism and transformation. The courage to be in its radical form is a key to an idea of God which transcends both mysticism and the person-to-person encounter. Dr. Freud has discovered the principle of free association. By giving up the control of your thoughts in the presence of a skilled listener, you can discover your unconscious feelings and thoughts without being asleep, or crazy, or drunk, or hypnotized. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The psychoanalyst reads between your lines, one is capable of understanding you better than you understand yourself because you have freed your thinking from the limitations of conventional thought control. However, free association soon deteriorated, like freedom and happiness. First it deteriorated in the orthodox psychoanalytic procedure itself. Not always, but often. Instead of giving rise to a meaningful expression of imprisoned thoughts, it became meaningless chatter. Other therapeutic schools reduced the role of the analyst to that of a sympathetic listener, who repeats in slightly different version the words of the patient, without trying to interpret or to explain. All this is done with the idea that the patient’s freedom must not be interfered with. The Freudian idea of free association has become the instrument of many psychologists who call themselves counselors, although the only thing they do not do is counsel. These counselors play an increasingly large role as private practitioners and as advisers in industry. What is the effect of the procedure? Obviously not a cure which Dr. Freud ad in mind when he devised free association as a basis for understanding the unconscious. Rather a release of tension which results from talking things out in the presence of a sympathetic listener. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Your thoughts, as long as you keep them within yourself, may disturb you—but something fruitful may come out of this disturbance; you mull them over, you think, you feel, you may arrive at a new thought born out of this travail. However, when you talk right away, when you do not let your thoughts and feelings build up pressure, as it were, they do not become fruitful. It is exactly the same as with unobstructed consumption. You are a system in which things go in and out continuously—and within it is nothing, no tension, no digestion, no self. Dr. Freud’s discovery of free association had the aim of finding out what went on in your underneath the surface, of discovering who you really were; the modern talking to the sympathetic listener has the opposite, although unavowed aim; its function is to make a mortal forget who one is (provided one has still some memory), to lose all tension, and with it all sense of self. Just as one oils machines, one oils people and especially those in the mass organizations of work. One oils them with pleasant slogans, material advantages, and with the sympathetic understanding of the psychologists. The talking and listening to eventually has become the indoor sport of those who cannot afford a professional listener, or prefer the layman for one reason of another. It has become fashionable, sophisticated, to talk things out. There is no inhibition, no sense of shame, no holding back. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
When we are allowed to freely express ourselves, one speaks about the tragic occurrences of one’s life with the same ease as one would talk about another person of no particular interest, or as one would speak about the various troubles one has had with one’s video game. Indeed, psychology and psychiatry are in the process of changing their function fundamentally. From the Delphic Oracle’s “Know thyself!” to Dr. Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy, the function of psychology was to discover the self, to understand the individual, to find the truth that makes you free. Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of mortals. The specialists in this field tell you what the normal person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal. In the Brave New World this conditioning is done from the first month of fertilization (by chemical means), until after puberty. With us, it begins a little later. Constant repetition by newspaper, radio, television, does most of the conditioning. However, the crowning achievement of manipulation is modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
What the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor did for industrial work when he started the Efficiency Movement, the psychologist does for the whole personality—all in the name of understanding freedom. There are many exceptions to this among psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, but it becomes increasingly clear that these professions are in the process of becoming a serious danger to the development of mortal, that their practitioners are evolving into the priests of the new religion of fun, consumption and selflessness, into the specialists of manipulation, into the spokes person for the alienated personality. One wonders whether everyone has forgotten the fact that eros, according to no less an authority than St. Augustine, is the power which drives men toward God. Eros created life on the Earth, the early Greek mythology tells us. When the World was barren and lifeless, it was Eros who seized his life-giving arrows and pierced the cold heart of the Earth, and immediately the brown surface was covered with luxuriant verdure. This is an appealing symbolic picture of how love is a creative relationship. It is creative in the sense that something new or novel or important comes out of relating. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Eros then breathed into the nostrils of the clay forms of man and woman and gave them the spirit of life. The relationship, not how it is expressed or consummated, is the important thing. A friendship between two people, whether of the opposite sex or the same sex, is a love relationship when certain important qualities are present. Any love relation involves four elements: Knowledge, Care, Respect, Responsibility. Eros is the kind of energy that is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand. Eros is defined as ardent desire, yearning, aspiring self-fulfilling love. For eros is the power which attracts us. The essence of eros is that it draws us from ahead. This is revealed in our day-to-day language when I saw a person allures me or entices me, or the possibilities of a new job invite me. Something in me responds to the other person, or the job, and pulls me toward the individual or career. I participate in forms, possibilities, higher levels of meaning, on neurophysiological dimensions but also on aesthetic and ethical dimensions as well. As the Greeks believed, knowledge and even ethical goodness exercise such a pull. Eros is the drive toward union with what we belong to—union with our own possibilities, union with significant other persons in our World in relation to whom we discover our own self-fulfillment. Eros is the yearning in a mortal which leads one to dedicate oneself to seek arete, the noble and good life. #RandolpHarris 14 of 17
To love, to be in a true loving relationship, the involved people must know each other. True love at first sight is possible under the rarest of circumstances and occurs only in the same kinds of ultra-sensitive people who may also be called mind-readers or superb judges of character. The common feeling of falling in love at first sight is a product of one or more things: fascination, fantasy, intimacy, admiration, appreciation, attraction, identification, or just plain good vibes. If one defines love in any of those terms, then for all intents and purposes the individual loves you. However, love, for most people, and we must say in reality, is much more. It is really knowing another individual. To know someone you must experience that person. Not just on dates, and certainly not just by seeing him or her on a two-dimensional movie screen or on social media. In the typical dating experience, even in this modern, enlightened, up-to-date, anti-establishment World, people do unreal, phony and inauthentic things in an attempt to put their best foot forward, basically to impress another person. So many things are artificially hidden—complexion flaws, food preferences, less-than-acceptable traits-that one person may require a great deal of time to penetrate the masks of another or to become acquainted with the games he or she plays. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Mature, deep and satisfying love comes from real, intimate, intensive and extensive knowledge. It comes from wide and profound experiencing of the fullest self possible. Eros makes one want to stay awake and think of the beloved, remembering, savoring, discovering ever-new facets of the prism of what the experience of being around them is like. It is the urge for union with the partner that is the occasion for human tenderness. The source of love is tenderness. Eros is the longing to establish union, full relationship. To know more than intellectual insight. You do not know a girl simply because you know her name is Elle Woods, that she lives on the 4900th Court of Regatta, that her phone number 817-4435, that her measurements are 35-22-36, that her age is 20, that she works at…, that her parents are…,that she has certain color eyes, hair, skin, etc. This is not the kind of knowledge we mean. This is Bureau of the Census information, almanac data. It is impressed on us that intimate, personal knowledge is fundamental and basic part of a close relationship. We must know each other—each of us must understand the other’s special uniqueness—before we consider our relationship one of love. The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but for a genuine union. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
True respect takes place as we come to develop our ability to love our fellow mortals as ourselves. A sharing takes place which is a new being, a new field of magnetic force. This is what is called chemistry of two people in love, and without it, a relationship will not last. Chemistry shakes us, it has within it the great wonder, tremendous and tremulous as it may be, it is when we know the other individual is the mate of our soul and the feeling is mutual. Chemistry is the moment of union of souls and realization that we have won the others. This is a symbolic way of communicating a basic truth of human experience, that eros always drives us to transcend ourselves. It is a truth which obtains our relationships in the objective World. “All these faded pictures I save in the corners of my mind. They call in waves to take me away. I will not be back tonight. And I breathe the sights that we left behind. Wen I dream, those nights will always be mine. I feel as years unfold that we are still connected to those days when we were young and you were my reflect. I still come back to you,” reports Emma Hewitt and Andrew Rayel (My Reflection). Respect is also synonymous with care and concern. We respect those we care about. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Its Past Enlightened to Perceive New Periods of Recollect
Indeed people’s charms should not go to waste, that is my motto, may it never have dire consequences for the mortal World. As I have pointed out before, anonymous authority and automation conformity are largely the results of our mode of production, which requires quick adaptation to the machines, disciplined mass behavior, common taste and obedience without the use of force. Another facet of our economic system, the need for mass consumption, has been instrumental in creating a feature in the social character of modern mortals which constitutes one of the most striking contrasts to the social character twenty first century. I am referring to the principle that every desire must be satisfied immediately, no wish must be frustrated. The most obvious illustration of this principle is to be found in our system of buying on the installment plan. In the nineteenth century you bought what you needed, when you had saved the money for it; today you buy what you need, or do not need, on credit, and the function of advertising is largely to coax you into buying and to whet your appetite for things, so that you can be coaxed. You live in a circle. You buy on the installment plan, and about the time you have finished paying, you sell and you buy again—the latest model. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The principle that desires must be satisfied without much delay has also determined sexual behavior, especially since the end of the First World War. A crude form of misunderstood Freudianism used to furnish the appropriate rationalizations; the idea being that neuroses result from repressed sexual strivings, that frustrations were traumatic, and the less you repressed the healthier you were. Even parents anxious to give their children everything they wanted lest they be frustrated, acquired a complex. Unfortunately, many of these children as well as their parents landed on the analyst’s couch, provided they could afford it. The greed for things and the inability to postpone the satisfaction of wishes as characteristic of modern mortals has been stressed by thoughtful observers, such as Max Scheler and Bergson. It as been given its most poignant expression by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World. Among the slogans by which the adolescents in the Brave New World are conditioned, one of the most important ones is “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” It is hammered into them, “two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half.” This instant realization of wishes is felt as happiness. “Everybody’s happy nowadays” is another of the Brave New World slogans; people “get what they want and they never want what they can’t get.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
This need for the immediate consumption of commodities and the immediate consummation of sexual desires is coupled in the Brave New World as in our own. It is considered immoral to keep one love partner beyond a relatively short time. Love is short-lived sexual desire, which must be satisfied immediately. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There is no such thing as a divided allegiance; you are so conditioned that you cannot help doing what you ought to do. And what you out to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really are not any temptations to resist. This lack of inhibition of desires leads to the same result as the lack of overt authority—the paralysis and eventually the destruction of the self. If I do not postpone the satisfaction of my wish (and am conditioned only to wish for what I can get), I have no conflicts, no doubts; no decision has to be made; I am never alone with myself, because I am always busy—either working, or having fun. I have no need to be aware of myself as myself because I am constantly absorbed having pleasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
I am—a system of desires and satisfaction; I have to work in order to fulfill my desires—and these very desires are constantly stimulated and directed by the economic machines. Most of these appetites are synthetic; even sexual appetite is by far not as natural as it is made out to be. It is to some extent stimulated artificially. And it needs to be if we want to have people as the contemporary system needs them—people who feel happy, who have no doubts, who have no conflicts, who are guided without the use of force. Having fun consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in; commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The World is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. How can we help being disappointed if our birth stops at the breast of the mother, if we are never weaned, if we remain overgrown babes, if we never go beyond the receptive orientation? So people do worry, feel inferior, inadequate, guilty. They sense that they live without living, that life runs through their hands like sand. How do they deal with their troubles, which stem from the passivity of constant taking in? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By another form of passivity, a constant spilling out, as it were: by talking. Here, as in the case of authority and consumption, an idea which once was productive has been turned into its opposite. Who we are—what our identities will be—is not a given, not fully decided at birth. Newborn infants are not miniature adults or people seeds, that only require a sprinkling of water to grow to their fullest stature. On the other hand, as unlike the adults they will become that infants are, they are not wholly, either. Just how much of our identities are we born with? How much is nurtured through processes and forces outside of ourselves? Perhaps we can most accurately say that people are born with potentials that develop as they grow into adult human beings. The terms we use to describe the life process—changing, growing, evolving, transforming, unfolding, becoming, realizing, actualizing, blooming, blossoming, flowering—reveal this belief that at birth we both are and are not all that we will become. Many theorists have tried to describe the processes through which people develop. However, these detailed systems cannot explain the study of the human life cycle with certainty to all the questions arise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Too many questions of philosophy and cannot, at least now, be answered by science. They do, though, add important insight and knowledge to our study of the ways in which we grow into being. Most people live in the confidence that out technological developments have largely freed us from the risks of unchosen pregnancy and venereal disease and, therefore, ipso facto, the anxiety people used to feel about sex and love is now banished forever to the museum. The vicissitudes about which the novelists of previous centuries wrote—when a woman gave herself to a man, it meant illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracism, as in The Scarlet Letter; or the tragic break-up of the family structure and the experience of death by suicide, as in Anna Karenina; or venereal disease, as in the market place of social reality—have been outgrown. Now, thank God and science, we tell ourselves, we are rid of all that! The implication is that sex is free and that love is easy and comes in readily procurable packages like what the students call “instant Zen.” And any talk of the deeper conflicts which used to be associated with the tragic and daimonic elements is anachronistic and absurd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
However, I shall be impolite enough to ask, May there not be a gigantic extensive repression underlying all this? A repression not of sex, but of something underlying body chemistry, some psychic needs more vital, deeper, and more comprehensive than sex. A repression that is socially sanctioned, to be sure—but just for that reason harder to discern and more effective in its results. I am obviously not questioning contemporary medical and psychological advances as such: no one in his or her right mind would fail to be grateful for the development of contraceptives, estrogen, and cures for venereal disease. And I count it good fortune indeed to be born into this age with its freedom of possibilities rather than in the Victorian period with its rigid mores. However, that issue is fallacious and a red herring. Our problem is more profound and starkly real. We pick up the morning paper and read that there are a million illegal abortions in enlightened America each year; that premarital pregnancies are increasing on all sides. One girl out of six who is now thirteen will, according to present statistics, become illegitimately pregnant before she is twenty—two and half times the incidence of ten year ago. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The increase is mainly among the girls of the proletarian classes, but there is enough increase among girls of middle and upper classes to prove that this is not a problem solely of disadvantage groups. Some people believe that we are what we are at birth. Nature, through heredity, determines everything. We look, act, feel, do, and believe what we do because of our genetic makeup. Others believe that regardless of what we are born with, it is the impact of our environment, of the way we are nurtured, that really determines who and what we become. What we learn or acquire through conditioning and experience makes up what we are. Most people now believe that both nature and nurture play important roles in shaping our behavior. We are confronted by the curious situation of the more birth control, the more illegitimate pregnancies. As the reader hastens to cry that what is necessary to change barbaric abortion laws and give more sex education, I would not disagree; but I could, and should raise a caveat. The blanket advising of more sex education can act as a reassurance by means of which we escape having to ask ourselves the more frightening question. May not the real issue be not on the level of conscious, rational intentions at all? May it not be in a deeper realm of what I shall later call intentionality? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Some women use their sex to gain personal affirmation. They are desired, and that is almost enough…a child is a symbol that she is a woman, and she may gain from having something on her own. This struggle to prove one’s identity and personal worth may be more outspoken with less affluent young women, but it is just as present in middle-class young ladies who can cover it up better by socially skillful behavior. Let us take as an example a female patient from an upper middle-class background with whom I whom I worked. Her father had been a banker in a small city, and her mother a proper lady who has always assumed a Christian attitude toward everyone but who seemed, from the data which came up in therapy, to be usually rigid and had actually resented having this girl when she was born. My patient was well educated, already in her early thirties a successful editor in a large publishing house, and obviously was not the slightest deficient in knowledge of sex or contraception. Yet she had two illegitimate pregnancies in her mid-twenties several years before she began treatment with me. Both of these pregnancies gave her painful feelings of guilt and conflict, yet she went from one directly into another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
She had been married for two years in her early twenties to a man who, an intellectual like herself, was emotionally detached, and each had tried by various kinds of aggressive-dependency nagging to get the other to infuse some meaning and vitality into an empty marriage. After her divorce, while she lived alone, she volunteered to do some evening reading to those who were visually impaired. She became pregnant by the young visually impaired man to whom she read. Though this, and its subsequent abortion, upset her greatly, she became pregnant again shortly after her first abortion. Now it is absurd to think that we can understand this behavior on the basis of sexual needs. Indeed, the fact tat she did not feel sexual desire was actually more influential in leading her into the sexual relations which caused the pregnancies. We must look to her image of herself and her ways of trying to find a meaningful place for herself in her World id we are to have any hope of discovering the dynamics of the pregnancies. She was, diagnostically speaking, what is called a typically contemporary schizoid personality: intelligent, articulate, efficient, successful in work, but detached in personal intercourse and afraid of intimate relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
She had always thought of herself as an empty person who never could feel much on her own or experience anything lasting even when she took psychedelics—the kind of person who cries out to the World to give her some passion, some vitality. Attractive, she ad a number of men friends but the relationships with them also had a dried up quality and lacked the zest for which she fervently longed. She described sleeping with the one with which she was most intimate at the time as if they were two animals clinging together for warmth, her feeling being a generalized despair. She had a dream early in therapy which recurred in varying form, of herself in one room and her parents in the next room separated by a wall which went not quite up to the ceiling; and no matter how hard she knocked on the wall or cried out to them in the dream, she could not get them to hear her. She arrived for her therapy hour one day having just come from an art exhibit, to tell me she had discovered the symbol most accurately describing her feelings about herself: the lonely figures of Edward Hopper, in his paintings in which there is only one figure—a solitary girl usherette in a brightly lighted and plush but entirely empty theater; a woman sitting alone by an upper window in a Victorian house at the shore in the deserted off-season; a lone person in a rocking chair on a porch not unlike the house in the small city in which my patient grew up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Edward Hopper’s paintings, indeed, give a poignant meaning to the quiet despair, the emptiness of human feeling and longing which is referred to by that cliché alienation. It is touching that her first pregnancy came in a relation with a human being who was visually impaired. We are impressed here by her elemental generosity in wanting to give him something and to prove something also to herself, but most of all we are struck by the aura of blindness surrounding the whole event of getting pregnant. She was one of the many person in our World of affluence and technological power who moved, humanly speaking, in a World of the blind, where nobody can see another and were our touching is at best a sightless fumbling, moving our fingers over the body of another trying to recognize him or her, but unable in our own self-enclosing darkness to do so. We could conclude that she became pregnant to establish her own self-esteem by proving somebody wants her—as her husband did not; to compensate for her feelings of emotional poverty—which pregnancy does quite literally by filling up the womb if we take the womb (hysteria) as a symbol of vacuum of emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Furthermore, the young lady may have wanted to get pregnant to expression her aggression against her mother and father and their suffocating and hypocritical middle-class background. All of the which goes without saying. However, what the deeper defiance required by, and indeed built into, the self-contradiction in her and in our society which belie our rational, well-meaning intentions? It is absurd to think that this girl, or any girl, gets pregnant simply because she does not know better. This woman lives in an age where, for upper-class and middle-class girls like her, contraceptives and sex knowledge were never more available, and her society proclaims on all sides that anxiety about sex is archaic and encourages her to be free of all conflict about love. What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new born freedom? Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluble, is great indeed; anxiety which in our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like the hysterical women of Victorian times (for everyone nowadays ought to be free and uninhibited) and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The girls and women in this predicament are partial victims of a gigantic repression in themselves and in our society—the repression of eros and passion and the over availability of sex as a technique for repression. A corollary is that our dogmatic enlightenment contains elements within it which rob us of the very means of meeting this new and inner anxiety. We are experiencing a return of the repressed, a return of an eros which will not be denied no mater how much it is bribed on all sides by sex: a returned of the repressed in a primitive way precisely designed to mock our withdrawal of feelings. The same is found in out work with men. A young psychiatrist, in his training analysis, was preoccupied mainly with the fear that he was homosexual. Now in his middle twenties, he had never had sexual relations with a woman, and though he had not been a practicing homosexual, he had been approached by enough men to make him think that he emanated that “aura.” During his therapy, he became acquainted with a woman and in due course they begin having sexual relations. At least half the time they did not use contraceptives. Several times I brought to his attention the fact that the was fairly sure to get pregnant; he—knowing all about this from his medical training—would agree and thank me. #RandolpHarris 14 of 19
However, when he still had intercourse without contraception and once was very anxious when the woman missed her menstrual cycle, I found myself vaguely anxious, too, and irritated at how stupid her seemed to be. I caught myself up with the realization that, in my naivete, I was missing the whole point of what was going on. So I broke in, “It seems you want to make this woman pregnant.” He at first emphatically contradicted me, but then he paused to ponder the truth of my statement. All talk of methods and what they ought to do was of course irrelevant. In this man, who had never been able to feel himself masculine, some vital need was pushing him not just to prove himself a man—of which impregnating a woman is much more decisive than merely the capacity to have intercourse—but to get some hold on nature, experience a fundamental procreative process, give himself over to some primitive and powerful biological process, partake of some deeper pulsations in the cosmos. We shall not understand these problems except when we see that our patients have been robbed of precisely these deeper sources of human experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
We observe in many of these illegitimate pregnancies—or their equivalent—a defiance of the very socially-ordered system which takes away affect, where technology is felt to be a substitute for feelings, a society which calls persons forth to an arid and meaningless existence and gives them, particularly the younger generation, an experience of personalization which is more painful than illegal abortion. No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. And, indeed, they often clutch at physical pain (or social ostracism or violence or delinquency) as a welcome relief. Have we become so civilized that we have forgotten that a girl can yearn to procreate, and can do so not just for psychobiological reasons but to break up the arid desert of feelingless existence, to destroy for one if not for all the repetitive pattern of fucking-to-avoid-the-emptiness-of-despair (“What shall we do tomorrow?” as T.S. Eliot has a rich courtesan cry, “What shall we ever do?”). Or that she can yearn to become pregnant because tee art is never fully converted to a passionlessness, and she is driven to an expression of that which is denied her and which she herself consciously denies in our age of the cool millennium. At least being pregnant is something real, and it proves to the girl and to the man that they are real. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, “We yearn to talk but our dried voices are birds feet over broken glass. We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.” It should not be surprising that a revolt is occurring against the mores which people think cause alienation; a defiance of social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort—all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling. The denial of the daimonic means only that the Earth Spirits will come back to haunt us in a new guise; Gaea will be heard, and when the darkness returns the black Madonna will be present if there is no white. The error into which we have fallen obviously consists not of our scientific advances and enlightenment as such, but the using of these for a blanket allaying of all anxiety about sex and love. Marcuse holds that in a nonrepressive society, as sex develops it tends to merge with eros. It is clear that our society has done just the opposite: we separated sex from eros and then tried to repress eros. The passion which is one element of the denied eros then comes back from its repression to upset the person’s whole existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The significant self is one who has come through the ravages of an insignificance-producing technology, has learned to accept and know oneself, has come to appreciate one’s place in the scheme of things (nature and other people), and as learned how to integrate the various sides of oneself in an authentic and honest fashion. The person who is struggling to be oneself and know oneself and enjoy being alive ever comes back, full circle, to the beginning, to that vaguest of all concepts: Love. Love, more than being a mere feeling, idea, ideal, or notion, is the most complex experience in all human life. It is the cause of more joy and also more misery than anything else we can know. What do we mean by love? Do any two people mean the same thing by it? Look at the confusion engendered by the simple expression of “I love you”: Sometimes it means: I desire you or I want you sexually. It may mean: I hope you love me or I hope that I will be able to love you. Often it means: It may be that a love relationship can develop between us or even I hate you. Often it is a wish for emotional exchange: I want your admiration in exchange for mine or I give my love in exchange for some passion or I want to feel cozy and at home wit you or I admire some of your qualities. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
A declaration of love is mostly a request: I desire you or I want you to gratify me or I want your protection or I want to be intimate with you or I want to exploit your loveliness. Sometimes it is the need for security and tenderness, for parental treatment. It may mean: My self-love goes out to you. However, it may also express submissiveness: Please take me as I am or I feel guilty about you. I want through you to correct the mistakes I have made in human relations. It may be self-sacrifice and a masochistic wish for dependency. Saying I love you to someone may also be a way of saying good-bye to a person you have wronged, someone you have set up, when you know something is about to happen to them. However, it also may be a full affirmation of the other, taking responsibility for mutual exchange of feelings. It may be a weak feeling of friendliness, it may be the scarcely even whispered expression of ecstasy. “I love you,” wish, desire, submission, conquest: it is never the word itself that tells the real meaning here. “Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people, and ye shall have no laws but my laws when I come, for I am your lawgiver, and what can stay my hand?” reports Doctrines and Covenants 38.22. It would be nice for people to recognize who one is and what one does, to recognize the individual as a person, and enjoy what we are sharing with them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
You Are the Great Unknown, Sweetheart–To Love Someone is to Bid One to Live and Invite One to Grow
Enough about the Garden of Eden. You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Rock Music scene is a cultic activity. This one is not properly a cult, for rock music, country rock, folk rock, and soul music are real and important trends in American and European music. They began, of course, in Afro-Cuban rhythms, African jazz and blues, and country and Western ballads. More than a fad, rock music has made an indelible mark on the American musical tradition. The cult that has grown up around performers and styles represents still another attempt to transcend certain ordinary experiences and reach out for something else, something beyond. The first real stars in the young rock movement were B.B, King, Bill Haley, and Chuck Berry. Elvis Presley brought rock to the mass media and made it a fantastically profitable occupation and art form. The Beatles gave full credit to these early stars for their original inspiration, but they added some dimensions of their own which enabled the rough and wild rock “child” to grow up into a musical form of sophistication and wide appeal. Bob Dylan introduced social comment into his music, at least in the first big commercial sense. Most folk songs had some kind of message, but Dylan’s commentary told the Establishment that the younger generation was very serious about remaking and challenging the established patterns. Pacifism and brotherhood became themes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Rock music is a form of transcendent behavior for many people. The Flower Children soon came to recognize the impact of electronically amplified music and some of their most significant messages were promoted by performers like Donovan, The Beatles, the Iron Butterfly, Mothers of Invention, and others. Joan Baez and Judy Collins made branding-iron-hot comments about life in the technological age with their soft and plaintive folk-rock sounds. So did Peter, Paul and Mary and many others. The young people began to recognize many things about themselves with their cultic involvement in Rock Music. They found, for example, that they were a force to be reckoned with. Their sounds and their themes were picked up and imitated by older, more established performers. They found that they had economic power: they could make or break a performer by either buying or not buying his or her record, tape, CD or steaming their music. The young generation found that they were also style-setters, and that older youth and even grown-ups were eager to follow in their footsteps. Out of all this, the young have found that they actually do have some significance. As a group, they represent youth, enthusiasm, economic power, political pressure, and above all, a separate and discrete identity that does not easily shade into those of groups on either side of them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Now, our question runs, can the individual love child or rock cultist emerge from this group identity into a phase of knowing oneself to be fully and truly significant, apart from one’s identification and involvement with a cult or group? We do not mean isolation, alienation, or repudiation; we mean, a person must by truly a significant and actualized. One is both a solitary and social being, neither one alone, but capable of being either. Too many people are only identity. Others have only a solitary or isolated identity. Real self-actualization, and this means mental health, is to know yourself, fully and really, both alone and in interaction with others. There are so many other activities that are cultic or similar to cults. Nudism, sexual cults, political action cults, organic food cults—each is important to many people. The cult is a situation that enables the person to experience oneself in safety or to transcend oneself at times. Since self-transcendence is a universal need of all people, we have tried to describe some of these cultic activities and religion solely as means by which individuals rise above their ordinary experiences, not with the intention of promoting or demeaning any one of them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we spend too much of our time and energy in actualizing ourselves, we lose sight of our relations to the larger reality, the realm of Meaning. We must not make actualization of the self our end-goal. Rather, one must seek to align oneself with the Meaning in life, seek purpose and intention, primarily through work or causes. Then self-actualization comes, not as a goal to be sought, but as a by-product of the search for Meaning. Hunting for peak experiences does not usually work. They usually just happen. We are surprised by joy. So, mortals are a pleasure-seeking or peak-experiencing being, not so much by intent as by accident. Oh, yes, we can seek pleasure, even more pleasure than Dr. Freud spoke of. We all do. However, the pleasures we seek are more momentary, more superficial: a white chocolate Twix, a warm drink of eggnog on a cold night, a hug, the sense of intimacy. Not all pleasures are quite in the same league, though. There is a hierarchy of pleasures: The cessation of pain, the moratorium of drunkenness, the relief of urination, the pleasure of a hot bath, the contentment of having done a job well, the satisfaction of success, on up through the happiness of being with loved friends, the rapture of being in love, the ecstasy of the perfect love act, on up to the final pleasure-beyond-pleasure of the mystical fusion with the Universe. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We all have some needs to go beyond our own existences, beyond and above our own experiences. We are not simply ordinariness-bound. The sense of significance is more than feeling that comes from knowing who you are, knowing that who you are is OK, knowing that others know you and appreciate you. It comes from some more grand experiences as well. A significant human being is one who can identify one’s own humanness with that of all other people. More than this, one identifies with Humanity, the same Humanity that ties all people together. And, one does even more than that. Once he or she experiences one’s identification with Humanity, one finds how much this means identification with all nature and, finally, with all of life. The search for personal significance is a search that involves growing as you go: the more you find, the more there is to find. The search begins at the small end of a cornucopia—the horn of plenty. We enter it small, because that is how must of us feel: the small opening fits our self-concept at the time. However, as we go through the cornucopia-shared search, we find that the horn is increasingly larger—and that is a good thing, for we are getting larger right along with it. At the end are the fruits of the search, the plenty which comes of knowing ourselves fully and being full selves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
There are many paths, many cornucopias: religion, a variety of cultic activities, medications and play, physical intimacy and work, prayer and practice: the styles and activities are infinite in number. To live life fully and most significantly means to experience as many things as possible. It means continually enlarging our scope of self-awareness by enlarging our perspective. “All you need is love” declares the Beatles, and though it is oversimplified, it is a great all-encompassing idea. Many of the goals and aspirations sought for by people in the religious and cultic activities mentioned are attained through the full experience of love. It should be repeated and impressed upon you that love is an experience that enables a person to transcend oneself without really losing oneself. Loving another is perhaps the only way both to find oneself and rise above oneself to experience the Larger realities of life. We do have myths. We had a goddess. However, not is not the time for all those things. You need not believe all I have seen. What I do have to give you is a vision. I think a vision is stronger than an illusion. And the vision is that we can exist as powerful beings without hurting anyone who is good and kind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Love is not only a many-splendored thing; it is a confusing and frustrating human experience as well. First of all, love is not merely an emotion, although many emotions are involved in the love experience. Love is a happening, something that is often not planned or expected or even intended. It involves levels of consciousness, self-development, emotional freedom, personal and social responsibility, tolerance, physical awareness and acceptance, knowledge, and much, much caring. To care of another person, in the most significant sense, is to help the individual grow and actualize oneself. Caring for someone means that you desire to see that person and expand and become all that he or she is capable of becoming. In order to do this, one must first of all care for oneself. One must be on the road to actualization of one’s own potential before one can be fully capable of interest in the needs, goals, or well-being of another person. Just as one cannot give what one has not got, neither can one take someone to a place one has not yet been. The idea that self-love must precede love of others is important to an understanding of what it means to love. Self-love does not mean selfish narcissism. Self and narcissism are not the same things. The ego is the center of the consciousness; the self is the center of the entire being. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
If you can realistically and wholly love your self (including your ego, but not merely in a narcissistic way), you then have enough self-regard to reach out, to experiment, to risk getting involved with others and caring about them. Narcissism is a superficial feeling of liking for the ego or for the roles we play or for a particular aspect of the ego, such as a skill, your appearance, or possessions. Narcissism, like masturbation, is an important part of self-development, but it can become a problem, for you and others, if you do not move beyond it. Narcissism shows itself as conceit, boastfulness, possessiveness, or emphasis on one or two parts of your selfhood, on materialism, or on success or achievement. It can help you firm up your ego identity, but then it should be left behind. The values and pressures of American society often make it difficult for many individuals to move beyond narcissism. Our societal priorities, such as getting ahead at any cost and paying excessive attention to how you look, how you come across socially, or being a winner, encourage narcissism. However, if you are aware of the other aspect of self-love—love of self, not ego—and its importance in the achievement of mature love, you can overcome these pressures. Characteristics that make up mature love are true, caring, knowledge, respect, and responsibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If we place a little more patience in the process and a greater amount of faith in the Lord, our challenges will find their way toward successful conclusions. Trust is the foundation upon which love must be built: no trust = no love. To trust means to believe. Trust has the same meaning as the theological concept of faith. It is derived from a Greek word meaning literally to put yourself in the hands of the object of your faith. To allow someone to get close to you, you must have faith in that person’s motives and in your own. You must trust that neither of your will try to hurt the other, that you will both be working toward a mutually beneficial relationship. Trusting others requires that you first must trust in yourself. You must believe in your own potential. You must be confident enough in your own identity that you can risk sharing yourself with another person. “If thou art sorrowful, call on the Lord thy God with supplication, that your souls may be joyful,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 136.29. Trust is always a risky business. Almost everyone ha trusted the wrong person and been hurt. Some people have been so badly hurt that they believer they can never trust again. Other, however, keeping the risk of pain in mind, know that most trust is warranted. We have to trust someone or else live in alienation and fear. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Let us rejoice in the blessings of peace, hope, and direction, blessings that so many of our Father’s children do not enjoy. Trusting in the Lord with all our hearts will allow us not to lean unto our own understanding. In all our ways, we must acknowledge God, and he shall direct our paths. God lives and loves each of us. I know our Father in Heaven has a perfect plan for us. As we follow this plan and the example of our Savior, we can find peace in this developing World, our hearts can be filled with hope, and we will receive the direction we need. Caring is the next building block of mature love. Caring is an active concern for the life and growth of those whom we love. This means we cannot simply talk about how much we care for something or someone, but we must also act upon it. Caring for others begins with self-caring. Somehow the World is hungry for goodness and recognizes it when it sees it. There is something in all of us that hungers after the good and true. Goodness is the attribute most needed and longed for not only in our individual lives but also in families, communities, states, and nations. If we are to effectively foster and utilize the great goodness of the people around us, we must strengthen both our families and our communities. The family is without question the God-given primary vehicle for the development and expression of personal goodness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, we also live in communities. People are by nature social beings whose lives and feelings are eternally connected and intertwined with those of others. Almost invariably, individuals reach their fully potential only in association and in community with others. Intimate knowledge of another persona is another factor necessary for love. Knowledge as it is meant here is much more than just familiarity with facts about a person. True knowledge of another person is very much like intuition. It is an emotional as much as mental experience. Regardless of the amount of time we spend with another person, picking that person’s brains and observing every facet of that person’s behavior, we may still have little true knowledge of that person. Why is this so? First of all, to know another person we must first know ourselves. When we have a deep, honest awareness of our own identity, we can begin to understand what goes in others. In addition, knowing another requires an openness and a willingness to be known ourselves. This requires trust. It means removing some of the defensive barriers we erect around us. It means taking off the false faces and masks that we wear as we play our many roles in life. This calls for authenticity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Honestly expressing ourselves to others is exceedingly risky, but if we sense they are a good person, the risk-talking may pay off in the closeness we feel as we gain true knowledge of another. Respect is another building block of love. Respect is a word that has been used and misused so often, it is a wonder it has any real meaning left to it. The root of the word comes from the Latin respicere—re- means back again, and spicere means to look. There is in the word, then, the connotation of taking another look, of seeing a person as if for the first time. As a child, some people think their fathers are the dumbest men alive. When they grow up, they are amazed at how much their fathers have learned! Obviously, this is talking about that fact that one’s own maturation has given one a new perspective on their father. One may suddenly see their father anew—whether the older man actually had learned anything new or not. When we respect people, we appreciate their uniqueness and hold them and all that they are in high regard. This does not mean that we like everything that they do, but that we accept them in their entirety, apart from riles, prejudices, circumstances, and relationships. We esteem their integrity, their wholeness, as human beings. To respect others, we must first have self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Responsibility is the final element necessary for love, and it should actually be spelled “response-ability,” to emphasize the meaning, the ability to responds. To have response-ability for another means to trust, care for, know, and respect someone so fully that we are aware of the person’s needs. Being aware, we try to meet as many of those needs as we responsibly can, without robbing that person of his or her own self-respect and responsibility. We are responsible to people, ore than we are responsible for them. Self-responsibility must precede responsibility for others. This means using one’s own resources to meet one’s own needs. It is not always easy to be responsible, but unless you are, real loving of yourself and other cannot take place. “With their wicked words they will try to hold you down. No this is not our fate, the lives in which they are bound and there is something more we know, it had to be found. I know the World will not wait, the tide is turning around, and there is not enough time. In the fallout of the wasted, in the half light I stand before you in the last dance of an old life. Now the cool wind’s blowing and we cannot stay, but it is alright. When the night is gone, I will still be here,” reports Emma Hewitt (Not Enough Time). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Baby has a New Place to Hide from Every One on Such a Dawn or Such a Dawn Would Anybody Sigh?
When they come on errand, they leave behind the totality of salvation. They have to, do they not? Or every haunting would be a theophany (the winged trio is said by some to symbolize the Holy Trinity), would it not? As the symbolic figures of death and the Devil show, the anxiety of this period was not restricted to the anxiety of guilt. It was also an anxiety of death and fate. The astrological ideas of the later ancient World had been revived by the Renaissance and had influenced even those humanists who joined the Reformation. We have already referred to the Neo-Stoic courage, expressed in some Renaissance pictures, where mortals direct the vessel of one’s life although it is driven by the winds of fate. Martin Luther the anxiety of fate on another level. He experienced the connection between the anxiety of guilt and the anxiety of fate. It is uneasy conscience which produces innumerable irrational fears in daily life. The rustling of a dry leaf horrifies one who is plagued by guilt. Therefore conquest of the anxiety of guilt is also conquest of the anxiety of fate. The courage of confidence takes the anxiety of fate as well as the anxiety of guilt into itself. It says “in spite of” to both of them. This is the genuine meaning of the doctrine of providence. Providence is not a theory about some activities of God; it is the religious symbol of the courage of confidence with respect to fate and death. For the courage of confidence says “in spite of” even to death. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The Apostle Paul , Martin Luther was well aware of the connection of the anxiety of guilt with the anxiety of death. In Stoicism and Neo-Stoicism the essential self is not threatened by death, because it belongs to being-itself and transcends nonbeing. Socrates, who in the power of one’s essential self conquered the anxiety of death, has become the symbol for the courage to take death upon oneself. This is the true meaning of Plato’s so-called doctrine of immortality of the soul, In discussing this doctrine we should neglect the arguments for immortality, even those in Plato’s Phaedon, and concentrate on the image of the dying Socrates. All the arguments, skeptically treated by Plato himself, are attempts to interpret the courage of Socrates, the courage to take one’s death into one’s self-affirmation. Socrates is certain that the self which the executioners will destroy is not the self which affirms itself in one’s courage to be. He does not say much about the relation of the two selves, and he could not because they are not numerically two, but one in two aspects. However, he makes it clear that the courage to die is the test of the courage to be. A self-affirmation which omits taking the affirmation of one’s death into itself tries to escape the test of courage, the facing of nonbeing in the most radical way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The popular belief in immortality which in the Western World has largely replaced the Christian symbol of resurrection is a mixture of courage and escape. It tries to maintain one’s self-affirmation even in the face of one’s having to die. However, it does this by continuing one’s finitude, that is one’s having to die, infinitely, so that the actual death never will occur. This, however, is an illusion and, logically speaking, a contradiction in terms. It makes endless what, by definition, must come to an end. The immortality of the soul is a poor symbol for the courage to be in the face of one’s having to die. The courage of Socrates (in Plato’s picture) was based not on a doctrine of the immortality of the soul but on the affirmation of oneself in one’s essential, indestructible being. He knows that he belongs to two orders of reality and that the one order is transtemporal. It was the courage of Socrates which more than any philosophical reflection revealed to the ancient World that everyone belongs to two orders. “Half the World is composed of people who have something to say and cannot, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it,” reports Robert Frost. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
However, there was one presupposition in the Socratic (Stoic and Neo-Stoic) courage to take death upon oneself, namely the ability of every individual to participate in both orders, the temporal and the eternal. This presupposition is not accepted by Christianity. According to Christianity we are estranged from our essential being. We are not free to realize our essential being, we are bound to contradict it. Therefore death can be accepted only through a state of confidence in which death has ceased to be the wages of sin. This, however, is the state of being accepted in spite of being unacceptable. Here is the point in which the ancient World was transformed by Christianity and in which Martin Luther’s courage to face death was rooted. It is the being accepted into communion with God that underlies this courage, not a questionable theory of immortality. The encounter with God in Martin Luther is not merely the basis for the courage to take upon oneself sin and condemnation, it is also the basis for taking upon oneself fate and death. For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity. One who participates in God participates in eternity. However, in order to participate in God one must be accepted by him and one must have accepted God’s acceptance of oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Martin Luther has experiences which he describes as attack of utter despair (Anfechtung), as the frightful threat of a complete meaninglessness. He felt these moments as satanic attacks in which everything was menaced: his Christian faith, the confidence in his work, the Reformation, the forgiveness of sins. Everything broke down in the extreme moments of this despair, nothing was left of the courage to be. Martin Luther in these moments and in the descriptions he gives of them, anticipated the descriptions of them by modern Existentialism. However, for him this was not the last word. The last word was the first commandment, the statement that God is God. It reminded him of the unconditional element in human experience of which one can be aware even in the abyss of meaninglessness. And this awareness saved him. It should not be forgotten that the great adversary of Martin Luther, Thomas Munzer, the Anabaptist and religious socialist, describes similar experiences. He speaks of the ultimate situation in which everything finite reveals its finitude, in which the finite has come to its end, in which anxiety grips the heart and all previous meanings fall apart, and in which just for this reason the Divine Spirit can make itself felt and can turn the whole situation into a courage to be whose expression is revolutionary action. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
While Martin Luther represents ecclesiastical Protestantism, Thomas Munzer represents evangelical radicalism. Both men have shaped history, and actually Thomas Munzer’s views had even more influence in American than Martin Luther’s. Both mortals experienced the anxiety of meaninglessness and described it in terms which had been created by Christian mystics. However, in doing so they transcended the courage of confidence which is based on a personal encounter with God. They had to receive elements from the courage to be which is based on mystical union. This leads to the question: whether the two types of the courage to accept acceptance can be united in view of the all-pervasive presence of the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness in our own period. Certainly one of the most fascinating cults is Spiritualism. For so many years psychologist have shied away from this area because it seemed do much a part of the World of magic and fantasy. However, this area is now called parapsychology, and is getting a lot of attention. As an example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has given birth to a department dealing with psychic research. This is status of some sort, for it means that foundations and governmental agencies can now support this kind of research. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We include under the general term “spiritualism” any form of experience or involvement with seemingly non-material phenomena, even those that seem to be non- or extra-sensory in the ways we perceive them. In this category are spirit- and ghost-communications, exorcisms, mediumship, and hauntings. The British Society for Psychic Research has been in existence for over one hundred and fifty years and has had a fairly high degree of respect. A. Conan Doyle, the physician and novelist who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, was one of its better-known members. The American Society for Psychic Research has been in existence for nearly one hundred years. Ghosts and spirits are part of the mythological and folklore of every culture. People who have had some kind of contact with ghost- or spirit-believers that they are sincere and devoted. Of course, every cult and every group has its share of eccentrics, kooks, exploiters, and hallucinators. However, brushing these aside, what of those who in dead earnest believe in and participate in such activities? We find that they are people who do not believe in death of the body as the end of existence. They are often religious people who believe in the immortality of the human soul, but, religious or not, they believe that life continues beyond the grave. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Ghosts are usually through to be unhappy or dissatisfied spirits. Either they left work unfinished, desired vengeance, or had to keep a particular house company even after their bodies left it. Many ghosts or spirits are attached to particular buildings or pieces of land. England has long been a country famous for its haunted houses and castles and its ancestral spirits returning to clank a chain or drive away unwelcome residents. Sometimes the spirit stays around because it was badly buried; that is, the burial did not suit the spirit. In modern, computerized America, many people wholeheartedly believe in spirits and spend much of their time and energy trying to contact them at seances, like Sarah Winchester, or in the company of professional mediums. Some people believe that writers like Anne Rice must have some contact with the spiritual World in order to be able to write such detailed Vampire and Ghost novels. Others are not ghost-hunters or spiritualists, but they have experienced situations which make it very difficult for them to disclaim the reality of spirits. In recent years, newspaper and movies and magazine accounts have told of the encounters Sarah Winchester had with house-guests of the non-material variety. Joe Hyams and his wife, actress Elke Sommer had haunting experiences. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Although Joe Hyams is a staunch disbeliever, he and his wife had to move from their Hollywood home because of the ruckus and tension caused by spirits. Their house has been fully examined by the Southern California Society for Psychical Research and given full scientific credence by the examiners. After three years of intensive study, this group of seventeen experts concluded that the house is truly occupied by ghosts or spirits, identity unknown. Thousands, possibly millions, of sincere and honest people have had some such experience, or are believers in spiritualism. It is a religion for many cultures in the so-called primitive World, a grown-up version of the animism that found life or essence residing in every rock, tree, gopher, and coconut. Truly, we must acknowledge that one mortal’s fancies may be another mortal’s faith. However, even acknowledging that reality is a subjective thing, is there any objective evidence that could make these things truth? The parapsychologist says yes. J.B. and Laura Rhine, Murphy, R. Johnson, and Sudre tell us that there is more than ample evidence to convince them of the objective truth of psychic phenomena, especially extrasensory perception (ESP). In the Rhines’ Parapsychology Laboratory at staid Old Duke University, they have performed countless and thousands of documented and validated experiments, using every conceivable method known. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Law are believed to play an important role in explanation as well as predication. One consequence which has often been thought to follow from the existence of precognition is that, sensationally, the future must somehow be already here—or at any rate there. This is usually derived from a conception of precognition as a mode of perception, of extrasensory perception (ESP). ESP includes many types of psychic phenomena. Clairvoyance is the name given to the experiences reported by many people of seeing something not present. For example, a person may be able to report exactly what is going on in a particular room which is miles away. (Often the clairvoyant is person who know that room, its occupants, or the probable occurrences in the room to a greater or lesser degree.) Precognition is the name given to the ability reported by some people to foretell a future event or occurrence. The vision may take place in a dream, or it may be the result of a premonition or hunch. Usually this ability to see into the future is based on guesswork that is pieced together from previously known or unconsciously retained bits of information. Sometimes the wishes or fears of the precogniator actually happen precisely because they are predicted: a self-fulfilling prophecy. Occasionally prophecies come true because they are staged and set up so that they do occur, thus validating the words of the precognitor—in this case usually a professional or stage psychic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Telepathy is the name given to the phenomena of thought-transference, or mind-reading. Often this occurs between two people who know each other very well and can anticipate each other’s thoughts or wishes, although occasionally a person who is highly sensitive to others or highly skilled in reading gestures may have astonished success with mind reading. Of course, some telepathy is fraudulent. Stage psychics can do and do plant stooges in the audience and exchange information with them by use of prearranged signals. Telekinesis or psychokinesis is the fourth category of ESP. It involves mental influence on physical objects. Some people claim to be able to send a typewriter flying across a room, move a chair by concentrating on it, or tell dice exactly how to turn up. Although we have no authenticated cases of furniture flying, the phenomenon could be attributed to individual hallucinations or group hypnosis. And dice, of course, if not loaded, are subject to the principles of mathematical probability. ESP may be a fact of objective reality. We do not know yet, and possibly so many people accept untested evidence out of a need to believe in spirits or ESP because they have failed to find satisfactions or excitement in their own physical lives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Other reasons people need to believe in the supernatural is fear of death may make them yearn for life beyond. Some people need extra stimulation, and certainly few things are as stimulating as ghost stories or psychic phenomena. We do not close our minds to the possibilities of these things, but we certainly wish to press for the alternative of realizing the fullness of personal experience. Life is so much more interesting and exciting than most people find it. Another cultic activity that has involved countless numbers of people is witchcraft. Throughout mortal’s history there has been a belief in special powers of certain people, witches and warlocks, to work wondrous deeds. Witches are now portrayed in movies and cartoons and storybooks as beautiful, enchanting women, wearing pretty gowns or regular clothes. Some of them have cats—their familiars—usually accompanying them. We find, however, that millions of people in this country, in Europe, and especially in England believe in the existence of men and women who practice good magic, beneficial cures and charms. Grouped in covens, usually made up of twelve witches and a leader—another witch, a devil, or a spirit—they often do quite ordinary work to support themselves, but spend their off hours practicing their spells and charms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Good witches are wise or knowledgeable in the arts of healing and divination of water. The belief in bad witches is often tied into satanic cults which worship the devil. Cults of Satan-worship are frequently combined with nudism and sexual orgies, which represent other cultic activities. A cult has existed seemingly forever around the study of Heavenly bodies. Astrology, of course, was a science long before astronomy came into being. Ancient mortals looked to the stars and planets and thought they contained answers to life’s questions. Out of the careful plotting and mapping of the celestial bodies grew the systematic and mathematical science of astronomy. However, a large and persistent group of people were not content just to know about these bodies. They certainly could not care less about their chemical or geological composition. They had little or no interest in their size, orbital patterns, rotations, or revolutions, nor was there much concern about traveling back and forth between Earth and any of them. No, their main interest is and has always been: what do these consistent and eternal watchers have to say about my life and behavior? #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Astrologers and their devotees firmly believe that there is something in the patterns of celestial movement that is directly related to the life of the person born in a particular “house” and under a particular sign of the zodiac. Astrology, witchcraft, and tarot cards are very big with the love generation, and there are many reasons why. First, the flower children are interested in anything mystical and esoteric. Secondly, they are disenchanted with the materialistic orientation of the Establishment and they seek better, more humanistic answers in the stars and the Universe around them. Third, they often get caught up in the past. Astrology and witchcraft are ancient and have never actually been destroyed by science or technology, thus they must have some eternal or transcendent quality. Seeking evidence of eternity is very important to those who believe that science and technology can snuff out physical life in a mere instant—which seems to be an increasing possibility! Also, because astrology and witchcraft bug the Establishment, are so nonrational, so unscientific, so other-Worldly, they are good weapons for the young to use on their elders, if weapons are needed. Well-known people are caught up in a serious relationship with astrology. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
They often admit that they do not make a decisive move without consulting their horoscope or calling their astrologer: “Do I buy stock in Cloudera (CLDR)?” “The fed just raised interest rates, is it a good time to buy a home?” “Should I marry her? She’s a Taurus and I am a Libra.” What is the appeal? For most of us astrology is a passing interest, a charming involvement in something far-out, entertaining, esoteric, or romantic. In college, my professor was always in a bad mood, so I used to consult my horoscope to know what to expect for that day. Thankfully, I eventually graduated. Our lives often run into dry periods, dull stretches, or challenges, and we are looking for a way out, a way to know what to expect, a way to know when good times are coming. So, we look for something to grab our interest. A few people find their lives to be totally devoid of interest or charm. For them, the World of esoterica is a fascinating and stimulating retreat. However, I have learned that when Mars in in retrograde, it is good not to make any big decisions and keep some money tucked away. Many people, without any interest in psychedelic or mind-changing drugs, enjoy the vividness and stimulation of Armin van Buuren’s A State of Trance music and art. The light shows, posters, incense, underground papers, and head-comics all provide detours or enchanting colorations to your workaday existences. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The mass media and the advertising agencies are fully aware of the charm and fascination of these esoteric experiences and they exploit them fully. Insofar as they provide a different or novel experience for people, they are perfectly fine. Fantasy and imagination are enjoyable retreats and add immeasurably to our lives, so long as we know them for what they are. We all enjoy change and novelty; we all need something to occasionally lift us out of the ordinary. “Baby you were the perfect dream for everyone. I though it would be oh so very good to meet you. Was I mistaken? Was I the mistake? I never gave myself like that to anyone. Fool, it is over now. Foolish, I know you. All of this time you were stuck within this place, in a lonely twisted World, and I cannot believe you were so out of your mind and it was more than I could take. I could never be your girl. Still I cannot believe you were so foolish, boy. Baby’s got a new place to hide from everyone. You know that I cannot reach you where you go. And I gave all I had, but I cannot bring you back. So I will let this go tonight. Still, I cannot believe you were so foolish, boy,” reports Emma Hewitt (Foolish Boy). Adolescents explore and experiment to see “what I am made of” and “what I can do.” It is generally when identity is more firmed up that individuals are able to go outside of themselves for attachment to others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Many activities during adolescence, and many social activities during this period tend to encourage curiosity, and desire for bonds. Sometimes some fleeting moments are mistaken for love during this stage. It may well be that a mature love relationship can be formed during adolescence; however, it is usually not until people are at least in their twenties that they form truly mature, intimate love relationships. Lasting growth-promoting love during adolescence is the exception, not the rule. The feelings experienced during adolescence—attraction, crushes, and infatuations—although perhaps not mature love, are nonetheless valuable. They are beneficial and of themselves, and they are also important as stepping stones toward later mature relationships. In caring for another person, we trust that individual to make mistakes and to learn from them. Trusting the other is to let go; it included an element of risk and a leap into the unknow, both of which take courage. We must protect our youth and allow them to develop and grow so they can figure out who they are and what they like. If it is unnatural, you just do not do it. That is all, and all family life should be kept clean and worthy and on a very high plane. There are some people who has said that behind the bedroom doors or in their truck anything goes. That is not true and the Lord will not condone it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I Thought the Storm was Brief–They are All in the Same Boat, but where is the Boat Going?
They will never believe him, and it was the smartest thing for him to do. He can repeat the confession until doomsday, but when you know more, you will understand. Another aspect of social adjustment is the complete lack of privacy, and the indiscriminate talking about one’s problems. Here again, one sees the influence of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Even the thin walls are greeted as help from feeling alone. “I never feel lonely, even when Justin is away,” goes a typical comment. “You know friends are nearby, because at night you hear the neighbors through the walls.” Marriages which might break up otherwise are saved, depressed moods are kept from becoming worse, by talking, talking, talking. “It is wonderful,” says one young wife. “You find yourself discussing all your problems with your neighbors—things that back in Canada we would have kept to ourselves.” As time goes on, this capacity for self-revelation grows; and on the most intimate details of family life, court people become amazingly frank with each other. No one, they point out, ever need face a problem alone. We may add that it would be more correct to say that never do they face a problem. Even the architecture becomes functional in the battle against loneliness. Just as doors inside houses—which are sometimes said to have marked the birth of middle class—are disappearing, so are the barriers against neighbors. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The picture in the picture window, for example, is what is going on inside—or, what is going on inside other people’s picture windows. The conformity pattern develops a new morality, a new kind of super-ego. However, the new morality is not the conscience of the humanistic tradition nor is the new super-ego made in the image of an authoritarian father. Virtue is so be adjusted and to be like the rest. Vice, to be different. Often this is expressed in psychiatric terms, where virtuous means being healthy, and evil, being neurotic. From the eye of the court there is no escape. Love affair are rare for that reason, rather than for moral reasons or the fact that the marriages are so satisfactory. There are feeble attempts at privacy. While the rule is that you walk into the house without knocking, or making any other sign, some people gain little privacy by moving the chair to the front, rather than the court side of the apartment, to show that they do not want to be disturbed. However, there is an important corollary of such efforts at privacy—people feel a little guilt about making them. Except very occasionally, to shut oneself off from others like this is regarded as either a childish prank or, more likely, an indication of some inner neurosis. The individual, not group, has been erred. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
So, at any rate, many errants seem to feel, and they are often penitent about what elsewhere would be regarded as one’s own business, and rather normal business at that. “I have promised myself to make it up to them.” One court resident recently told a confidant. “I was feeling bad and just plain did not make the effort to ask the others in later. I do not blame them, really, for reacting the way they did. I will make it up to them somehow.” Indeed, privacy has become clandestine. Again the terms which are used are taken from the progressive political and philosophic tradition; what could sound finer than the sentence “Not in solitary and selfish contemplation but in doing things with other people does one fulfill oneself.” What it really means, however, is giving up oneself, becoming part and parcel of the herd, and liking it. This state is often called by another pleasant word, “togetherness.” The favorite way of expressing the same state of mind is that of putting it in psychiatric terms: “We have learned not to be so introverted,” one junior executive, and a very thoughtful and successful one, describes in the lesson. “Before we came here we used to live pretty much to ourselves. On Sundays, for instance, we used to stay in bed until around maybe two o’clock, reading the paper and listening to the symphony on the radio. Now we stop around and visit with people, or they visit with us. I really think Cresleigh Homes at Rocklin Trails has broadened us.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Lack of conformity is not only punished by disapproving words like “neurotic,” but sometimes by cruel sanctions. Regatta Court is a case,” says one resident of the highly active block. “She was so excited to get in with the community when she moved in. She is a very warm-heated gal, and is always trying to help people, but she is well—sort of elaborate about it. One day she decided to win over everybody by giving an afternoon party for the gals. Poor thing, she did it all wrong. The girls turned up in their bathing suits and slacks, as usual, and here she had little dollies and silver and everything spread around. Ever sine then it has been almost like a planned campaign to keep her out of things. It is really pitiful. She sits there in her beach chair out front just dying for someone to come and kaffeeklatsch with her, right across the street four or five girls are yakking away. Every time they suddenly all laugh at some jokes she think they are laughing at her. She came over here yesterday and cried all afternoon. She told me she and her husband are thinking about inviting them over for dinner so they can make a fresh start.” Other cultures have punished deviants from the prescribed political or religious creed by prison or the stake. Here the punishment is only perceived ostracism which drives a poor woman into despair and an intense feeling of guilt. What is the crime? One act of error, one single sin toward the god of conformity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
It is only another aspect of the alienated kind of interpersonal relationship that friends are not formed on the basis of individual liking or attraction, but that they are determined by the location of one’s own house or apartment in relation to the others. This is the way it works. It begins with the children. The new suburbs are matriarchies, yet the children are in effect so dictatorial that a term like filiarchy would not be entirely facetious. It is the children who set the basic design; their friendships are translated into the mother’s friendships, and these, in turn, to the family’s. Fathers just tag along. It is the flow of wheeled juvenile traffic tat determines which is to be the functional door; i.e., in the homes, the front door; in the courts, the back door. It determines, further, the route one takes from the functional door; for when wives go visiting with neighbors they gravitate toward the houses within sight and hearing of their children and the telephone. This crystallizes into the court checkerboard movement (i.e., the regular kaffeeklatsch route) and this forms that basis of adult friendships. Actually, this determination of friendship goes so far that the reader of the article is invited by the author to pick out the clusters of friendship in one sector of the settlement, just from the picture of the location of the houses, their entrance and exit doors in this sector. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
What is important is this picture is not only the fact of alienated friendships, and automaton conformity, but the reaction of people to this fact. Consciously it seems people fully accept the new form of adjustment. Once people hated to concede that their behavior was determined by anything expect their own free will. Not so with the new suburbanites; they are fully aware of the all-pervading power of the environment over them. As a matter of fact, there are few subjects they like so much to talk about; and with the increasing lay curiosity about psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, they discuss their social life in surprisingly clinical terms. However, they have no sense of plight; this, they seem to say, is the way things are, and the trick is not to fight it but to understand it. This young generation has also its philosophy to explain their way of life. Not merely as an instinctive wish, but as an articulate set of values to be passed on to one’s children, the next generation of leaders are coming to deify social utility. Does it work, not why, has become the key question. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
With society having become so complex, the individual can have meaning only as one contributes to the harmony of the group, transients explain—and for them, constantly on the move, ever exposed to new groups, the adapting to groups has become particularly necessary. They are all, as they themselves so often put it, in the same boat. On the other hand, the value of solitary thought, the fact that conflict is sometimes necessary, and other such disturbing thoughts rarely intrude. The most important, or really the only important ting children as well as adults have to learn, is to get along with other people, which, if taught in school is called citizenship, the equivalent for outgoingness and togetherness as the adults call it. Are people really happy, are the as satisfied, unconsciously, as they believe themselves to be? Considering the nature of humanity, and the conditions for happiness, this can hardly be so. However, they even have some doubts consciously. While they feel that conformity and merging with the group is their duty, many of them sense that they are frustrating other urges. They feel that responding to the group mores is akin to a moral duty—and so they continue, hesitant and unsure, imprisoned in fraternity or sorority. When we pass beyond the range of our senses, we find evidence that both we and the World we live in have been given a specious appearance of self-completeness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The feeling of self-completeness does not merely mean that the human senses are limited; it means that the practical mind has been formed in such a way that it reinforces the impression given by the senses and takes for granted the things which are not true, but which make for implicity and efficiency in practical life. The great value of psychical research is that it has begun to put perspective into the Universe and to show us that neither we nor our World come to an end where we thought they did. “Every once in a while I wonder,” says one transient in an almost furtive moment of contemplation. “I do not want to do anything to offend the people here: they are kind and decent, and I am proud we have been able to get along with each other—with all our differences so well. But then, once in a while, I think of myself and my husband and what we are not doing and I get depressed. Is it just enough not to be bad?” Indeed, this life of compromise, this outgoing life, is the life of imprisonment, selflessness and depression. They are all in the same boats, but where is the boat going? No one seems to have the faintest idea; nor, for that matter, do they see much point in even raising the question. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The picture of conformity as we have illustrated it with the outgoing inhabitants of Rocklin Trails is certainly not the same all over America. The reasons are obvious. These people are young, they are middle-class and upper middle-class and they move upwards, they are mostly people who in their work career manipulate symbols and people, and whose advancement depends on whether they permit themselves to be manipulated. There are undoubtedly many older people of the same occupational group, and many equally young people of different occupational groups who are less advanced, as for instance those engineers, chemists and physicists, more interested in their work than in the hope of jumping into an executive career as soon as possible; furthermore, there are millions of farmers and farm-hands, whose style of life has only been changed partly by the conditions of the twenty first century; eventually the industrial workers, whose income is not too different from the white-collar workers, but whose work situation is. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Although this is not the place to discuss the meaning of work for the industrial worker today, this much can be said here: there is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things, even though their roles in the process of production is a partial and in many ways an alienated one. The worker in a big steel mill co-operates with others, and has to do so if one is to protect one’s life; one faces dangers, and shares them with others; one’s colleagues as well as the foreman can judge and appreciate one’s skill rather than one’s smile and pleasant personality; one has a considerable amount of freedom outside of work; one has paid vacations, one may be busy in one’s garden, with a hobby, with local and union politics. However, even taking into account all these factors with differentiate the industrial worker will escape being molded by the dominant conformity pattern. In the first place, even the most beneficial aspects of one’s work situation, like the ones just mentioned, do not alter the fact that one’s work is alienated and only to a limited extent a meaningful expression of one’s energy and reason; secondly, the trend for increasing automatization of industrial work diminishes this latter factor rapidly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Eventually, one is under the influence of our whole cultural apparatus, the advertisements, movies, television, newspapers, just as everybody else, and can hardly escape being driven into conformity, although perhaps more slowly than other sectors of the population. What holds true for the for the industrial worker holds true also for the farmer. With the confusion of motives in sex that we have discussed in the past—almost every motive being present in the act except the desire to make love—it is no wonder that there is a diminution of feeling and that passion has lessened almost to the banishing point. This diminution of feeling often takes the form of a kind of anesthesia (now with no need of ointment) in people who can perform the mechanical aspects of the sexual act very well. We are becoming used to the plaint from the couch or patient’s chair that “We made love, but I did not feel anything.” In a World gone grey with market reports, time studies, tax regulations and path lab analyses, the rebel finds sex to be the one green thing. It is surely true that the zest, adventure, and trying out of one’s strength, the discovering of vast and exciting new areas of feeling and experience in one’s self and in one’s relations to others, and the validation of the self that foes with these are indeed frontier experiences. They are rightly and normally present in sexuality as part of the psychosocial development of every person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Sex in our society did, in fact, have this power for several decades after 1920’s, when almost every other activity was becoming other-directed, jaded, emptied of zest and adventure. However, for various reasons—one of them being that sex by itself had to carry the weight for the validation of the personality in practically all other realms as well—the frontier freshness, newness, and challenge become more and more lost. For we are now living in the post-Riesman age, and are experiencing the long-run implications of Riesman’s other-directed behavior, the radar-reflected way of life. The last frontier has become a teeming Las Vegas and no frontier at all. Young people can no longer get bootlegged feeling of personal identity out of revolting in sexuality since there is nothing there to revolt against. Studies of medicine addiction among many young people report them as saying that the revolt against parents, the social kick of feeling their own oats which they used to get from sex, they now have to get from medication. One such study indicates that students express a certain boredom with sex, while certain medicines are synonymous with excitement, curiosity, forbidden adventure, and society’s abounding permissiveness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
It no longer sounds new when we discover that for many young people what used to be called love-making is now experiences as a futile panting palm to palm. They tell us that it is hard for them to understand what the poets were talking about, and that we should so often hear the disappointed refrain, “We went to bed but it was not any good.” Nothing to revolt against, did I say? Well, there is obviously one thing left to revolt against, and that is sex itself. The frontier, the establishing of identity, the validation of the self can be, and not infrequently does become for some people, a revolt against sexuality entirely. I am certainly not advocating this. What I wish to indicate is that the very revolt against sex—this modern Lysistrata in robot’s dress—is rumbling at the gates of our cities or, if not rumbling, at least hovering. The sexual revolution comes finally back on itself not with a bang but a whimper. Thus it is not surprising that, as sex become more machines like, with passion irrelevant and then even pleasure diminishing, the problem has come full circle. And we find, mirabile dictum, a progression from an anesthetic attitude to an antiseptic one. Sexual contact itself then tends to get put on the shelf and to be avoided. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
This is another and surely least constructive aspect of the new puritanism: it returns, finally, to a new asceticism. This is said graphically in charming limerick that seems to have sprung up on some sophisticated campus: The word has come down from the Dean that with the assistance of the teaching machine, King Oedipus Rex could have learned about sex without every touching the Queen. Many people welcome this revolt against sex. Sex as we now think of it may soon be dead. Sexual concepts, ideas, and practices already are being altered almost beyond recognition. The foldout playmate in Playmate magazine—she of the outsize breast and buttocks, pictured in the sharp detail—signals the death of the throes of a departing age. It is predicted the eros will not be lost in the new sexless age but diffused, and that all life will be more erotic than now seems possible. This last reassurance would be comforting indeed to believe. However, as usual, it penetrates insights into present phenomena and is unfortunately placed in framework of history—pretribalism with its so-called lessened distinction between male and female—which has no factual basis at all. And we have not been given evidence whatever for this optimistic prediction that new eros, rather than apathy, will succeed the demise of vive la difference. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Indeed, there are amazing confusions about the worship of the new electric age. “And what does an X-ray of a woman reveal? Not a realistic picture, but a deep, involving image. Not a specialized female, but a human being.” Well! An X-ray actually reveals not a human being at all but a depersonalized, fragmentized segment of bone or tissue which can be read only by a highly specialized technician and from which we could never in a thousand years recognize a human being or any man or woman we know, let alone one we love. Such a reassuring view of the future is frightening and depressing in the extreme. Some people seem to believe that we are hurtling into, not a bisexual or multi-sexual, but an a-sexual society: the boys grow their hair and the girls wear pants. Romance will disappear; in fact, it has almost disappeared now. Given the guaranteed Annual Income and The Birth Patrol Pill, will women choose to marry? Why should they? What of the time when the fertilized ovum can be implanted in the womb of a mercenary, and one’s progeny selected from a sperm-bank? Will the lady choose to reproduce her husband, if there still are such things? No problems, no jealousy, no love-transference. And what of the children, incubated under glass? #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
In the future will communal love develop the human qualities that we assume emerge from the present rearing children? Will women under these conditions lose the survival drive and become as death-oriented as the present generation of American mortals? I do not raise the question in advocacy. I consider come of the possibilities horrifying. The real issue underlying this revolution is not what one does with sexual organs and sexual function per se, but what happens to mortal’s humanity. What disturbs me is the real possibility of the disappearance of our humane, life-giving qualities with the speed of developments in the life sciences, and the fact that no one seems to be discussing the alternative possibilities for good and evil in these developments. The purpose of this discussion is precisely to raise the questions of the alternative possibilities for good and evil—that is, the destruction or the enhancement of these qualities which constitute mortal’s humane, life-giving qualities. Our natural affections are planted in us by the Spirit of God, for a wise purpose; and the are the very main-springs of life and happiness—they are the cement of all virtuous and Heavenly society—they are the essence of charity, or love. There is not more pure and holy principle in existence than the affection which glows in the heart of a virtuous mortal for one’s companion. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The fact is, God made mortals, male and female; he planted in their hearts those affections which are calculated to promote their happiness and union. Your love, like a tree, must be nourished. There will come a great love and interdependence between you, for your love is a divine one. It is deep, inclusive, comprehensive. It is not like that association of the World which is misnamed love, but which is mostly physical attraction. The love which the Lord speaks of is not only physical attraction, but spiritual attraction as well. It is faith and confidence in, and understanding of, one another. It is total partnership. It is companionship with common ideals and standards. One must be unselfish toward and sacrifice for one another and display cleanliness of thought and action and faith in God and is program. “I still think about you now. You are always with me in my mind. For this time, I still dream about the day that you return the meaning to this place. The Sun will rise for you and I. The distance between us was never far through the highways and time waits for no one, but I do because it is always you and I. Do you recall the meaning in those days, before we change? And I still dream about your face, but feeling that you are just one step away. Would never fade, like you and I,” reports Emma Hewitt (You and I). #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I Turn My Brimming Eyes Away as Experiment to Me is Every One I Meet
For a moment I felt an abrupt rush of countless points of white light sweep across the field of view, as if the unseen million of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes. Very bright colors, the wonderful loveliness of vivid colors gone before I could name them. The disappearance of overt authority is clearly visible in all spheres of life. Parents do not give commands any more; they suggest that the child “will want to do this.” Since they have no principles or convictions themselves, they try to guide children to do what the law of conformity expects, and often, being older and hence less in touch with “the latest,” they learn from the children what attitude is required. The same holds true in business and in industry; you do not give orders, you suggest; you do not command, your coax and manipulate. Even the American army has accepted much of the new form of authority. The army is propagandized as if it were an attractive business enterprise; the soldier should feel like a member of a team, even though the hard fact remains that one must be trained to kill and be killed. As long as there was overt authority, there was conflict, and there was rebellion—against irrational authority. In the conflict with the commands of one’s conscience, in the fight against irrational authority, the personality developed—specifically the sense of self developed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I experience myself as “I” because I doubt, I protest, I rebel. Even if I submit and sense defeat, I experience myself as “I”—I, the defeated one. However, if I am not aware of submitting or rebelling, if I am ruled by an anonymous authority, I lose the sense of self, I become a “one,” a part of the “It.” The mechanism through which the anonymous authority operates is conformity. I ought to do what everybody does, hence, I must conform, not be different, not stick out; I must be ready and willing to change according to the changes in the pattern; I must not ask whether I am right or wrong, but whether I am adjusted, whether I am not peculiar, not different. The only thing which is permanent in me is just this readiness for change. Nobody has power over me, expect the herd of which I am part, yet to which I am subjected. It is hardly necessary to demonstrate to the reader the degree which this submission to anonymous authority by conformity has reached. However, I want to give a few illustrations taken from the very interesting and illuminating settlement in California. In this upscale development in Roseville, California was made to house hundreds of people, partly in clusters of rental garden apartments at Pearl Creek Apartments rent for one-bedroom apartment from $1,630, partly in ranch-type houses in Rocklin, California at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails for sale starting at mid $400,000’s. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The inhabitants of this community are mostly junior executives, with a sprinkling of chemists and engineers, with an average income of $62,748.05-$73,206.06, between 25 and 35 years of age, married, and with one or two children. What are the social relations, and the adjustment in this package community? Whole people move there mainly out of a simple economic necessity and not because of any yen for womb image, after exposure to such an environment some people find a warmth and support in it that makes other environments seem unduly cold—it is somewhat unsettling, for example, to hear the way residents of the new suburbs occasionally refer to “the outside.” This feeling of warmth is more or less the same as the feeling of been accepted: “I could afford another place than the development we are going to,” says one of the people, “and I must say it is not the kind of place where you have the boss or a customer dinner. However, you get real acceptance is indeed a in a community like that.” This craving for acceptance is indeed a very characteristic feeling in the alienated person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless one doubts that he or she is acceptable, and why should a young, educated, successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves—because they are not themselves. The only haven for having a sense of identity is conformity. Being acceptable really means not being different from anybody else. Feeling inferior stems from feeling different, and no question is asked whether the difference is for the better or worse. Adjustment begins early. One parent expresses the concept of anonymous authority quite succinctly: The adjustment to the group does not seem to involve so many problems for them [the children]. I have noticed that they seem to get the feeling that nobody is the boss—there is a feeling of complete co-operation. Partly this comes from early exposure to court play. The ideological concept in which this phenomenon is expressed here is that of absence of authority, a beneficial value in terms of twenty first century freedom. The reality behind this concept of freedom is the presence of anonymous authority and the absence of individuality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
What could be clearer for this concept of conformity than the statement made by one mother: “Johnny has not been doing so well at school. The teacher told me he was doing fine in some respects but that his social adjustment was not as good as it might be. He would pick one or two friends to play with—and sometimes he was happy to remain by himself.” Indeed, the alienated person finds it almost impossible to remain by oneself, because one is seized by the panic of experiencing nothingness. That it should be formulated so frankly is nevertheless surprising, and shows that we have even ceased to be ashamed of our herdlike inclinations. The parents sometimes complain that the school might be a bit too permissive, and that the children lack discipline, but whatever the faults of Park Forest parents maybe, harshness and authoritarianism are not among them. Indeed not, but why would you need authoritarianism in its overt forms if the anonymous authority of conformism makes your children submit completely to the It, even if they do not submit to their individual parents? The complaint of the parents, however, about lack of discipline is not meant too seriously, for “What we have in Park Forest, it is becoming evident, is the apotheosis of pragmatism. It would be an exaggeration, perhaps, to say that the transients have come to deify society—and the job of adjusting to it—but certainly they have remarkably little yen to quarrel with society. They are, as one puts it, the practical generation.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Another aspect of alienated conformity is the leveling-out process of taste and judgment which describes “The Melting Pot,” or as some like to call it “The Smelting Pot.” “When I first came here I was pretty rarefied,” a self-styled “egghead” explained to a recent visitor. “I remember how shocked I was one day when I told the girls in the court how much I had enjoyed listening to The Magic Flute the night before. They did not know what I was talking about. I began to learn that diaper talk I lot more important to them. I still listen to The Magic Flute but now I realize that for most people other things in life seem as important.” Another woman reports that she was discovered reading Plato when one of the girls made a surprise visit. The visitor “almost fell over from surprise. Now all of them are sure I am strange.” Actually, the sensitive woman overestimates the damage. The others do not think her overly odd, for her deviance is accompanied by enough tact, enough observance of the little customs that oil court life, so that equilibrium is maintained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
What matters is to transform value judgment into matters of opinion, whether it is listening to The Magic Flute as against diaper talk, or whether it is being a Republican as against being a Democrat. All that matters is that nothing is too serious, that one exchanges views, and that one is ready to accept any opinion or conviction (if there is such a thing) as being as good as the other. On the market of opinions everybody is supposed to have a commodity of the same value, and it is indecent and not fair to doubt it. The word which is used for alienated conformity and sociability is of course one which expresses the phenomenon in terms of a very beneficial value. Indiscriminating sociability and lack of individuality is called being outgoing. The language here becomes psychiatrically tinged with the philosophy thrown in for good measure. You can really help make a lot of people happy here. I have brought out two couples myself; I saw potentialities in them they did not realize they had. Whenever we see someone who is shy and withdrawn, we make a special effort with them. A poignant note comes into our discussion when we remind ourselves that this excessive concern for satisfying the partner is an expression, however perverted, of a sound and basic element in the sexual act: the pleasure and experience of self-affirmation in being able to give to the partner. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The man is often deeply grateful toward the woman who lets herself be gratified by him—lets him give her an orgasm, to use the phrase that is often the symbol for this experience. This is a point midway between lust and tenderness, between sex and agape (or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the type of which is the love of God for humans)—and it partakes of both. Many a male cannot feel his own identity either as a man or a person in our culture until he is able to gratify a woman. The very structure of human interpersonal relations is such that the sexual act does not achieve its full pleasure or meaning if the man and woman cannot feel they are able to gratify the other. And it is the inability to experience this pleasure at the gratification of the other which often underlies the exploitative sexuality the compulsive sexuality of the Don Juan seduction type. Don Juan has to perform the act over and over again because he remains forever unsatisfied, quite despite the fact that he is entirely potent and has a technically good orgasm. Now the problem is not the desire and need to satisfy the partner as such, but the fact that this need is interpreted by the persons in the sexual act only a technical sense—giving physical sensation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
What is omitted even from our very vocabulary (and thus the words may sound square as I say them here) is the experience of giving feelings, sharing fantasies, offering the inner psychic richness that normally takes a little time and enables sensation to transcend itself in emotion and emotion to transcend itself in tenderness and sometimes love. It is not surprising that contemporary tends toward the mechanization of sex have much to do with the problem of impotence. The distinguishing characteristic of the machines is that it can go through all the motions but it never feels. A knowledgeable medical student, one of whose reasons for coming into analysis was his sexual impotence, had a revealing dream. He was asking me in the dream to put a pipe in his dead that would go down through his body and come out at the other end of his penis. He was confident in the dream that the pipe would constitute an admirably strong erection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
What was entirely missing in this intelligent scion of our sophisticated times was any understanding at all that what he conceived as his solution was exactly the cause of his problem, namely the image of himself as a screwing machine. His symbol is remarkably graphic: the brain, the intellect, is included, but true symbol of our alienate age, his shrew system bypasses entirely the seats of emotions, the thalamus, the heart and lungs, even the stomach. Direct route from head to penis—but what is lost is the heart! Impotence is increasing these days despite (or because of) the unrestrained freedom on all sides. All therapists seem to agree that more men are coming to them with that problem—though whether this represents a real increase in the prevalence of sexual impotence or merely a greater awareness and ability to talk about it cannot be definitely answered. Obviously, it is one of those topics on which meaningful statistics are almost impossible to get. It is clear that men have an urge to get help on impotence. Whatever the reason, it is becoming harder for the young man as well as the old to take “yes” for an answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
To see the curious ways the new puritanism shows itself, you have only to pen an issue of Playboy, that redoubtable journal reputedly sold mainly to college students and clergymen. You discover the scantly clad girls with silicate breast side by side with the articles by reputable authors, and you conclude on first blush that the magazine is certainly on the side of the new enlightenment. However, you look more closely you see a strange expression in these photographed women: detached, mechanical, uninviting, vacuous—the typical schizoid personality in the negative sense of that term. You discover that they are not sexy at all but that Playboy has only shifted the fig lead from the genitals to the face. You read the letters to the editor and find the first, entitled “Playboy Priest,” telling of a priest who “lectures on Hefner’s philosophy to audiences of young people and numerous members of the clergy,” that “true Christian ethics and morality are not incompatible with Hefner’s philosophy,” and—written with enthusiastic approbation—that “most clergymen in their fashionable parsonages live more like playboys than ascetics.” You find another letter entitled “Jesus was a playboy,” since he loved Mary Magdalene, good food, and grooming, and castigated the Pharisees. And you wonder why all this religious justification and why people, if they are going to be “liberated,” cannot just enjoy their liberation? #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Whether one takes the cynical view that letters to the editor are planted, or the more generous one that these examples are selected from hundreds of letters, it amounts to the same thing. An image of a type of American male is being presented—a suave, detached, self-assumed bachelor, who regards the woman as a “Playboy accessory” like items in his fashionable wardrobe. You note also that Playboy carries no advertising for trusses, bald heads, or anything that would detract from this image. You discover that the good articles (which, frankly, can be bought by an editor who wants to hire an assistant with taste and pay the requisite amount of money) give authority to this image. Harvey Cox concludes that Playboy is basically antisexual, and that it is the latest and slickest episode in man’s continuing refusal to be human. He believes the whole phenomenon of Playboy is only a part vividly illustrates the awful fact of the new kind of tyranny. The poet-sociologist Calvin Herton, discussing Playboy in connection with the fashion and entertainment World, calls it the new sexual fascism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Many people desire to live out of mind, to experience their nonrational or irrational selves. They want, out of curiosity, out of need, out of a feeling of incompleteness, to know the rest of themselves, the part of them that is usually hidden away, like the family of skeletons. Playboy has indeed caught on to something significant in American society, it is believed to be the repressed fear of involvement with women. I go farther and hold that it, as an example of the new puritanism, gets its dynamic from a repressed anxiety in American men that underlies even the fear of involvement. This is the repressed anxiety about impotence. Everything in the magazine is beautifully concocted to bolster the Illusion of potency without ever putting it to the test or challenge at all. Noninvolvement (like playing it cool) is elevated into the ideal model for Playboy. This is possible because the illusion is air-tight, ministering as it does to men fearful for their potency, and capitalizing on this anxiety. The character of the illusion is shown further in the fact that the readership of Playboy drops off significantly after the age of thirty, when men cannot escape dealing with real women. This illusion is illustrated by the fact that Hefner himself, a former Sunday-school teacher and son of a devout Methodists, practically never went outside his large establishment in North Chicago. Ensconced there, he carries on his work surrounded by his bunnies and amidst his nonalcoholic bacchanals on Pepsi-Cola. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Over Looking a Superior Spectre–And God Forbid I Look Behind Since that Appalling Day!
You can tell me the truth. I am your own self, remember? I was darkly and passionately thrilled by all this, and I felt those chills again. If we are conscious of what is going on, we can, in however slight a way, influence the direction of the trends. We can then hopefully develop new values which will be relevant to our new cultural predicament. The libido exists in a certain quantity in the individual, that you can deprive yourself, economize emotionally in one way to increase your enjoyment in another, and if you spend your libido in direct sexuality you will not have it for utilization, for example, in artistic creation. The original Puritan movement, in its best representatives and before its general deterioration into the moralistic compartments of Victorianism at the end of the nineteenth century was characterized by admirable qualities of dedication to integrity and truth. Many people in our society, yearning for the nirvana of automatic change in their characters and relief from responsibility that comes from handing over one’s psyche to a technical process, have actually in their values of free expression, changed their clothes and their roles more than their characters. What was omitted was the opening of our senses and imaginations to the enrichment of pleasure and passion and the meaning of love; we relegated these to technical processes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
In this kind of free love, one does not learn to love; and freedom becomes not a liberation but a new straitjacket. The upshot was that our sexual values were thrown into confusion and contradiction, and sexual love presented the almost insoluble paradoxes we are now observing. It is important not to overstate the case, nor to lose sight at any point of the desirable benefits of the modern fluidity in sexual mores. The confusion being described go hand in hand and hand wit the real possibilities of freedom of the individual. Couples are able to affirm sex as a source of pleasure and delight; no longer hounded by the misconception that sex as a natural act is evil, they can become more sensitive to the actual evils in their relationships such as manipulation of each other. Free to a degree Victorians never were, they can explore ways of making their relationship more enriching. Even the growing frequency of divorce, no matter how sobering the problems it raises, has the beneficial psychological effect of making it harder for couples to rationalize a bad marriage by the dogma that they are stuck with each other. The possibility of finding a new lover makes it more necessary for us to accept the responsibility of choosing the one we do have if we stay with him or her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
There is the possibility of developing a courage that is midway between—and includes both—biological lust on one hand and on the other the desire for meaningful relationship, a deepening awareness of each other, and the other aspects of what we call human understanding. Courage can be shifted from simply fighting society’s mores to the inward capacity to commit one’s self to another human beings. However, these beneficial benefits, it is now abundantly clear, do not occur automatically. They become possible only as the contradictions which we have been describing are understood and worked through. To share the grief, the joy, the agony, the ecstasy, the fears, and even the guilt of another person require a quality of relating that many do not achieve. It requires that the individuals be comfortable and accepting of their emotions. It also requires them to experience both sympathy and empathy. When you experience sympathy, you are able to feel the feelings of another person in close, but still removed and objective, way. When you experience empathy, you are almost one with that person—you feel what the other person feels. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Emotional intimacy requires a depth of feeling, an ability to identify with and relate to others. It is also vital that we be able to let these feelings be known, to share and express them. This is not easy for many people, who have been raised to deny, hide, or repress any hint of feeling or emotion. There are six patients who go to bed without ostensible shame or guilt—and generally with different partners. The women—four of the six patients—all state that they do not feel much in the sex act. The motives of two of them women going to bed seem to be to hang on to the man and to live up to the standard that sexual intercourse is “what you do” at a certain stage. The third woman has the particular motive of generosity: she sees going to bed as something nice you give a man—and she makes tremendous demands upon him to take care of her in return. The fourth woman seems the only one who does experience some real sexual lust, beyond which her motives are a combination of generosity to and anger at the man (“I will force him to give me pleasure!”). The two male patients were originally impotent, and now, though able to have intercourse, have intermittent trouble with potency. However, the outstanding fact is they never report getting much of a bang out of their sexual intercourse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Their chief motive for engaging in sex seems to be to demonstrate their masculinity. The specific purpose of one of the men, indeed, seems more to tell his analyst about his previous night’s adventure, fair or poor as it may have been, in a kind of backstage interchange of confidence between men, than to enjoy the love-making itself. Let us now pursue our inquiry on a deeper level by asking: What are the underlying motives in these patterns? What drives people toward the contemporary compulsive preoccupation with sex in place of their previous compulsive denial of it? The struggle to prove one’s identity is obviously a central motive—an aim present in women as well as men. There is an egalitarianism of the sexes and the interchangeability of the sexual roles. Egalitarianism is clung to at the price of denying not only biological differences—which are basic, to say the least—between men and women, but emotional differences from which come much of the delight of the sexual act. The self-contradiction here is that the compulsive need to prove you are identical with your partner means that you repress your own unique sensibilities—and this is exactly what undermines your own sense of identity. This contradiction contributes to the tendency in our society for us to become machines even in bed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Another motive is the individual’s hope to overcome his own solitariness. Allied with this is the desperate endeavor to escape feelings of emptiness and the threat of apathy: partners pant and quiver hoping to find an answering quiver in someone else’s body just to prove that their own is not dead; they seek a responding, a longing in the other to prove their own feelings are alive. Out of an ancient conceit, this is called love. One often gets the impression, amid the male’s flexing of sexual prowess, that men are in training to become sexual athletes. However, what is the great of the game? Not only men, but women struggle to prove their sexual power—they too must keep up to the timetable, must show passion, and have the vaunted orgasm. Now it is well accepted in psychotherapeutic circles that, dynamically, the overconcern with potency is generally a compensation for feelings of impotence. The use of sex to prove potency in all these different realms has led to the increasing emphasis on technical performance. And here we observe another curiously self-defeating pattern. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The excessive concern with technical performance in sex is actually correlated with the reduction of sexual feeling. The techniques of achieving this approach the ludicrous: one is that an anesthetic ointment is applied to the penis before intercourse. Thus feeling less, the man is able to postpone his orgasm longer. I have learned from colleagues that the prescribing of this anesthetic remedy for premature ejaculation is not unusual. One male patient was so desperate about his premature ejaculations, even though these ejaculations took place after periods of penetration of ten minutes or more. A neighbor who was a urologist recommended an anesthetic ointment to be used prior to intercourse. This patient expressed complete satisfaction with the solution and was very grateful to the urologist. Entirely willing to give up any pleasure on his own, he sought only to prove himself a competent male. A patient of mine reported that he had gone to a physician with the problem of premature ejaculation, and that such an anesthetic ointment had been prescribed. My surprise was particularly over the fact that the patient has accepted this solution with no questions and no conflict. Did not they remedy fit the necessary bill, did not it help him turn in a better performance? #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, by the time that young man got to me, he was impotent in every way imaginable, even to the point of being unable to handle such scarcely ladylike behavior on the part of his wife as taking off her shoe while they were driving and beating hum over the head with it. By all means the man was impotent in this hideous caricature of a marriage. And his penis, before it was drugged senseless, seemed to be the only character with enough sense to have the appropriate intention, namely to get out as quickly as possible. Making one’s self feel less in order to perform better! This is a symbol, as macabre as it is vivid, of the vicious circle in which so much of our culture is caught. The more one must demonstrate his potency, the more he treats sexual intercourse—this most intimate and personal of all acts—as a performance to be judged by exterior requirements, the more he then views himself as a machine to be turned on, adjusted, and steered, and the less feeling e has for either himself or his partner; and the less feeling, the more he loses genuine sexual appetite and ability. The upshot of this self-defeating pattern is that, in the long run, the lover who is most efficient will also be the one who is impotent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Therefore, transpersonal intimacy is difficult for many people to comprehend. It is called transpersonal because it seems to be experiences between, or above and beyond, the persons involved. It is very difficult to define this dimension. Transcendence (from the Latin, trans, meaning beyond, and scandere, meaning to climb) refers to that which is above personal or private experience, highly abstract, beyond human knowledge. It is the intimacy of inner experiences, of nonmaterial, inexpressible feelings. It is based in the concept of transcendence. Transpersonal intimacy between two persons may be expressed as an intuitive sharing, as communication that does not require (or cannot have) words. Transpersonal intimacy can also define the relationship people feel with their God or whatever higher consciousness guides their spiritual life. As one can see, intimacy represents differing faces of closeness. They are different ways of experiencing another person. Only people who have a wide range of experience and who are really aware of themselves can fully experience all of these forms of intimacy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Most people can only experience and express closeness in one or two dimensions, except perhaps during times of crises. Most of us do not have the full repertoire or experiences necessary to know another person in such full and deep ways. The full expression of intimacy is an ideal, perhaps—something only a few people experience. The fact that it does not occur easily or readily in most people should not be a source of discouragement, however, nor should it convince you that only very special people are able to experience many dimensions of closeness. It is more likely that the number of people who are able (or willing) to devote enough time to the study and perfection of the art of loving is very small. It is not that these people are any more favored than the rest of us. It is simply that they put the ability to experience and express closeness further up on their list of priorities than others do. Some people who could once relate to others closely have lost this skill or have given it up because of the risks involved. Having once been hurt or taken advantage of, some people steadfastly refuse to ever again become intimate with another person. These people find that they become too vulnerable, too open to exploitation or threat, if they allow others too close. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Intimacy is risky indeed because it involves letting others into the innermost parts of your being. The risk is just as great on the other extreme, however. You can lose touch and become so protected and invulnerable that nobody gets in. Then your experience closeness with no one. You are safe and secure, but all alone. In the center of the Protestant courage of confidence stands the courage to accept acceptance is spite of the consciousness of guilt. Martin Luther, and in fact the whole period, experienced the anxiety of guilt and condemnation as the main form of their anxiety. The courage to affirm oneself in spite of this anxiety is the courage which we have called the courage of confidence. It is rooted in the personal, total, and immediate certainty of divine forgiveness. There is belief in forgiveness in all forms of mortal’s courage to be, even in neocollctivism. However, there is no interpretation of human existence in which it is so predominant as in genuine Protestantism. And there is no movement in history in which it is equally profound and equally paradoxical. In the Lutheran formula that “one who is unjust is just” (in the view of the divine forgiveness) or in the more modern phrasing that “one who is unacceptable is accepted” the victory over the anxiety of guilt and condemnation is sharply expressed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
One could say that the courage to be is he courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable. One does not need to remind the theologians for the fact that this is the genuine meaning of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith” (a doctrine which in its original phrasing has become incomprehensible even for students of theology). However, one must remind theologians and ministers that in the fight against the anxiety of guilt by psychotherapy the idea of acceptance has received the attention and gained the significance which in the Reformation period was to be seen in phrases like “forgiveness of sins” or “justification through faith.” Accepting acceptance though being unacceptable if the basis for the courage of confidence. Decisive for this self-affirmation is its being independent of any moral, intellectual, or religious precondition: it is not the good or the wise of the pious who are entitled to the courage to accept acceptance but those who are lacking in all these qualities and are not aware of being unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
This, however, does not mean acceptance by oneself as oneself. It is not a justification of one’s accidental individuality. It is not the Existentialist courage to be as oneself. It is the paradoxical act in which one is accepted by that which infinitely transcends one’s individual self. It is in the experience of the Reformers the acceptance of the unacceptable sinner into judging and transforming communion with God. The courage to be in this respect is the courage to accept the forgiveness of sins, not as an abstract assertion but as the fundamental experience in the encounter with God. Self-affirmation in spite of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation presupposes participation in something which transcends the self. In the communion of healing, for example the psychoanalytic situation, the patient participations in the healing power of the helper by whom one is accepted although one feels oneself unacceptable. The healer, in this relationship, does not stand for oneself as an individual but represents the objective power of acceptance and self-affirmation. This objective power works through the healer in the patient. Of course, it must be embodied in a person who can realize guilt, who can judge, and who can accept in spite of the judgment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Acceptance by something which is less than personal could never overcome personal self-rejection. A wall to which I confess cannot forgive me. No self-acceptance is possible is one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation. However, even if one is personally accepted it needs a self-transcending courage to accept this acceptance, it needs the courage of confidence. For being accepted does not mean that guilt is denied. The healing helper who tried convince his patient that he was not really guilty would do him a great disservice. He would prevent him from taking his guilt into his self-affirmation. He may help him to transform displaced, neurotic guilt feelings into genuine ones who are, so to speak, put on the right place, but he cannot tell him that there is no guilt in him. He accepts the patient into his communion without condemning anything and without covering anything up. Here, however, is the point where the religious acceptance as being accepted transcends medical healing. Religion asks for the ultimate source of the power which heals by accepting the unacceptable, it asks for God. The acceptance by God, his forgiving or justifying act, is the only and ultimate source of courage to be which is able to take the anxiety of guilt and condemnation into itself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
For the ultimate power of self-affirmation can only be the power of being-itself. Everything less than this, one’s own or anybody else’s finite power of being, cannot overcome the radical, infinite threat of nonbeing which is experienced in the despair of self-condemnation. This is why the courage of confidence, as it is expressed in the mortal like Martin Luther, emphasizes unceasingly exclusive trust in God and rejects any other foundation for his courage to be, not only as insufficient but as driving one into more guilt and deeper anxiety. The immense liberation brought to the people of the 16th century by the message of the Reformers and the creation of their indomitable courage to accept acceptance was due to the solafide doctrine, namely to the message that the courage of confidence is conditioned not by anything finite but solely by that which is unconditional itself and which we experience as unconditional in a person-to-person encounter. Many people desiring this Larger Experience have avoided traditional religious involvements and have found vehicles in movements or programs that are somewhat like cults. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The word “cult” has to be rescued from traditional usage, in which it was given a status somewhere below church, similar to a superstition, more radical than a sect, and usually populated by oddballs. The redefined concept means that activity become cultic when it is raised to a high enough level of seriousness and fervor to center the life interest of participants and make them devotees rather than just workers or players. A cult is more than a place or situation through which one gains kicks or expression of freedom. It is intimately involved with the search for identity, and usually, with a search for personal significance. Many people, young and old, have felt a need for more identity-experiencing than the traditional religions have been able to offer. To many people, the Gothic structure, the stained glass and pipe organ, the formalism and ritual are all too fixed, too rigid, too cold, and do not invite them to participate in a religious experience. They feel that religions is such a setting is a spectator activity, a spectacle. And, for others, to gain membership in fundamentalist sects means to give up much freedom and to take on a feeling of total worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
So, the religious cults grow up. Many full-scale denominations of today began as cults, became sects, and are now respectable religious bodies: Quakers, Amish, Methodists, Assembly of God, and so forth. However, in their beginnings they shared with today’s religious cults the same kinds of qualities: personal involvement through rituals, emotional activity and feeling, promises of inner peace (or salvation), a leader with whom to identify, and a definite feeling of belonging, which is the identity sought for by most of the members. There are so many religious cults we hardly know where to begin. We will mention only a few—Self-Realization Fellowship, Father Divine’s followers, the Temple of Krishna Consciousness, and many others that have connections with various Eastern Philosophies. The word esoteric comes to mind when you see or hear of the belief systems and practices of these groups. However, esoteric, or even the word exotic fails to describe them fully. Of course, like anything else, a person cannot fully know a cultic activity from the outside; one must become a fully participating and believing member. One does what the ritual demands, not just to be a member, but because one believes in the rituals and what they mean. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
While a few of these groups offer salvation, in the traditional sense of glorious with-God life after death, any of them only talk about a present-day, contemporary form of salvation. It may be the nirvana of the classical Buddhism or the satori (enlightenment) of Zen, or it may be a total cosmic awakening and Oneness that comes from mediation and/or chanting. Whatever the terms, the salvation often consists in some form of Larger awareness of who you are and of what your beings consists. I have tried to give a general picture of the alienation of modern mortals from themselves and from their follow mortals in the process of producing, consuming and leisure activities. Now, we should deal with some specific aspects of the contemporary social character which are closely related to the phenomenon of alienation, the treatment of which, however, is facilitated by dealing with them separately rather than as subheadings of alienation. The first such aspect to be dealt with is modern mortals’ attitude towards authority. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
We have discussed the between rational and irrational, furthering and inhibiting authority, and stated that Western society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was characterized by the mixture of both kinds of authority. What is common to both rational and irrational authority is that overt authority. You know who orders and forbids: the father, the teacher, the boss, the king, the officer, the priest, God, the law, the moral conscience. The demands or prohibitions may be reasonable or not, strict or lenient, I may obey or rebel; I always know that there is an authority, who it is, what it wants, and what results from my compliance or my rebellion. Authority in the twenty-first century has changed its character; it is not overt authority, but anonymous, invisible, alienated authority. Nobody makes a demand, neither a person, nor an idea, nor a moral law. Yet we all conform as much or more than people in an intensely authoritarian society would. Indeed, nobody is an authority expect “It.” What is It? Profit, economic necessities, the market, common sense, public opinion, what “one” does, thinks, feels. The laws of the market—and just as unassailable. Who can attack the invisible? Who can rebel against Nobody? #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Sweet Hours have Perished here and Somehow in Heaven Our Journey had Advanced Eternity by Term
They will recollect how cold I looked, and how I just said “please.” Then they will hasten to the doctor. Keep your minds open to each other. Of course you will depend on words, no matter how much you read each other’s thoughts, but do not exchange souls. Too much, and you will lose the mutual telepathy. Of course we know there may be no link between what is taking place at the card table and what is taking place in the economy. However, if card games played by millions of people shift the role of deception, would not we be naïve simply to assume that such shifts do not also occur in the World of commerce? The marketing orientation is closely related to the fact that the need to exchange has become a paramount drive in modern mortals. By 1941, the end of the Great Depression, the Association of American Playing Card Manufacturers revealed that contract bridge had become the most popular card game in the country, and that 44 percent of the household in the United States of America played it. Contract bridge is a game played by partners, who must cooperate—asocial game that from the beginning was frequently recommended as a way to make friends or even find a beau. It was recommended as a means of learning social skills (though the game occasionally ended friendships or caused divorces). Contract bridge has only rarely been played for money. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is, of course, true that even in a primitive economy based on a rudimentary form of division of labor, mortals exchange goods with each other within the tribe or among neighboring tribes. The mortal who produces cloth exchanges it for grain which one’s neighbor may have produced, or for sickles or knives made by the blacksmith. With increasing division of labor, there is increasing exchange of goods, but normally the exchange of goods is nothing but a means to an economic end. In capitalistic society exchanging has become and end in itself. None other than Adam Smith saw the fundamental role of the need to exchange, and explained it as a basic drive in mortals. This division of labor from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It is common to all mortals, and to be found in no other race of beings, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. The principle of exchange on an ever-increasing scale on the national and World market is indeed one of the fundamental economic principles on which the capitalistic system rests, but Adam Smith foresaw here that this principle was also to become one of the deepest psychic needs of the modern, alienated personality. Exchange has lost its rational function as a mere means for economic purposes, and has become an end in itself, extended to the noneconomic realms. Quite unwittingly, Adam Smith himself indicates the irrational nature of this need to exchange in one’s example of the exchange between the two dogs. There could be no possible realistic purpose in this exchange; either the two bones are alike, and then there is no reason to exchange them, or the one is better than the other, and then the dog who has the better one would not voluntarily exchange it. The example makes sense only if we assume that to exchange is a need in itself, even if it does not serve any practical purpose—and this is indeed what Adam Smith does assume. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
As I have already mentioned in another context, the love of exchange has replaced the love of possession. One buys a car, or a house, intending to sell it at first opportunity. However, more important is the fact that the drive for exchange operates in the realm of interpersonal relations. Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market. Each person is a package in which several aspects of one’s exchange value is blended into one: one’s personality, by which is meant those qualities which make one a good sale person of oneself; one’s looks, education, income, and change for success—each person strives to exchange this package for the best value obtainable. Even the function of going to a party, and of social intercourse in general, is to a large extent that of exchange. One is eager to meet the slightly higher-priced packages, in order to make contact and possibly a profitable exchange. One wishes to exchange one’s social position, and that is one’s own self, for a higher one, and in this process one exchanges one’s old set of friends, set of habits and feelings for the new ones, just as one exchanged a Mercedes-Benz for a BMW or a Ford for a Buick. While Adam Smith Believed this need for exchange to be an inherent part of human nature, it is actually a symptom of the abstractification and alienation inherent in the social character of modern mortals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The whole process of living is experienced analogously to the profitable investment of capital, my life and my person being the capital which is invested. If a mortal buys a cake of soap or a pound of meat, one has the legitimate expectation that the money one pays corresponds to the value of the soap or a pound of meat one buys. One is concerned that the equation “so much soap = so much money” makes sense in terms of the existing price structure. However, this expectation has become extended to all other forms of activity. If a mortal goes to an Emma Hewitt concert or to the theater to see Legally Blond 3, one asks oneself more or less explicitly whether the show is “worth the money” one paid (and of course you know it is). While this question makes some marginal sense, fundamentally the question does not make any sense, because two incommensurable things are brought together in the equation; the pleasure of listening to an Emma Hewitt concert cannot possibly be expressed in terms of money; the concert is not a commodity, nor is the experience of listening to it. The same holds true when a mortal makes a pleasure trip, goes to a lecture, gives a party, or any of the many activities which involve the expenditure of money. The acidity in itself is a productive act of living, and incommensurable with the amount of money spent for it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The need to measure living acts in terms of something quantifiable appears also in the tendency to ask whether something was worth the time. A young man’s evening with a young lady, a visit with friends, and the many other action in which expenditure of money may or may not be involved, raise the question of whether the activity was worth the money or the tie. In each case one needs to justify the acidity in terms of an equation which shows that it was a profitable investment of energy. Even hygiene and health have to serve for the same purpose; a mortal taking a walk every morning tends to look on it as a good investment for one’s health, rather than a pleasurable activity which does not need any justification. This attitude found its closest and most drastic expression in Bentham’s concept of pleasure and pain. Starting on the assumption that the aim of life was to have pleasure, Bentham suggested a kind of bookkeeping which would show for each action whether the pleasure was greater than the pain, and if the pleasure was greater, the action was worth while doing. This the whole of life to him was something analogous to a business in which at any given point the favorable balance would show that it was profitable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
While Bentham’s views are not very much in the minds of people any more, the attitude which they express has become ever more firmly established. In Dr. Freud’s concept of the pleasure principle and in his pessimistic views concerning the prevalence of suffering over pleasure in civilized society, one can detect the influence of Benthamian calculation. A new question has arisen in modern mortal’s mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living, and correspondingly, the feeling that one’s life is a failure, or is a success. This idea is based on the concept of life as an enterprise which should show a profit. The failure is like the bankruptcy of a business in which the losses are greater than the gains. This concept is nonsensical. We may be happy or unhappy, achieve some aims, and not achieve others; yet there is no sensible balance which could show whether life if worth while living. Maybe from the standpoint of a balance life is never worth while living. It ends necessarily with death; many of our hopes are disappointed; it involves suffering and effort; from a standpoint of the balance, it would seem to make more sense not to have been born at all. One the other hand, who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies? #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Life is a unique gift and challenge, not to be measured in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to the question whether it is worth while living, because the question does not make any sense. “it is hard to say what I want my legacy to be, what I want people to say when I am long gone. At this point, right now, I am going to say I want people to see me as an entertainer. Someone who can do it all. I have to honestly say, everything is worth it. The times when you are tired. The times you are a bit sad. The—the good moments when you are on stage performing in front of thousands of people. In the end it is all worth it because it really makes me happy, and I would not trade it for anything else in the World. I honestly would not. There is nothing better than loving what you do. I have good friends, I have beautiful family, and I have a career; a career that is blooming, and still growing, and I am truly blessed. And I thank God for his blessings every single change I get,” reports Aaliayh. We have so much freedom, so many opportunities to develop our unique personalities and talents, our memories, and our personalized contributions. Tears of gratitude formed this wonderous World in which we live. God’s teachings give brilliance and hope and love to everyone single soul, being, creature and life form that exists, has ever existed, and that ever will exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The interpretation of life as an enterprise seems to be the basis for a typical modern phenomenon, about which a great deal of speculation exists: the increase of experiencing death by suicide in modern Western society. Between 2010 and 2016 experiencing death by suicide increased 140 percent in Prussia, 355 percent in France. England had 110 cases of suicide per million inhabitants. Sweden 66, as against 150 respectively. Death by suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. On average, there are 129 people who experience death by suicide in America. In 2017, there were 1.3 million attempted suicides, 47,173 of those people died. Sucide and self-injury cost the Untied States of American $69 billion annually. How can we explain this increase in suicide, accompanying the increasing prosperity in the twenty-first century? No doubt that the experiencing death by suicide are highly complex, and that there is not a single motivation which we can assume to be the cause. We find revenge suicide as a pattern in China; we find experiencing death by suicide by melancholia all over the World; but neither of those motivations play much a role in the increase of rates of experiencing death by suicide in the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Some people think it is possible that there is an increase in death by suicide because of a phenomenon called anomie, which is the destruction of all the traditional social bonds, to the fact that all truly collective organization has become secondary to the state, and all genuine social life has been annihilated. Some people living in the modern political state are a disorganized dust of individuals. It is also believed that the boredom and monotony of life which is engendered by the alienated way of living is an additional factor for why people experience death by suicide. However, Easter cultures believe that it is possible dark spirits, dark energy, or demons follow people and cause some to experience death by suicide and it is not something the victim actually intended to do. The suicide figures for the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the United States, together with the figures on alcoholism and the opioid crises seem to support this hypothesis. However, there is another reason which has been ignored about experiencing death by suicide. It has to do with the whole balance concept of life as an enterprise which can fail. Problems or trials in our lives need to be viewed in the perspective of scriptural doctrine. Otherwise they can easily overtake our vision, absorb our energy, and deprive us of the joy and beauty the Lord intends us to receive here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Many cases of suicide are caused by feeling that life has been a failure, that it is not worth whole living any more; one experiences death by suicide just as a business person declares one’s bankruptcy when losses exceed gains, and when there is no more hope of recuperating the losses. Do you take time each day to realize how beautiful life can be? You are on Earth for a divine purpose. The tempering effect of patience is required. Some blessings will be delivered in this life, other will come from beyond the veil. Religion begins at the point where philosophy moves into personal commitment and action. A religion is more than a mere belief or an understanding of something; it implies the reaction of a mortal’s whole being to that on which one feels dependent. It is life lived in the conviction that what is highest in spirit is deepest in nature. Religion deals with an indwelling spirit in mortals or some animistic spirit in a rock, tree, car, or animal. For many, God is an Ultimate concern; however, mortals have many definitions of God, and the total number represents the infinite variety of experiences that people have. God is love—he is behind and inclusive of whatever love we may have known. God is a Truth that is beyond individual truths. Therefore, there is always more than two sides to every story. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The concept of God has found very little coverage in books about psychology, mostly because the usual methods of the science’s study do not work well in trying to define, identify, quantify or describe God. The best that scientists have been able to do is to study the effect of a belief or disbelief in God on people’s behavior. Nonetheless, the subject of religion is one of enormous importance. It is the feelings, acts, and experience of individual mortals in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine. Devout religionists point to the fact the for preliterate societies, rocks and Earth contained spirits which had to be appeased, appealed to, and worshipped in some manner or other as evidence of a universal need for worship and religious experience in all mortals. Religion helps account for the origin and development of the society, which most religions do; it helps to organize the power structure; it helps to sanction many of the personal behaviors of the people in society—like marriage, sex, family practices; it helps to provide some common symbols and bonds—such as the concept of the chosen people; it helps to designate certain roles—chief, priest, worshippers, acolytes, shaman, or witch doctor, and so on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Religion is also used as a means of keeping the people in a particular state—building a gap between those who are keepers of the flame and those who worship, keeping the masses contented or in a state of puzzled uncertainty, keeping the masses happy. Many people let their religious beliefs help them to accept burdens or hardships (the cross I must bear) or to think of the better life Beyond (in that city foursquare). So it is possible that one function of some sort of religious belief or activity is to enable a person or a group of people to endure difficulties or otherwise to find help. However, is this all? Is it not possible that religion has the hard-to-describe function of enabling mortals to see their relatedness to the Universe and to other people? When a religion permits a mortal to transcend one’s solitariness and give one a picture of the larger reality, it may enable because the experience might be similar to standing on a quiet hillside at night and viewing the panorama of constellations and comets in the skies above. Some people become suddenly aware of the immensity of the Universe and raise serious doubts about their part in it all. Knowing the approximate distance to the nearest star, and that the star is actually a Sun to the planets that may circle about it, and that there may be some form of intelligence on those planets can make one feel tremendously insignificant! #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
How, with this experience, can one possibly add to one’s own feeling of significance? Some people cannot. However, others get that feeling called the Oceanic Experience and realize that their tiny and infinitesimal self is part of it all, that they and the Universe, as object, are no longer separate. Another point: Religion seems to be the only institution that gives (or has given) mortals a way of dealing with the anxiety that comes from knowing our physical bodies are not yet immortal, and that this may be the only certainty. Primitive mortals had few alternatives to explain life and death—no science or philosophy, just religious rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These gave mortals some assurance of continuity. As mortal have discovered more alternatives, there have been more changes in their religious views. For some people, losing themselves in such an experience means literally to lose themselves. However, for other people, this losing of self means to find and gain a larder, more comprehensive sense of self. If this can happen, we say the self-transcendence is beautiful. The pole of individualization expresses itself in the religious experience as a personal encounter with God. And the courage derived from it is the courage of confidence in the personal reality which is manifest in religious experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In contradistinction to the mystical union one can call this relation a personal communion with the source of courage. Although the two types are in contrast they do not excluded each other. For they are united by the polar interdependence of individualization and participation. The courage of confidence has often, especially in Protestantism, been identified with the courage of faith. However this is not adequate, because confidence is only one element in faith. Faith embraces both mystical participation and personal confidence. Most parts of the Bible describe the religious encounter in strongly personalist terms. Biblicism, notably that of the Reformers, follows this emphasis. Martin Luther directed his attack against the objective, quantitative, and impersonal elements in the Roman system. He fought for an immediate person-to-person relationship between God and mortals. In him the courage of confidence reached its highest point in the history of Christian thought. Every work of Martin Luther (not to be confused with Martin Luther King Jr.), especially in his earlier years, is filled with such courage. Again and again he uses the word trotz, “in spite of.” In spite of all the negativities which he had experienced, in spite of the anxiety which dominated that period, one derived the power of self-affirmation from one’s unshakable confidence in God and from the person encounter with him. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
According to the expressions of anxiety in his period, the negativity of Martin Luther’s courage had to conquer were symbolized in the figures of death and the Devil. It has rightly been declared that Albrechet Durer’s engraving, “Knight, Death, and the Devil,” is a classic expression of the spirit of the Lutheran Reformation and—it might be added—of Luther’s courage of confidence, of his form of the courage to be. A knight in full armor is riding through a valley, accompanied by the figure of death on one side, the Devil on the other. Fearlessly, concentrated, confident he looks ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of the negatives of existence. His courage is certainly not the courage to be as a part. The Reformation broke away from the semicollectivism of the Middle Ages. Luther’s courage of confidence is personal confidence, derived from person-to-person encounter with God. Neither popes nor councils could give him this confidence. Therefore, he had to reject them just because they relied on a doctrine which blocked off the courage of confidence. They sanctioned a system in which the anxiety of death and guilt never was completely conquered. There were many assurances but no certainty, many supports for the courage of confidence but no unquestionable foundation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The collective offered different ways of resisting anxiety but no way in which the individual could take his anxiety upon himself. Martin Luther never was certain; he never could affirm his being with unconditional directly with his total being, in an immediate personal relation. There was, except in mysticism, always mediation through the Church, in indirect and partial meeting between God and the soul. When the Reformation removed the mediation and opened up a direct, total, and person approach to God, a new nonmystical courage to be was possible. It is manifest in the heroic representatives of fighting Protestantism, in the Calvinist as well as the Lutheran Reformation, and in Calvinism even more conspicuously. It is not the heroism of risking martyrdom, of resisting the authorities, of transforming the structure of Church and society, but it is the courage of confidence which makes these people heroic and which is the basis of the other expression of their courage. One could say—and liberal Protestantism often has said—that the courage of the Reformers is the beginning of the individualistic type of the courage to be as oneself. However, such an interpretation confuses a possible historical effect with the matter itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the courage of the Reformers the courage to be as oneself is both affirmed and transcended. In comparison with the mystical form of courageous self-affirmation the Protestant courage of confidence affirms the individual self as an individual self in its encounter with God as person. This radically distinguishes the personalism of the Reformation from all the later forms of individualism and Existentialism. The courage of the Reformers is not the courage to be oneself—as it is not the courage to be as a part. It transcends and unites both of them. For the courage of confidence is not rooted in confidence about oneself. The Reformation pronouns the opposite: one can become confident about one’s existence only after ceasing to base one’s confidence on oneself. One the other hand the courage of confidence is in no way based on anything finite besides oneself, not even on the Church. It is based on God and solely on God, who is experiences in a unique and personal encounter. The courage of the Reformation transcends both the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. It is threatened neither by the loss of oneself nor by the loss of one’s World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Freud himself had a very limited sexual life. His own sexual expression began late, around thirty, and subsided early, around forty. At forty-one Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess complaining of his depressed mood, and added, “Also sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” Another incident points to the fact that around this age his sexual life had more or less ended. Freud reports in The Interpretation of Dreams that at one time, in his forties, he felt physically attacked to a young woman and reached out half-voluntarily and touched her. He comments on how surprised he was that he was still able to find the possibility for such attraction in him. Freud believed in the control and channeling of sexuality, and was convinced that this had specific value both for cultural development and for one’s own character. In 1883, during his prolonged engagement to Martha Bernays, the young Freud wrote to his future wife: it neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least do not have much taste for it. I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing what. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
And this constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. And the extreme cases of people like ourselves who chain themselves together for life and death, who deprive themselves and pine for years so as to remain faithful, who probably would not survive a catastrophe that robbed them of their beloved. From that declaration, one may comprehend that Freud’s doctrine of sublimation lies in this belief that libido exists in a certain quantity in the individual, that you can deprive yourself, economize emotionally in one way to increase your enjoyment in another, and that if you spend your libido in direct sexuality you will not have it for utilization, for example, in artistic creation. This concept of sublimation is Freud’ most puritanical belief. The original Puritan movement, in its best representatives and before its general deterioration into the moralistic compartment of Victorianism at the end of the twenty-first century, was characterized by admirable qualities of dedication to integrity and truth. The progress of modern science owes a great deal to it and, indeed, would probably not have been possible without these virtues in their scientific laboratories. It is also possible to make contact with other people in the realm of ideas, of beliefs, of words and thoughts. This is called cognitive (thought) intimacy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Two people may know each other’s minds, have access to the inner most arenas of each other’s mental processes. To establish such closeness means a constant and opening sharing of ideas. When intellectual changes occur, people can assist one another’s understanding by batting the ideas around—by debating them, arguing them, or simply talking them out. The special quality of cognitive intimacy is that it often consists of unspoken and unexpressed sharing. This quality makes it very difficult to describe. However, those who know it feel it to be one of the more exciting and challenging aspects of intimate experience. “Always I have known that you were there. I only had to find out where we have our own ways, our own signs to follow, with different roads that lead us home. And I feel you close. I am alive again. And it seems like home. This is where the rainbow ends. Footsteps I follow to your door, we do not need to talk anymore, we have the same heart, the same mine, the same souls. The distant lights will lead us on,” reports Emma Hewitt (Alive Again). Shared feeling is emotional intimacy, a mutual accessibility, naturalness, nonpossessiveness, and is a process that required constant attention. It is an important aspect of human closeness. It is this dimension of intimacy, perhaps, that brings us closet to a workable definite of loving. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Times Literary Supplement: Christ Will Explain Each Separate Anguish in the Fair Schoolroom in the Sky!
I shall know why, when time is over, and I have ceased to wonder why. He will tell me what Peter promised. I locked eyes with him, and it seemed for an instant I caught hold of shared secrets, things that they all knew, things they could not tell, things so profoundly connected to their wealth and their roots that they could never be outgrown or expurgated or overcome. As soon as we look at the relation of sex and love in our time, we find ourselves immediately caught up in a whirlpool of contradictions. In Victorian times, when the denial of sexual impulses, feelings, and drives was the mode and one would not talk about sex in polite company, an aura of sanctifying repulsiveness surrounded the whole topic. Males and females dealt with each other as though neither possessed sexual organs. The details were considered a little unpleasant to discuss. However, some people believed that ignoring such a vital part of the human body and self would lead to a morass of neurotic symptoms. We now place more emphasis on sex than any society since that of ancient Rome, and some scholars believe we are more preoccupied with sex than any other people in all history. And this is not just an American obsession. Across the ocean in England, for example, from bishops to biologists, everyone is in on the act. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Open The Times Literary Supplement or any other newspaper, any day (Sunday in particular), and the odds are you will find some pundit treating the public to his or her views on contraception, abortion, adultery, obscene publications, homosexuality between consenting adults or (if all else fails) contemporary moral patterns among our adolescent. Many therapists today see patients who come for help to talk about sex, a great deal of sexual activity, practically no one complaining of cultural prohibitions over going to bed as often or with as many partners as one wishes. However, what our patients do complain of is the lack of feeling and passion. The curious thing about this ferment of discussion is how little anyone seems to be enjoying emancipation. So much sex and so little meaning or even fun in it! Where the Victorian did not want anyone to know that he or she had sexual feelings, people are now giving it away like biscuits at tea time, and ashamed if they do not. Before 1910, if you called a lady sexy she would be insulted; nowadays, she prizes the compliment and rewards you by turning her charms in your direction. Our patients often have the problems of frigidity and impotence, but the strange and poignant thing we observe is how desperately they struggle not to let anyone find out they do not feel sexually. The Victorian man or woman was guilty if one did experience sex; now people feel guilty if they do not. #RandolpHarris 2 of 19
One paradox, therefore, is that enlightenment has not solved the sexual problems in our culture. To be sure, there are important beneficial results of the new enlightenment, chiefly in increased freedom for the individual. Most external problems are eased: sexual knowledge can be bought in any bookstore, contraception is available everywhere and couples can, without guilt and generally without squeamishness, discuss their sexual relationship and undertake to make it more mutually gratifying and meaningful. Let these gains not be underestimated. External social anxiety and guilt have lessened; dull would be the man who did not rejoice in this. However, internal anxiety and guilt have increased. And in some ways these are more morbid, harder to handle, and impose a heavier burden upon the individual than external anxiety. The challenge women used to face from men was simple and direct—would she or would she not go to bed?—a direct issue of how she stood vis-à-vis cultural mores. However, the question men ask now is no longer, “Will she or will she not?” but “Can she or can she not?” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The challenge is shifted to the woman’s personal adequacy, namely, her own capacity to have the vaunted orgasm—which should resemble a grand mal seizure. Through we might agree that the second question places the problem of sexual decision more where is should be, we cannot overlook the fact that the first question is much easier for the person to handle. In my practice, one woman was afraid to go to bed for fear that the man would not find her very good at making love. Another was afraid because she did not know how to do it, assuming that her lover would hold this against her. Another was scared to death of the second marriage for fear that she would not be able to have the orgasm as she had not in her first. Often the woman’s hesitation is formulated as, “He will not like me well enough to come back again.” In past decades, you could blame society’s strict mores and preserve your own self-esteem by telling yourself what you did not did not do was society’s fault and not yours. And this would give you some time in which to decide what you do want to do, or to let yourself grow into a decision. However, when the question is simply how you can perform, your own sense of adequacy and self-esteem is called immediately into question, and the whole weight of the encounter is shifted inward to how you can meet the test. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
College students, in their fights with college authorities about hours girls are to be permitted in the men’s rooms, are curiously blind to the fact that rules are often a boon. Ruled give the student time to find oneself. He was the leeway to consider a way of behaving without being committed before he is ready, to try on for size, to venture into relationships tentatively—which is part of any growing up. Better to have the lack of commitment direct and open rather than to go into sexual relations under pressure—doing violence to his feelings by having physical commitment without psychological. He may flout the rules; but at least they give some structure to be flouted. My point is true whether he obeys the rule or not. Many contemporary students, understandably anxious because of their new sexual freedom, repress this anxiety (one should like freedom) and then compensate for the additional anxiety the repression gives them by attacking the parietal authorities for not giving them freedom! What we did not see in our short-sighted liberalism is sex was that throwing the individual into an unbounded and empty sea of free choice does not in itself give freedom, but it more apt to increase inner conflict. The sexual freedom to which we were devoted fell short of being fully human. #RandolpHarris 5 of 19
We all have observed drama after drama, engaging in sex was like setting out to shop on a dull afternoon; desire had nothing to do with it and even curiosity was faint. The crucial point is that in sheer realistic enlightenment there has occurred a dehumanization of sex fiction. The battle against censorship and for freedom of expression surely was a great battle to win, but has it not become a new strait jacket? Our dogmatic enlightenment is self-defeating: it ends up destroying the very sexual passion it set out to protect. Maybe more people should focus on intimacy. Although many people deny its operation in themselves, most psychologist recognize the existence and importance of a need for intimacy. Intimacy comes from the Latin, intimus, meaning the innermost. This is a need for more than just closeness; it is a need to be on the inside of another person’s experiences. If we share intimacy wit another person, it is as if we are inside that person’s skin and able to experience some of the inner life of that person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
For a great many of us, there is not enough closeness, not enough being with another person. Although there are undoubtedly many people whose needs for intimacy are being met, there are many others who do not know how important such closeness is for them, or, if they do know, they are unable to satisfy their need for it. Marriage counselors and other psychotherapists indicate that high up on the list of problems that people bring to them is an inability to get close, to let someone get close to them, or to sustain any form of shared intimacy. Some people who are deprived of intimacy begin to display neurotic behavior. An individual who is neurotic has an emotional condition characterized by much anxiety and conflicting motives; this condition is often stimulated by choices that all seem bad. However, two people can feel close while taking a walk, having a talk, looking into each other’s eyes, sharing a burdensome responsibility, experiencing common grief, joy, worry, guilt, or sexual desire. All the many different forms of intimate expression can be divided into groups or dimensions. People who are really fully functioning human beings relate to others through all of these dimensions; ultimately, no judgments can be made as to which of these dimensions is more important, desirable, or necessary. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
You are energy, you body is energy. The unfolding, the development of your biological process is you, is your body. Your body is an energetic process, going by your name. It delights me to say that I am my body, with deep understanding of what that means. It gives me identity with my aliveness, without any need to split myself, body and mind. I see all my process—thinking, feeling, acting, imagining—as part of my biological reality, rooted in the Universe. However, the new emphasis on technique in sex and love-making backfires. It often occurs to me that there is an inverse relationship between the number of how-to-do-it books perused by a person or rolling off the presses in a society and the amount of sexual passion or even pleasure experienced by the person involved. Certainly nothing is wrong with technique as such, in playing golf or acting or making love. However, the emphasis beyond a certain point on technique is sex makes for a mechanistic attitude toward love-making, and goes along with alienation, feelings of loneliness, and depersonalization. One aspect of the alienation is that the lover, with his age-old art, tends to be superseded by the computer operator with his modern efficiency. Couples place great emphasis on bookkeeping and timetables in their love-making. If they fall behind schedule they come anxious and feel impelled to go to bed whether they want to or not. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
My patients have endured stoically, or without noticing, remarkably destructive treatment at the hands of their spouses, but they have experiences falling behind in the sexual time-table as a loss of love. The man feels he is somehow losing his masculine status if he does not perform up to schedule, and the woman that she has lost her feminine attractiveness if too long a period goes by without the man at least making a pass at her. The phrase “between men,” which women use about their affairs, similarly suggest a gap in which women use about their affairs, similarly suggests a gap in time like the entr’acte. Elaborate accounting and ledger-book lists—how often this week have we made love? did he (or she) pay the right amount of attention to me during the evening? was the foreplay long enough?—make one wonder how the spontaneity of this most spontaneous act can possibly survive. The computer hovers in the stage wings of the drama of love-making. “Don’t you miss yourself, and all you used to chain, it always ends. And you keep on running backwards, keep on chasing your own demons, so don’t waste another hour, and let me in. Disarm yourself, release the fear. Disarm yourself, and hold me near. Give yourself to me. Look to other people turning, while you’re hiding in the shadow, so don’t run away in silence. Let me in,” reports Emma Hewitt and Dash Berlin (Disarm Yourself). #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
It is not surprising then, in this preoccupation with techniques, that the question typically asked about an act of love-making are not, Was there passion or meaning or pleasure in the act? but How well did I perform. Take for example the tyranny of the orgasm, and the preoccupation with achieving a simultaneous orgasm, which is another aspect of the alienation. I confess that when people talk about the apocalyptic orgasm, I find myself wondering, Why do they have to try so hard? What abyss of self-doubt, what inner void of loneliness, are they trying to cover up by this great concern with grandiose effects? Even the sexologists, whose attitude is generally the more sex the merrier, are raising their eyebrows these days about the anxious overemphasis on achieving the orgasm and the great importance attached to satisfying the partner. A man makes the point of asking the woman if she made it, or if she is all right, or uses some other euphemism is possible. We men are reminded by Simone de Beauvior and other women who try to interpret the love act that this is the last thing in the World a woman wants to be asked. Furthermore, the technical preoccupation robs the woman of exactly what she wants most of all, physically and emotionally, namely the man’s spontaneous abandon at the moment of climax. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This abandon gives her whatever thrill or ecstasy she and the experience are capable of. When we cut through all the rigmarole about roles and performance, what still remains is how amazingly important the sheer fact of intimacy of relationship is—the meeting, the growing close with the excitement of not knowing where it will lead, the assertion of the self, and the giving of the self—in making a sexual encounter memorable. It is not this intimacy that makes us return to the event in memory again and again when we need to be warmed by whatever hearths life makes available? Our bodies are sensitive to a wide variety of stimulations. We respond to every form of physical contact and touch. The skin of our bodies is loaded with the most sensitive information-gatherers, delicate receptors that keep the brain in a constant state of awareness. It is a most basic form of getting information and of getting close. Our intimate encounter involve verbal, visual, and even olfactory [sense of smell] elements, but above all, loving means touching and body contact. Perhaps the touch is so basic—it has been called the greatest of all senses—that we tend to take it for granted. Unhappily, and almost without our noticing it, we have gradually become less and less touchful more and more distant, and physical untouchability has been accompanied by emotional remoteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
It is as if the modern urbanite has put on a suit of emotional armour and, with a velvet hand inside an iron glove, is beginning to feel trapped and alienated from the feelings of even his [or her] nearest companions. It is a strange thing in our society that what does into building a relationship—the sharing of tastes, fantasies, dreams, hopes for the future, and fears from the past—seems to make people more shy and vulnerable than going to bed with each other. They are more wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual openness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy. The way sexuality is being used today is causing a state of alienation from the body and a separation of emotion from reason, and the body is being used as a machines. “There are few more depressing sights than a progressive intellectual determined to end up in bed with someone from a sense of moral duty. There is no more high-minded puritan in the World than your modern advocate of salvation through properly directed passion,” reports the London Times Literary Supplement. A woman used to be guilty if she went to be with a man; now she feels vaguely guilty if after a certain number of dates she refrains; her sin is morbid repression, refusing to give. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And the partner, who is always completely enlightened (or at least pretends to be) refuses to allay her guilt by getting overtly angry at her (if she could fight him on the issues, the conflict would be a lot easier for her). However, he stands broadmindedly by, ready at the end of every date to undertake a crusade to assist her out of her fallen state. And this, of course, makes her no all the more guilt-producing for her. This all means, of course, that people not only have to learn to perform sexually but have to make sure, at the same time, that they can do so without letting themselves go in passion or unseemly commitment—the latter of which may be interpreted as exerting an unhealthy demand upon the partner. The Victorian person sought to have love without falling into sex; the modern person seeks to have sex without falling into love. The new sophisticate is not castrated by society, but like Origen is self-castrated. Sex and the body are for him not something to be and live out, but tools to be cultivated like a T.V. announcer’s voice. The new sophisticate expresses his passion by devoting himself passionately to the moral principle of dispersing all passion, loving everybody until love has no power left to scare anyone. He is deathly afraid of his passions unless they are kept under leash, and the theory of total expression is precisely his leash. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The new sophisticate’s dogma of liberty is his repression; and his principle of full libidinal health, full of sexual satisfaction, is his denial of eros (drive of love to procreate; urge). The old Puritans repressed sex and were passionate. That is as in the passion of Fallon and Michael on Dynasty, in the episode A Real Instinct for the Jugular (original air date 7 December 2018 on the CW), and it was a very different thing. Our new puritan (with a little p) represses passion and is sexual. His purpose is to hold back the body to try to make nature a slave. The new sophisticate’s rigid principle of full freedom is not freedom but a new straitjacket. He does all this because he is afraid of his body and his compassionate roots in nature, afraid of the soil and his procreative power. He is our latter-day Baconian devoted to gaining power over nature, gaining knowledge in order to get more power. And you gain power over sexuality (like working an enslaved person until all zest for revolt is squeezed out of him) precisely by the role of full expression. Sex becomes our tool like the caveman’s bow and arrow, crowbar, or adz. Sex, the new machine, the Machina Ultima. This new puritanism has crept into contemporary psychiatry and psychology. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
It is argued in some books on the counseling of married couples that the therapist ought to use only the term “fuck” when discussing sexual intercourse, and to insist the patient use it; for any other word plays into the patients’ dissimulation. What is significant here is not the use of the term itself: surely the sheer lust, animal but self-conscious, and bodily abandon which is rightly called fucking is not to be left out of the spectrum of human experience. However, the interesting thing is that the use of the once-forbidden word is not made into an ought—a duty for the moral reason of honesty. To be sure, it is dissimulation to deny the biological side of copulation. However, it is also dissimulation to use the term fuck for the sexual experience when what we seek is a relationship of personal intimacy which is more than a release of sexual tension, a personal intimacy which will be remembered tomorrow and many weeks after tomorrow. The former is dissimulation in the service of inhibition; the latter is dissimulation in the service of alienation of the self, a defense of the self against the anxiety of intimate relationship. The former was the particular problem in the 1800s, the latter is the particular problem of ours. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The new puritanism beings with it a depersonalization of our whole language. Instead of making love, we have sex; in contrast of intercourse, we screw; instead of going to bed, we lay someone or (Heaven help the English language as well as ourselves!) we are laid. This alienation has become so much the order of the day that in some psychotherapeutic training schools, young psychiatrists and psychologist are taught that it is therapeutic to use solely the four-letter words in sessions; the patient is probably masking some repression if he talks about making love; so it becomes our righteous duty—the new puritanism incarnate!—to let him know he only fucks. Everyone seems so intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of Victorian prudishness that we entirely forget that these different words refer to different kinds of human experience. Probably most people have experienced the different forms of sexual relationship described by the different terms and do not have much difficulty distinguishing among them. I am not making a value judgment among these different experiences; they are all appropriate to their own kinds of relationship. Every woman wants at some time to be laid—transported, carried away, made to have passion when at first she has none as in the famous scene between Fallon and Michael in Dynasty. However, if being laid is all that ever happens in her sexual life, then her experience of personal alienation and rejection of sex are just around the corner. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If the therapist does not appreciate these diverse kinds of experience, he will be presiding at the shrinking and truncating of the patient’s consciousness, and will be confirming the narrowing of the patient’s bodily awareness as well as his or her capacity for relationship. This is the chief criticism of new puritanism: it grossly limits feelings, it blocks the infinite variety and richness of the act, and it makes for emotional impoverishment. It is not surprising that the new puritanism develops smoldering hostility among the members of our society. And that hostility, in turn, comes out frequently in references to the sexual act itself. We say “go fuck yourself” or “fuck you” as a term of contempt to show that the other is of no value whatever beyond being used and tossed aside. The biological lust is here in its reducito ad absurdum. Indeed, the work fuck is the most common expletive in out contemporary language to express violent hostility. I do not think this by accident. However, does physical intimacy mean sex? In the broadest meaning of the term—sensuality—it does mean sex. Yet, even though most people may automatically think of sex when they hear the words intimate or intimacy, sexual caressing or intercourse is far from being the only form that physical intimacy takes. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Indeed, there is no guarantee at all that two people, involved in the most passionate forms of sexual behavior, are being intimate in the least! Sometimes sexual activity is a means of evading, hiding from, denying, or taking intimacy. How can this be? Sexual response is a relatively unconscious, or even automatic, behavior. While the best sexual expression is the most conscious, the most aware, the most holistic of our experiences, it can still happen without much thought or willing. However, being intimate, getting close and expressing it, requires a great deal of consciousness and intent. Because we have come to see sexual expression as a very intimate form of behavior, many people are able to convince their partners (or others) and even themselves that they are really close when, in fact, they have given little of themselves to the relationship. Physical intimacy, like other dimensions of intimacy, requires that the individuals involved be at home with their bodies, that they like, enjoy, and accept their physical beings, and that they recognize and appreciate the importance of touch and caress and other such forms of making contact. However, the Queen of England averred on her wedding night, that sex is too good for the common people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It was too late for man, but early for God; creation impotent to help, but prayer remained our side. How excellent the Heaven, when Earth cannot be had; how hospitable, then, the face of our handsome neighbor, God! Tenderness and respect—never selfishness—must be the guiding principles in the intimate relationship between husband and wife. “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband,” reports 1 Corinthians 7.2-4. It is the destiny of men and women to join together to make eternal family units. In the context of lawful marriage, the intimacy of sexual relations is right and divinely approved. There is nothing unholy or degrading about sexuality in itself, for by that means men and women join in a process of creation and in an expression of love. The union of the genders, husband and wife (and only husband and wife), was for the principal purpose of bringing children into the World. Sexual experiences were never intended by the Lord to be a mere plaything or merely to satisfy passions and lusts. We know of no directive from the Lord that proper sexual experience between husbands and wives need be limited totally to the procreation of children, but we find much evidence from Adam until now that no provision was ever made by the Lord for indiscriminate sex. #RandolphHaris 19 of 19
Randolph Harris II International Institute 