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One Seeks to Fulfill a Steady Purpose which Remains and is Not an Emotional Froth which Abates and Later Vanishes
How Long is it Since You were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
You Follow Me and I Will be Your Guide and Lead You Forth through an Eternal Place there You Shall See the Ancient Spirits!
The original front-porch lamp was recently restored, refurbished, and reinstalled! Looks good for over 100 years old!
To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite second. Modern beings, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest booty or department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, new ways of busting down and twerking, and oneself having plenty of money in which to buy them and make it rain. One would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of “muffins” and gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer and bigger things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than one. Significantly enough, one of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property has undergone a profound change. In the older attitude, certain sense of loving possession existed between a being and their property. It grew on one. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one had to part with Pointe du Lac mansion and plantation because it could not be used anymore. There is very little left on this sense of property today. One is ready to forget brand loyalty and throw away the BMW for a Tessela, ditch granny’s Victorian for a loft. One loves the newness of the thing bought, and ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Against Heavens Hand or Will, Argue Not Nor Bate a Lot of Heart or Hope, Still Bear Up and Steer Right Onward!
Investigators of the paranormal—we watch and we are always here. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I could not believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I have never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it has all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. Nicolas de Lenfent had been educated all his life to be a little imitation aristocrat. Well, during his first term studying law in Paris, at Pantheon-Assas University, he fell madly in love with the violin, of all things. Seems he heard an Italian virtuoso, one of those geniuses from Padua who is so great that mortals say he has sold his soul to the devil. Well, Nicolas dropped everything at once to take lessons from Wolfgang Mozart. He sold his books—the 17th century Institutio Theologiae Elencticae by Francisco Turrettione, the 16th century Tractatulus Hypocratis Medicorum Optimi de Aspectibus Plantrum Verus Lubam by Pietro d’Abano. He did nothing but play and play until he failed his examinations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nicolas wanted to be a musician. Can you imagine? And his father was beside himself. He even smashed the instrument, and you know what an expensive instrument the Molitor Stradivarius is, and you know what a piece of expensive merchandise means to the good draper. Nicolas promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his rare silver and tortoiseshell verge pocket watch to buy another. He is impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well. On Sunday when I went to mass, he was playing upstairs in his bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands. I gave a little grasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that. Of course, people said he will never be anything. He is too old. That when you are already twenty, you cannot take up the violin. But what do they know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil. Engaging destiny is seen most brilliantly in poets, partly because of their genius with words, but mainly because they live in and write with the awareness of deeper dimensions of consciousness than the rest of us. Whether or not we call these depths subconscious, unconscious, or collective unconscious, they still are arrived at only by intensity of feeling and vision, an ecstasy or a rage that cuts through superficial existence and reveals the profound forms of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
We should expect poets to have a great deal to communicate about destiny and about their own struggles to confront it. And we are not disappointed. I have always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reasons. Many people do not much believe in God and never have. Of course, when they do to mass they say they do. However, it is a duty for them. Real religion long ago died out for many people, especially when Madalyn Murry O’Hair came along and founded American Atheists and challenged mandatory prayer and Bible reading in public schools, but of course she and her sons ended up stealing money from the foundation and absconded. And as fate would have it, David Roland Waters, a convicted felon and former employee of American Atheists was convicted of murdering Madalyn O’Hair, her second son Jon Garth Murray, and her adopted daughter Robin Murry O’Hair (daughter of her son William J. Murray and his high school girlfriend Susan). Now we have all these shootings in the schools since people are removing God from the country founded in his name, as religion has died out in the families of thousands of aristocrats. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Once I remember crying over witches. We were little boys and the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the charred ground. That was a horrid, horrid place. I remember screaming and being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, “Wake up.” However, I had not thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burst alive. When my mother came to get us, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales. The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our village, that they had been innocent. Victims of superstition. There were no real witches. No wonder I had screamed and screamed. However, my mother told a different story, that the witches has been in league with the devil, that they had lighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed the sheep and the children. Still, if no one is ever brunt in the name of God, the World would be better. The good father even said that they had burnt a good number of werewolves in those times, too. They were a regular menace. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Nevertheless, the poet’s way is the opposite to the opaque, placid life. In authentic poetry we find a confrontation which does not involve repression nor covering up nor sacrifice of passion in order to avoid despair, nor any of the other ways most of us use to avoid direct acknowledgment of our destiny. The art of the poets teases out our awareness of our fate; the energy that does into the making of the poem adds to our passion; and by means of the music poets combine with words, the poem takes on a power to express the dignity of our state as human beings. All pains in the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, find their sole speech in that victorious brow. This is an expression for all of us to understand the passions and griefs experienced in engaging our own destinies. The joy and ecstasy from this level is where freedom takes off. All possibilities open up—thou art freed. When we consider how our light is spent, half our days in this dark World and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide could lodge us useless, not to express our freedom is a cruel fate. For many people their failure to see life and its precious capacity is what eats away their souls. However, religious faith is what helps us to accept our destiny, it keeps us from being cynical and sarcastic. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Against Heavens hand or will, one must not argue, nor bate a lot of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer right onward. This thought might lead one through the Worlds vain mask content, through the veil, have we no better guide. This is not a resignation. Resignation usually drains away one’s power and productivity. However, we are still passionate in our defense of freedom. Give us the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties. Help us to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. It is important to have such passionate devotion to the cause one believes in and speak not of resignation, passivity, docility, or loss of energy. Tragic experience can be formed by art into a thing of beauty. This outer power in politics as well as inner power of poetry indicates that we have kept very much alive our dialectical relation to our own destiny and thus our experience of authentic freedom. The World is twofold for mortals in accordance with our twofold attitude. Modern society only recognizes one of these modes, the mode of experience, through which mortals treats the World (including their fellow people), as an object to be analyzed and utilized. Most mortals ignore the second mode, the mode of encounter, through which mortals enter into a relation with the World, engaging as active participants rather than as objective observer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is only by opening ourselves up to this second mode of engaging in the World that we can escape the ills of the modern human condition. Or mortals encounter being and becoming as what confronts one—always only one being and everything only as a being. What is there reveals itself to one in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to one as being. Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically. Measure and comparisons have fled. It is up to us how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for us. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each if for us a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees our association wit the World. The World that appears to us in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to us, and we cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when we cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if one tries to make it surveryable, one loses it. It comes—comes to fetch us—and if it does not reach us or encounter us it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside us, it touches our ground; and id we say “soul of my soul” we have not said too much. However, one must beware of trying to transpose it into our soul—that way one destroy it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it—you must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimation of eternity. The It-World hangs together in space and time. The You-World does not hang together in space and time. The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation. These are the two basic privileges of the It-World. They induce mortals to consider the It-World as in which one has to live and also can live comfortably—and that even offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In this firm and wholesome chronicle the You-moments appears as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether indispensable. Since one must after all return into the World, why not stay in it in the first place? Why not call to order that which confronts us and send it home into objectivity? And when one cannot get around to saying You, perhaps to one’s father, wife, companion—why not say You and mean It? After all, producing the sound “You” with one’s vocal cords does not by any means entail speaking the uncanny basic word. Even whispering an amorous You with one’s soul is hardly dangerous as long as in all seriousness one means nothing but experiencing and using. One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. However, in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn. And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. However, whoever lives only with that is not human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? When we have fears that we may cease to be, before the pen has gleaned one’s teeming brain—keep in mind the chief expression of possibility, the freedom to create, may be taken from one. When one beholds, upon the night’s starred face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that one may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when one feel, fair creature of an hour, that one shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love;–then on the shore of the wide World one stands alone, and thinks till love and fame to nothingness do sink. The words will began to pour out of one as they had out of a poet, and soon one will be talking about things they had felt in their hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words will seem to be essential words they way good friends do on those rare occasions. And friends will come to describe their longings and dissatisfactions, and say things to each other with exuberance. Once night, when the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I had never done before—of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I could not see the towers of my father’s house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Into this Universe, and why not knowing nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; and out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. Up from the Earth’s centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; and many knots unraveled by the road; but not the master-knot of human fate. The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it. We must attack the false wishes of illusions that we all tend to carry—the hope that somehow we shall escape, through our special piety or our self-pity, the common fate of humankind. We simply do not know the ultimate answers. However, despite this fate and the injustices that it implies, we must seize what freedom we can and push on. The mystery will remain a mystery, our destiny cannot be unraveled by reason or by wit. We must pit fortitude against fatalism. Confront fate without becoming fatalistic. As a boy eight centuries ago, studied Sufism and science and as an adult become known as Persia’s outstanding astronomer, who wrote an authoritative text on algebra, who revised the astronomical tables, who persuaded the sultan to reform the calendar, and who in other ways worked diligently in the sultan’s government. Hardly a hedonistic loafer! #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Because something deep down in the subconscious knows that the ego is destructible, sooner or later, in one incarnation or another, a longing arises for what which is indestructible. From this moment one begins, however feebly, to crease indulging the desires, the wishes, of one’s ego, and to replace the by something new and higher. This is the beginning of the Quest, and it may take a religious, a spiritual, or a philosophic form, according to one’s maturity. Many seem to believe their entry into the quest for God will set their life in order and solve their problems forever. This is, of course, mere wishful thinking. It is not their entry but their completion of the quest that could ever do these things for them. The embracing of one’s fate so directly and so clearly—as well as so blithely and courageously—reduced the negative effect of the piddling worries about destiny, and sets one free inwardly for actualizing one’s freedom outwardly. Like Queen Akasha, those persons who often seem the most capable of accepting the inevitable are also the most productive and the most capable of pleasure and joy. We see in these poets that the acceptance of human destiny is the way to put one’s feet on solid ground. We then are not the ready prey of hobgoblins—we are no longer fighting battles against figments of our imagination; no boogeyman or woman is lurking in the closet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We are freed from the hundred and one imaginary bonds; we are loosed from the need to beg others to take care of us. Having confronted the worst, we are released to open up to the possibilities of life. Those of us who dare to face the question of truth may listen to what the Fourth Gospel says about it. The Fourth Gospel speaks a true reality—that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it. If Jesus says, “I am the truth,” he indicates that in Christ the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present, unveiled, undistorted, Christ’s infinite depth, in his unapproachable mystery. Jesus is not the truth because his teachings are true his teachings are. However, Christ’s teachings are true because they express his words. And he is more than any word said about him. The truth which makes us free is neither the teaching of Jesus nor the teaching about Jesus. They point to the truth, but are not a law of truth. Nor are the doctrines about him the truth that liberates. I say this to you as somebody who all his life has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ. However, the more one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have learned from our professors and from the teaching of the Church in all generations, is not the truth that makes us free. “The dead do not share. Though they reach towards us from the grave (I swear they do) they do not band their hearts to you They hand their heads, the part that stares,” Stan Rice from “Their Share” Body of Work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Love is a Cosmic Force—For those Who Stand in it and Behold in it, People Emerge from their Entanglement in Busy-ness!
Riding on a train through Switzerland, I looked up suddenly to see Armand directly opposite watching me over the upturned cover of cover of his fur-lined coat. Armand snatched the book out of my hand and insisted that I explain what it was, why I read it, what did the picture on the cover mean? In Paris Armand pursued me nightly through the boulevards and the back streets, only and now and then questioning me on the places I went, the things I did. In Venice, I would look out of my room at the Danieli, to see Armand staring from a window across the way. Only when people are tired of the frustrations and obstruction, the spites and cruelties which so often mar Worldly life, will individuals feel ready to turn in real earnest to the Quest. Only then will its perfect tranquility seem more desirable than the hectic excitement of following desires. The essential point is that the more an executive is involved in the World’s affairs, the more one needs this quest which leads one out of the World. The more one’s life is devoted to acquiring money and good and position, the more one needs a firm base within oneself from which properly to use these things as they ought to be used. A time may come when a mortal may tire of the whole social round, the business or professional rat-race, and desire to turn away from it—when one begins to see through its futilities, vanities, and uneducatedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
After trying to the usual ways, what other recourse can they have to fulfill this quest? The first appearance of this sense of futility (in the heart’s deeper life), and may pass disregarded and unheeded. However, it will return again and again, and grow apace, until the unsatisfactoriness of a wholly materialistic life, the transitioriness of a merely Earthly happiness, achieve recognition and obtain acceptance. With this negative phase, modern mortal’s inner life begins. They feel vaguely that there are higher laws governing life, that they do not know them. They would like to learn, but in the medley of sects and cults—wit their claims and contradictions—they do not feel safe enough to entrust their lives to any particular one, although attracted to some more than to others. To escape from Worldly troubles, to assuage the disappointment of frustrated hopes, Christians offer a way. The smugly complacent, the thoughtless surface-types, or those always immersed in pettinesses and trivialities will have no awareness of a higher need. However, the others, relatively a few, will find it gnawing at their hearts and tensing their minds. The very condition which is so satisfactory to the larder group brings misery to the smaller one. No longer is one content to be a straw swept along by the river of circumstance. Those who are tired of the falsities and inanities accepted by so many, who want to come to a true life, must come to the quest. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Those who seek a larger meaning to life cannot live like the less affluent for bodily needs alone, or like the professional for bodily and cultural needs alone. Their feeling is still the profounder: a peace and harmony, an understanding and strength. People come to this quest seeking something beyond the misery, wretchedness, and cruelty of this chaotic World, something of light, warmth, kindness, and peace. The need to insulate ourselves privately from the shocks of contemporary living, is partly met my Christianity. There are those who come to this quest simply because they are disillusioned with the World. Wearied with the self-seeking disputations of political schemers, repelled by the heartless treatment of non-followers by political extremists, they turn away and look elsewhere for truth, honesty, goodness. We seek truth for various reasons. One is because it possesses a certitude that gives us anchorage and rest. The free mortal is one who wills without arbitrary self-will. One believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of one. One must sacrifice one’s puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to one’s grand will, which quits defined for destined being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
As freedom and destiny, so arbitrary self-will and fate belong together. However, freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning. Metaphorically, freedom in its essence is the acceptance of the chains which suit you and for which you are suited, and of the barness in which you pull towards an end chosen and valued by yourself, and not imposed. It is not, and never can be, the absence of restrictions, obligations or law and of duty. That direct relationships involve some action on what confronts us becomes clear in one of three examples. The essential deep of art determines the process where by the form becomes a work. That which confronts me is fulfilled through the encounter through which it enters into the World of things in order to remain incessantly effective, incessantly It—but also infinitely able to become again a You, enchanting and inspiring. It becomes incarnate: out of the flood of spaceless and timeless presence it rises to the shore of continued existence. Less clear is the element of action in the relation to human You. The essential act that here establishes directness is usually understood as a feeling, and thus misunderstood. Feelings accompany the Christian spirit and spiritual fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Jesus Christ’s feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one has; love occurs. Feelings dwell in mortals, but mortals dwell in one’s love. This is no metaphor but actuality; love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely it content or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with one’s being, does not know love, even if one should ascribe to it the feelings that one lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, mortals emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the cleaver and the foolish, the beautiful and the unattractive, one after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated, emerging into a unique confrontation. Exclusiveness comes into being miraculously again and again—and now one can act, help, heal, educate, raise, redeem. Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling—the equality of all lovers, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure whose life is circumscribed by the life of one beloved human being to him that is nailed his life long to the cross of the World, capable of what is immense and bold enough to risk it: to love mortals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Let the meaning of action in the third example, that of the creature and its contemplation, remain mysterious. Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the Universe, and it will dawn on you what this waiting, peering, stretching of the neck of the creature means. Every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you, and no matter which one you approach you always reach Being. Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us. When they are touched by the sacred basic word, the wicked become a revelation. How are we educated by children, by animals! Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity. You speak of love as if it were the only relationship between mortals; but are you even justified in choosing it as an example, seeing that there is also hatred? As long as love is blind—that is, as long as it does not see a whole being—it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being. Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in the domination of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to say You. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
It does happen to mortals that a human being confronts them and they are unable to address one with the basic word that always involves an affirmation of the being one addresses, and then they have to reject either the other person or themselves: when entering-into-relationship comes to this barrier, it recognizes its own relativity which disappears only when this barrier is removed. Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love and hate. This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our World. However exclusively present it may have been in the direct relationship—as soon as the relationship has run its course or is permeated by means, the You becomes an object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its measure and boundary. The actualization of the work involves a loss of actuality. Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable—the point at which manifold systems of laws intersect. And even love cannot persist in direct relation; it endures, but only in the alternation of actuality and latency. The human being who but now was unique and devoid of qualities, not at hand but only present, not experienceable, only touchable, has again become a He or She, an aggregate of qualities, a quantum with no shape. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Now I can again abstract from one the color of one’s hair, of one’s speech, of one’s graciousness; but as long as I can do that one is my You no longer and not yet again. Every You in the World is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of objects: every thing in the World can—either before or after it becomes a thing—appear to some I as its You. However, the language of objects catches only one corner of actual life. The It is the chrysalis, the You the You the butterfly. Only it is not always as if these states took turns so neatly; often it is an intricately entangled series of events that is tortuously dual. What is the relationship between freedom and determinism? Both of them operate in our day-to-day lives. If we refused to accept either freedom or determinism, we would diminish our possibilities for living. Without determinism and the predictability of plane schedules that goes with it, for example, our lives would be lost in anarchy. However, without freedom and the exuberance that goes with it, without poetry and flights of imagination that freedom entails, we would be swallowed up in apathy. I read everything on the topic I could find, and I pondered the question at length; but evermore, I came out by the same door I went in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
One morning, having gotten up early to go to my study, I walked out to get the morning newspaper, which is thrown on the curb in front of our house. When I was about fifteen steps from the house, in this relaxed, preworking mood, there suddenly came into my mind—so clearly that it seemed like someone speaking out loud—these sentences: Freedom and determinism give birth to each other. Every advance in freedom gives birth to a new freedom. Freedom is a circle within a larger circle of determinism, which is, in turn, surrounded by a larger circle of freedom. And so on ad infinitum. Immediately there crowded also into my mind the demonstrations for this hypothesis. Take Dr. Freud and his description of the unconscious. In his deterministic theory of the mind, he demonstrated that our needs are determined by unconscious childhood experiences and that our so-called rational values are really not rational, but are compensations for their opposites in our unconscious, irrational urges. Dr. Freud seems to be taking our freedom away. However, soon we began to see that the real effect of Dr. Freud’s determinism was to increase the breadth and depth of the human mind. One was, in our present terms, simply clarifying one aspect of destiny. For hereafter the mind would include not only the conscious, the unconscious, and, with an assist from Dr. Jung, the collective unconscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Lo and behold, the determinism in Dr. Freud’s theory actually gave us far-reaching possibilities for freedom in self-development, freedom in directing our minds, and freedom in enjoying the ecstatic possibilities of intellectual exploration. Another illustration was Dr. Darwin and the determinism to make us all into a bunch of monkeys? However, after the anger had cooled, we began to see that Darwin’s new theory, deterministic as it was, actually gave us a new intellectual freedom for understanding our past and new freedom in possibilities, especially in the twentieth century, for controlling and directing our evolution. All this ran through my mind in a few seconds. Immediately after that flood of idea, I picked up the newspaper and started back toward the house. However, in the few moments it took to retrace my steps, I became acutely aware of a fragment of poetry running through my mind: “Other friends have flown before—on the morrow one will leave me.” I had no idea where this intrusive and surprising couplet came from, and at that moment I had not the slightest hint as to what it meant. However, I became aware that I was instantaneously filled with anxiety. My frightened mind was now totally occupied by thoughts completely contrary to my exhilaration of minutes before. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
I began to recognize an old shadow-companion, an enemy-friend who always put in his leering appearance at just such moments. The context surrounding this verse in my mind indicated that it expressed the anxiety projected by this uninvited and obtrusive guest who spoke so stridently I could not help but listen. It was as though my enemy-friend was saying, “Come off it. Forget these new ideas you have gotten, which you fondly imagine were original. People have known these things for centuries. Forget it all and go in and enjoy your breakfast.” Now very anxious but exhilarated, I hurried into the house not to eat my breakfast, but to scribble down these ideas before they should be lost in the confusion that anxiety creates. Later on in the morning, I recalled where the couplet came from. It was the last two lines of a stanza in Poe’s The Raven. As every schoolboy knows (although later we may have forgotten) the scene of the poem in Poe’s room late at night. Oppressed with feelings of loneliness and alienation, and possibly under the influence of medication, Poe carries on a conversation with this raven who flew into his room and perched on his window sill. Poe gradually begins to feel an affection for this unusual bird, and he fears, in the couplet mentioned, that the bird will desert him—“On the morrow he will leave me.” However, the raven answers this one word, as he does at the conclusion of half of the stanzas in the poem: “Nevermore.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Being a psychoanalyst, I could not resist pondering the significance of the word “nevermore.” Could it mean “nevermore” will we escape from the human paradox? That is, when we gain enough freedom to get new insights, new visions, will we be attacked by the anxiety that accompanies freedom like a shadow? We may black off our new thoughts by apathy or by strict and rigid doctrines, hanging on to the tried and true ideas that never upset anyone. Yet whatever form of denial we choose, this “nevermore” says that we never will be completely free from this human paradox: that with the freedom presupposed in every new idea, there comes the equivalent anxiety to plague us. This is the curse and the blessing of being human—that we are free but destined at the same moment. However, at the same time this destiny, of which this black bird was a part, is saying something helpful: that its presence, as Poe experienced it, will “nevermore” desert us. Long before the Christian era people spoke of the divine providence at work behind the driving forces of life and history. And in Christianity the words of Jesus about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and one’s command not to be anxious about tomorrow, have strengthened the faith in providence. It become the most common belief of Christian people. It gave them courage in danger, consolation in sorrow, hope among ruins. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
However, more and more this faith lost is depth. It became a matter-of-course and was deprived of the overwhelming, surprising and triumphant character it has in the words of Paul. When the German soldiers went into the First World War most of them shared the popular belief in a nice God was would make everything work out for the best. Actually, everything worked out for the worst, for the nation and for almost everyone in it. In the trenches of the war, the popular belief in personal providence was gradually broken and in the fifth year of war nothing was left. During the second World War similar developments took place in this country. In the political tensions and fears of the last decade the belief in historical providence also broke down. The confidence, shared by large groups in this country, that in history everything will eventually turn out for the best, has almost disappeared. Today not much of it is left. Neither the personal nor the historical belief in providence had depth or a real foundation. These beliefs were products of wishful thinking and not of faith. Faith in providence is not a part of the Christian faith—a part which is easier to grasp than the other parts. It is not the case, as an old country parson once told me, that people firmly believe in divine providence, but that the higher contents of the Christian faith, sin and salvation, Christ and the Church, are strange to them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
If this is so, then the meaning of providence must also be strange to them and their belief in it is due to break down as such beliefs have in the storms of our century. Faith in providence is faith altogether. It is the courage to say yes to one’s own life and life in general, in spite of the driving forces of fate, in spite of the insecurities of daily existence, in spite of the catastrophes of existence. It is of such courage that Paul speaks in our text. However, first he speaks of the powers which try to make this courage impossible. What do these powers do? They separate us from the love of God. This sentence is surprising. We would point to the dangers of pain and death which threaten our life day by day. Paul is certainly not unaware of them. He enumerates them as tribulation of distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or the sword. However, he feels himself to be a conqueror of them all. And then he starts again and names the powers which threaten to separate us from the love of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
There is something mysterious about these powers. They do not have evil names like those which Paul has previously listed; most of them have glorious names—Angels, principalities, life, and height. Why are they the ones which are most threatening? It is because they are always at work in every moment of our lives and because they have a double face. They are the powers which rule the World and they rule it for good and for evil. They grasp us by the good they bring and they destroy us by the evil they contain. This is the reason that they are more dangerous than the obvious evils. This is the reason that the triumph over them is the ultimate test which proves that Jesus is the Christ, the bringer of the new state of things. There are billions of forms and of creatures in the Universe spread through space. They appear and vanish, they come and go, create and pass away, grow and decay, act and interact. This has been going on for immense periods of time; but in the thoughtful mortal’s mind there must arise the question, “To what end was is and shall be all this?” If mental restlessness, a discount with ignorance, with the recurring trivialities of life which does not offer any higher meaning, put one on the Quest, one may find oneself suffering from mental loneliness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
There Other Two Persons Seemed a Million Miles Away—Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand and Eternity in an Hour
The air so emotionally frigid that when going to be at night, there was a feeling that no other person was in the house. I never in a thousand years would have imagined that would come out. Often times in human beings there is an early attachment of imprinting behavior, where people seem to follow their attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made stronger by punishment or other difficulties put in their path. Some people spend a lifetime looking for someone to make up for their losses, to bring them justice for their less than pleasant childhoods or adult life. They go through life lonely, yearning for a love that will fill the large area of emptiness in their hearts. However, the struggles these individuals are engaged in is bound to be self-defeating. The first and fundamental challenge is to confront one’s fate as it is, reconcile one’s self to the fact that one did receive a bad deal, know that justice is irrelevant, no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. An individual only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of one’s life knocking one’s head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some people hang on to the past as a way of hanging on to someone they cared deeply about. It is an expression of the hope that someday this coveted individual will reward one, someday one will find the Holy Grail. Now one will get the original care one was missing; now one will get that restored! However, there is no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. Yet, that is just the way it is. The lost idol image, the lost change, the great emptiness within one—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as the ultimate freedom is a command over one’s own attitude. However, you cannot change the experiences themselves. If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for pie in the sky by and by and by you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You do not let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom. However, is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The struggle to come to terms with acrimonious relationships and lifestyles has much to do with the emergence of creativity. For example, a man who had an unpleasant childhood ended up developing talents which led to his high status in the World of architecture. Because he had such a disturbed family life, that the creativity was compensation for such an early trauma. We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that some people have been unfortunate and never have been able to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth that it is best to take life easily, as many may. They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels. This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood or adulthood had been documented in many cases. Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits generation of possibilities is the beginning of a creative product. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous situations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievements, many after having experienced the most deplorable traumatic childhoods. The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any well-adjusted syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J.S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The well-adjusted person rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood allows the creative capacity to be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, house, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If one can accept the deprivation of the care one rightfully expected, if one can engage this loneness face to face, one will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than one ever could have achieved otherwise. If one can accept this aspect of one’s destiny, the fates will work rather than against one. In this way one lives with the Universe rater than against it. One must learn to engage and accept these cruel things in one’s background. It is, therefore, inevitable that the questions “Is there a need for self-control” arises when a way of life is being espoused that encourages freedom of thought and action. And it is vital that no glib, easy answer be given, for it is an important question. Situations do exist where it can be said without equivocation “Yes, do exercise self-control.” Wen, for example, individuals have the desire to destroy the life or property of others or when they have the urge to take their own lives or act in obviously self-destructive ways, it is important that they control these impulses. Society has found it necessary and desirable, when it has the opportunity, to impose control on such persons by limiting their freedom by restraining them. One of the most painful tragedies in American life today is the suicides that occur among high school and college students—frequently those of great promise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It could be said those planning to end their own lives to please, please, hold on! Life may seem painful and meaningless. Perhaps you feel suddenly and terribly disillusioned. However, at least bear with the struggles and give yourselves the perspective of a few more years before you make such an irrevocable decision. It is not enough simply to develop self-control, even though we may need to use it to curb destructive impulses. The ultimately satisfying answer is to deal effectively with problems that underlie our destructive impulses so that we can move beyond the need for self-control. The basic problem is self-hate, for self-destructiveness and destructiveness directed toward others go hand and hand. The nation, for example, that sets out to destroy other nations is bent on a self-destructive course. The personal who assaults another person and follows one’s impulses is not benefiting one’s self. And, of course, one’s self-hate is evident in the obvious lack of confidence on one’s ability to relate to individuals in other ways that would be more pleasant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
So let us be clear about one thing. The violent or destructive acts we are so often afraid we will do if we do not control ourselves are not the result of true freedom or spontaneity. The murderer is not free. One is an enslaved, tormented person who is driven by pent-up feelings of self-hate that have been projected outward onto other individuals or onto society at large. The superheated steam of this hatred builds up in one’s internal pressure cooker until whatever self-control one possesses is bypassed in an explosion of violence. To exhort such a person to control one’s self may be a necessary stop-gap measure, although it is likely to be futile. Any thorough-going help must deal with the mortal’s self-hate. Most of us may feel some impulses within ourselves to be destructive to others or to ourselves, which we sense the seen to curb by self-control. Often the inner pressure is not too great and we can be successful in this control if we choose to go that route, but the more such self-control we need to impose on ourselves the less able we will be to be carefree and spontaneous. And spontaneity is a deliciously desirable way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we can discover why we feel destructive and through this exploration reduce the self-hate to the point where we have relatively little need for self-control, it will be a far more freeing experience. A professional therapist can often be very helpful here, for one can provide a relatively secure environment where hatreds (both toward the self and others) can be expressed and explored with a minimum of danger. Often in therapy people discover that they are not nearly as dangerous to themselves or others as the feared. They find they had been so frightened of freedom that they had imagined themselves far more potentially harmful than they were as a way of keeping themselves rigidly controlled. However, some people like to deceive themselves. To be rejected makes a better excuse—to tell everyone how misunderstood they are, and how they triumphed over great odds. The misunderstood genius, nobody to help them, and so on. We all live in the old state of things. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. We have known ourselves in our old being, and we shall ask ourselves in this hour whether we also have experiences something of a New Being in ourselves. The union with God is when the New Reality is present. God is the ultimate truth and demands complete devotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is important to experience the birth in consciousness of a new—though old—part of the self. One may consider it a dawning of awareness of new possibilities which have in effect been there all the time. This is a giant step toward personal freedom. This New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called Christ. And it is actually the beginning of accepting acceptance, the uniting of one’s self with that early self that one had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life was not happy but threatening. Although this does not alter the original lack of basic trust, it does surmount it in the literal meaning of that term. We hear about the psychology of anger and how it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that their anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. However, it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger. In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to get even with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This transformation of anger into resentment is the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings. Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is immature resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours. I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resentment. I am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living. However, people who are romantically involved with others that do not share their values will find there is a conflict of two different value systems, and it will feel like a red hot poker being shoved into your heart. Some people take their issues they have with their absentee parents out on their partner or a family member of the same gender as the parent they have an issue with. They take revenge by punishing innocent people as a whole. The individual being targeted has to admit one’s own cruelty—cruelty to one’s self most of all for allowing someone like that to be in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do not cover up what you really feel and become deceitful just to survive. Do not surrender your freedom. Many people always try to foresee that the other person’s reaction will be before they speak. These types of individual hide behind such laudable words as responsibility, dutiful, noble member of society, and so on. However, one must hate these roles they play with people who are taking advantage of them. Occasionally being honest with people and venting your anger will give you partial freedom. At least one starts to know one can say what one feels. However, it may still be a freedom within a jail. There is the lacking surge of anger that leads to a changing of one’s life, the willingness to cut loose all the barges one is pulling, to throw aside all one’s luggage and one’s overscrupulous cares. It is not a good idea to always prefer to be hurt rather than to take care of yourself even if it hurts someone else. Another vital question remains to be discussed in regard to living spontaneously. Can we be deeply involved in a love relationship and still be free to be spontaneous? A great many people act as though love and spontaneity are incompatible. There are two frequent feelings that contribute to this reaction that love and freedom cannot coexist. And, of course, they help to make love that much more frightening to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One of these feelings has to do with the idea that the revealing of ourselves, which intimacy involves, gives the other person power over us, thereby limiting our freedom to do what we want to do. Have you noticed that when you talk to people sometimes it is like you have an invisible wall between your eyes and theirs—a wall that has never been absent in all the time you have know them? Well, some of us are always on guard. There is the feeling that one can never let anyone see one completely—know all about who we are. That is because it would give the other person too many strings on one. It would allow one to become their puppet. Many develop these defenses of withdrawing into one’s self and permitting others to see as few of one’s real feelings as possible as a way of avoiding manipulation by them. This is because some feel if one allows others to really know one, one will be helpless to avoid being manipulated. The other feeling that leads us to shy away from love because it appears to threaten our freedom is probably even more common. This is the idea that love is inescapably tied up with obligation and responsibility. Among other ways in which this duty theme operates is the idea that if we really love another we will cease doing what we want to do and concentrate on pleasing the one we love. Such feelings often strike a death blow to the experience and expression of love. Men and women talk about their lack of freedom to do what they would like to do because of the necessity of providing adequately for their families. So work becomes noxious, tolerated duty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We also hear could saying their partner would not like it if they did this or that and that they would like to go out, but the children have to come first, you know. So all of life become hedged about with responsibilities and the necessity of pleasing others brought about by love. And virtually everything in life, from daily work, fidelity, pleasures of the flesh, and second honeymoons to family picnics, walking in the park, and holding hands in the movie, becomes a dutiful and essentially joyless act that we do in hope that spouse and children will be pleased. When approached this way, it is no wonder that love seems like slavery and many splendored things! When so many people view love this way, it is not surprising that a playboy (and playgirl) philosophy would develop in our culture in which physical intimacy without emotional intimacy would become very attractive to us as a way of life. The essential message of the philosophy seems to be, “As long as I can remain indifferent to my pleasures of the flesh partners I can retain my freedom and individuality. Once I begin to allow myself to care for someone, I have had it! I am on my way to becoming a slave.” The joker in this deck is that the moment we embrace this philosophy we have walked out on the freedom to have the most deeply satisfying fun of all—a love relationship freely experienced and expressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The basic problem underlying our feeling that love and freedom are incompatible is our old nemesis, self-hate. If we act freely and do what we want to do, we assume, and often we have been taught to assume, that we will destroy relationships that are important to us. However, this involves a colossal distrust of ourselves. We are, in effect, saying to ourselves, “If you do not watch yourself carefully, you are such a miserable creature and so self-destructive that you will alienate everyone you care for and end up all alone.” The reality is that one of the quickest ways of alienating another person is to put every effort into pleasing them. When we try to put their wishes foremost, we are likely to become a nonentity in their eyes. It is not particularly pleasing to attempt to relate to a person who has no apparent desires of one’s own, who always bends to accommodate our wishes, and who makes an uncomplaining doormat of one’s self for us to walk upon. Furthermore, when we deny our own desires, we quickly come to resent that person for talking advantage of us. That resentment will then likely be expressed in any number of ways. Perhaps we begin to take on martyr posture and express by word or attitude the feelings: “After all I have done for you, the least you could do would be to try to please me once in a while.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is much more straightforward and ultimately satisfying to be what we want to be and do what we want to do. As we learn that we can value ourselves and respond to our own desires, it is unlikely we will act in ways that destroy relationships with those for whom we care—because this will be destructive toward ourselves, too. It is true that more flare-ups of disagreements and anger may occur, because our wishes and those of others will not always agree, but two individuals in this situation are likely to respect each other for being sufficiently independent to express feelings openly, and the way is then clear to battle through to some agreements. If we do find ourselves acting in ways that constantly hurt those we love and destroy our relationships with them it would be advisable to seek professional help, for it would be an indication that we have so much self-hate that we have a need to hurt ourselves, since hurting others is self-destructive. Love God and do as you please. This is a profound idea, but it can be carried an additional step and be developed into a philosophical phrase which is more complete. If you truly value yourself, love yourself and do as you please for you will not hurt people unnecessarily. To do so would be to hurt yourself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This seems too good to be true to most of us. We are so connived that to live spontaneously is to live dangerously toward others and ourselves, but if we can begin, perhaps a little at a time, to be more responsive to our inner selves, we will discover that living spontaneously is exciting and rewarding to ourselves and to those we care for. Once having made that discovery we will not be content with less than an ever-increasingly spontaneous life. Moving toward the right attitude is passionate and infinite longing. The New Being is not something at simply takes the place of the Old Being. However, it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. Yet, not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-condilation, re-union, re-surrection. The message of reconciliation is: Be reconciled to God. Crease to be hostile to the Lord, for God is never hostile to you. The message of reconciliation is not that Good needs to be reconciled. How could he be? Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile the Lord? The sacred is here and now. God is present in all elements. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Beauty Will Save the World is Not a Slip of the Tongue but a Prophecy as Beauty Has the Inspiration to Take Us to New Worlds
Know thy self and you will win a hundred battles. The major difficulty of our effort to live selfless lives is that we become more or less successful at it! As we try to lease those around us, we become more and more fuzzy as individuals. Chameleonlike, we seem to become like those in whose presence we are at the moment. This is a basic problem of those whose lives are centered in giving of themselves. If this is their primary motive in life, they soon have very little self to give. The theologian Paul Tillich once declared, “It is time to end the bad theological usage of jumping with moral indignation on every word in which the syllable ‘self’ appears.” Love of one’s self is not antagonistic to having satisfying relationships. On the contrary, we are free to love others only as we become free to love ourselves. From the standpoint of the emotional factors involved in interpersonal relationships it would be legitimate to rephrase Jesus’ statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” to read, “You cannot love your neighbor until you love yourself.” For hate of one’s self constantly interferes with the whole gamut of our relationships from casual acquaintances to those with whom we desire to be intimate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
For one thing, when we are intolerant of ourselves, we tend to be intolerant of others. An often it is the same trait with which we have difficulty within ourselves that we cannot tolerate others. Jealousy often involves this kind of reaction. One man, Martin, had a brief encounter with another woman near the end of his second year of marriage. He and the other woman engaged in pleasures of the flesh on only one very unsatisfying occasion. He felt very guilty about this experience. During the succeeding years of his marriage Martin was ridden with fear that he might repeat the experience. Whenever he became aware of feelings of wanting to have pleasures of the flesh with another woman other than his wife, Pandora, who was a vivacious, sometimes almost flirtatious, woman. He could not tolerate in her what he found intolerable in himself; and he built a virtual prison for her, and incidentally for himself as well. He became very upset when Pandora showed any warmth or interest in their male friends and alienated a number of other couples with whom they began to associate. He became very suspicious of her, frequently checking up on her activities. He insisted that she spend every moment possible with him. For Pandora, that trapped feeling in marriage was no figure of speech as long as she was willing to tolerate the unreasonable demand brought on by his own self-hate and self-mistrust. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Another way that self-hate interferes with our enjoyment of our associations with others is that it frequently leads to our being overly sensitive and too easily hurt. When we are self-condemning we tend to read condemnation into other people’s words and actions. We may become so touchy that the simplest comments by others seem to have sinister condemning undertones. On the way home from a party, a wife may say in passing, “Gee, the Buber’s have a beautiful home.” And the husband may feel she is condemning him for not being man enough to have sufficient earnings to own such a home. Or he may say, Chelsea Buber sure looked great tonight, did she not?” And her reply, “Yeah, great!” may be loaded with sarcasm because she feels he is really saying, “You look pretty unattractive and sloppy compared to that Chelsea Buber!” This touchiness also often causes us to generalize another’s critical remark in a very limited area and make it into a wholesale condemnation of ourselves. Many a wife has reacted this way to a comment from her husband at the dinner table, such as, “This coq au vin tastes a little flat. I wish you had put more red Burgundy and garlic in it.” Wife at this point may burst into tears, jump up from the table, and shout, “Nothing I do it ever good enough for you. You really have me, right?!” Assuming the husband does not constantly criticize her, it can safely be said that she has read a great deal of self-condemnation into his remark. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
The human creature is the most fortunate of all living creatures, because one alone has the potential capacity and opportunity to become spiritually aware. Every life in the fleshly body represents and opportunity to obtain spiritual realization because mortals can only discover one’s divinity to the fullest whilst in the waking state. The refusal to reach up towards the higher truth and power leaves problems basically unsolved and questions really unanswered, for the cosmic urge within must assert and reassert itself. When a mortal comes to his or her real senses, one will recognize that one has only one problem: “How can I come into awareness of, and oneness with, my true being?” For it is to lead one to this final question that other questions and problems have staged the road of one’s whole life. This answered, the way to answer all the other ones which beset one, be they physical or financial, intellectual or familiar, will open up. Hence Jesus’ statements: “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and “To one that hath [enlightenment] shall be given [what one personally needs].” Because we have lost our way, these truths are once again as fresh and significant and important as if they had never been known to humanity. Beauty will save the World. What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes: but whom has it saved? #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Nothing else seems able to save us. For no one would be foolish enough to think that the present policies of the two super-nations will do any more than produce a stand-off, each with a revolver as the other’s head. We build more nuclear warheads and the Russians do the same, they even have spy planes looking at military bases in California, and we invent more means of destruction and they do the same, each go around only repeating the stand-off on a more dangerous scale. Will we still be at the mercy of chance: an accidental release of some missile, or an extremist group setting off an atom bomb in New York, and the holocaust will be upon us? Power, not beauty, seems to govern nations. What the World can no longer endure in the nuclear age is its separation into many different nations, each with its own power needs; and the fact that the United States seems to be the most powerful is due largely to the fact that destiny gave us a particularly lush portion of this globe. However, or powerful position should not numb our realization that we will not be in this position forever. As Athens, at the height of its power and its great, unrivaled culture, as when Aeschylus and Sophocles were still alive, when Pericles was its leader, when Phidias had just finished the Parthenon, when Plato was young and Socrates gathered around him this unequaled group of young philosophers eternalized in Plato’s Dialogues—at its time of glory and power, Athens committed suicide by fighting the Peloponnesian War. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Sparta and the other city-states joined in this useless and wanton suicide. They were all so exhausted by the year 400 B.C. that the days of the city-state were numbered. We in our twenty-first century World face almost exactly the same challenge. Can we transcend that nation-state? Can we extend our love for country to other countries and the World? Destiny clearly cries out with the challenge to us to extend our imaginations, our economy and our way of thinking, to relate us to the whole planet rather than our own one piece of it. So long as we view our freedom as dependent upon our remaining the most powerful and richest nation on Earth, we shall have placed ourselves again under the sword of Damocles. We shall not be freed from this threat until we confirm a freedom for humanity. Power brings with it responsibility. Our power in America has brought more responsibility in the remarks that we are the special children of God, we carry his banners, God blesses America, he has a destiny for us different from that for other nations. God we thank thee the we are not as other people. Beauty and power. Were there every two such strange antagonists They have almost always been set in opposition to each other, such as Beauty and the Beast. How can we change this? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
In mythology Beauty is pictured as the radiant but weak maiden, requiring the knight to rescue her from the dark and unattractive Power, often pictured as a dragon. How can we be saved by beauty—this gentle but timeless quality, this eternal but ephemeral experience? I recall as a young boy when at the Villa Floridiana Porza, Ticino, 6948 Switzerland in Winter a snowflake lighted on my black mitten, and just as I was overwhelmed with winder at its marvelously intricate design, it melted away and left only a wet spot as a token that it was there an instant ago. How can we talk of such a gentle quality saving the World? Art and the beauty as expressed, are on a different level from the mundane characteristics of our World. There is, however, something special in the essence of beauty, a special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A work of art contains its verification in itself. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up to that very place, and this complete the work of all three? Beauty will save the World—is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy. One thing is certain: a World that does not have a concern for beauty will not be worth saving. Not life is to be valued, but the good life. The noble life is first of all the beautiful life. This is the fundamental importance of beauty and of the art that springs from the love of beauty. The humanities, such as art and music and poetry, exist for one purpose alone: to enhance the quality of human existence. There are riches that are posses at hand in any library, waiting to make life fuller, to make us more vital, to disclose to us the presence of joys in life which have been there all the time but we were blind to them. There is no library worth the name which does not have the mental inspiration to take us, like Columbus, to new Worlds. In poetry, in art, in literature, in music, there is not only the power to tame the savage breast, but to give us the sense of joy and serenity we sorely need. There is music that brings us this with no need for economic riches. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If our lives our boring, do we need to be awakened to adventure and the sense of passion? Homer brings us this, as does the poetry in many songs of Aaliyah Haughton and the Beatles. Taste is a particular approach, but it still can have its value; there is no need to insist that every person experience one’s soul enlivened by the same things. The earlier the age at which a person begins these studies and practices the better for one. To be born into a family where they already prevail, is to have an exceedingly good destiny. But however late in life anyone comes to them, it is never too late. One will have to content with set ways and fixed habits that will need changing, it is true. The mature and the elderly should take to spiritual studies as a duty. They have come to a period of life when they can evaluate its experiences better than the youthful. It is not too late at any period of life, even in one’s golden years, to obtain a firm footing upon the spiritual path and gain its satisfying rewards. In the end we all must turn to the inner Source of all our best human sources, to the Guru of all gurus, to the Overself. Then why not now? Now is the right moment to practice philosophy, to crush the ego, and to think optimistically. The quest, with its ideas and goals, is essential to the awakened mortal. One could not live without it without feeling half-dead, empty and futile. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Let us have done with the fake serenity that comes from the avoidance of tragedy. We do not need to cite the grandeur of classics like Hamlet, but the tragedies which are set in squalor, like O’Neill’s The Ice Man Cometh, also show us the nobility of the human being. We need not insist that every garden be as beautiful as the Keukenhof, Lisse, Netherlands with its 32 hectares and 7 million flowering plants; a meadow of weeds can also be beautiful. There is death as there is life, and let us open ourselves to both. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve; we have an internal, and then our place knows us no more. We affirm life as we affirm death; the two always go together, just as we listen to the discords which play their crucial part in Beethoven’s symphonies. We never have denied that darkness goes with light, or that pain goes with pleasure, and if the truth were known, makes possible the pleasures. We have never denied the ugliness that makes beauty possible and necessary, for it is in juxtaposition with ugliness that we are able to recognize beauty. We can note with pleasure that museums and galleries are becoming increasingly attended these day, and particularly that young people attend more and more exhibitions of art. More people go to galleries than attend football games; and such statistics, absurd on one level, on another tell us that the acquaintanceship with art seems at least to be growing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The galleries and museums give us the presence of adventure and solace, which we, citizens of a technological age, sorely need. Or we can carry with us in memory one picture to give us cheer and purpose, says Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Here the faces of Venus and the cherubic spirits of springtime seem woven together by the gossamer breeze, and we are carried away to an Olympus where the gods are not mocked but for once are humble and recognize one of their own. We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a mortal rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes one a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about one. One’s voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all great works of art or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that one is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation.Lord. Lord, whoever I am, whatever I am, whatever I am meant to be, I am part of this, this World, that is all of a flowing wonder–like this music. And you are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us. This music is your song. This is your house. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the Heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the Sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us—such is the creative and ruling principle of the Universe—such is the fulness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes mortals a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce mortals to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away, except in the case of those who are sufficiently prepared. As God has crated our independence so that we should have the possibility of renouncing it out of love, we should for the same reason wish to preserve the independence of our fellows. One who is perfectly obedient sets an infinite price upon the faculty of free choice in all mortals. In the same way there is no contradiction between the love of the beauty of the World and compassion. Such love does not prevent us from suffering on our own account when we are in affliction. Neither does it prevent us from suffering because other are afflicted. It is on another plane from suffering. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Life, it Seems, is but a Dream, and Even Dreams are Dream
Be assured of my love, and the love of those here. The World as it is, the reality principle, adamantine sanity, these reassuringly solid phrases may furnish just the firm ground one needs to embark on a consideration of the role of the unconscious, that realm of chaos and shadows, in creative activity. To see things as they are when they are not as we would like them to be is the sternest task to which as rational beings we are called. In the service of this stern necessity, conscious thought and reflection, discrimination, memory, judgment, logic, and experiment. To be able to doubt methodically while suspending judgment, to explore alternative explanations in the light of certain canons of evidence and criticism, is the essence of scientific attitude. Pristine common sense is the everyday form of this attitude; the physical sciences and mathematics are its most rigorous and pure embodiment. It is no news that many scientists, and especially the very best, are odd people. As we have suggested elsewhere, they are in the very forefront of the direction in which evolution is taking us, and as such they exemplify in their works such qualities as dryness of judgment, meticulous attention to details, distinctions and small differences, radical questioning of common assumptions, a distrust of the unfortified senses, and a preference for the abstract and the qualitative, and the immediately natural. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We are all children of Adam, however, if I may so show my hand, and even the most scientific of scientists usually has a streak of irrationality a yard wide up one’s back, which makes one’s oddness complete. The distinguished historian of science, A.C. Crombie, has given us in his monumental presentation of the history of the science revolution literally hundreds of accounts of how superstitions, whims, bizarre images or convictions lead finally to scientific advances and important break-throughs. The point of all this is that Necessity may be as stern as she wishes, and when we are called to the task we must go, but we rarely go quietly. There is something in the human mind that does not like things as they are, something that will make up its own little World in whatever way seems to that individual piece of mind to be an improvement. All things transitory but as symbols are sent; Earth’s insufficiency here grows to event. The symbol presents a reality transcended. It is the medium trough which superior vision of reality is attained; it amplifies the less affluent real World through the act of imagination. Life, it seems, is but a dream, and even dream are dreams. Players and painted stage took all my love and not the things that they were emblems of. Symbols, dreams, play, light-heartedness—these are the stuff of a part of mind that gives little service to syllogism, evidence, judgment, classification, prediction, law, and stern necessity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
However, stern necessity calls: let us consider the way in which unconscious and preconscious forces may influence the mental apparatus, which might just as well be called the mind, both topographically and dynamically. The topography does not, of course, have anything to do with the central nervous system, but is concerned solely with hypothetical spatial arrangements in formal theoretical system, irrespective of their possible situation or neurological correlates in the body. The mental apparatus, then, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the process constituting our mental activity; every mental act begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not. Between the unconscious and the preconscious there occurs a kind of testing process, which is called the censorship. The mental act in the unconscious has two alternative fates open to it: upon being scrutinized by censorship it may be rejected, not allowed to pass into the second phase, in which event is said to be repressed and must remain unconscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If, however, it passes this scrutiny it enters upon the second phase, the preconscious, and becomes capable of entering consciousness. The rigorous censorship exercises its office at the point of transition from the unconscious to the preconscious. Once in the preconscious, the thought my now, without any special resistance and given certain conditions, become the object of consciousness. The core of the unconscious consists of instinct-presentations having the sole aim of discharging the energy with which they are invested. In other words, they are the mental representation of impulses, or drives, or physiologically-based excitations which seek discharge. A tension or imbalance exists, and the tendency of the organism is to regain balance and stability by a discharge of energy. These ideational representations of drives that—because of the nature of the external World as well as of the organization of consciousness—are denied discharge become related to one another by laws quite different from those that govern logical thought. For one thing, they are exempt from mutual contradiction; quite opposite feelings about the same object may exist simultaneously in the unconscious. Time, place, and custom have no effect upon them. Moreover, they are continually seeking short-cuts to discharges of their energy, and this they achieve by such mechanism as displacement, condensation, substitution, and symbolization. These mechanisms are exhibited most clearly in dreams. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Several persons whom the dreamer knows in one’s waking state may be condensed into a single dream personage; one person may be substituted for another, and feelings displaced from the original object of them to another object; situations that trouble the dreamer in one’s waking life may undergo a symbolic transformation which serves to make them almost unrecognizable. Our studies of the psychology of literary creation persuade us that ideas from the unconscious play a large part in furnishing the material out of which the work of art is made. Art differs from dreams and neurosis, however, in that its elaboration requires conscious effort, criticism, judgment, and a sense of form that is quite alien to the chaos of the unconscious. What appears to happen is this: the censorship momentarily suspends its function and an unconscious idea passes into the preconscious. This idea at first seems vague and appears to have no relationship to other conscious content. Often it finds its first fleeting representation simply as a momentary visual or verbal image. In then somehow begins to pull along with it various associated ideas, feelings, and symbols from the unconscious, which then enter into relationship to one another in the preconscious, as well as with other ideas already in the preconscious. The complex of ideas thus elaborated may finally come to conscious expression almost fully formed, or, more commonly, they come in fragments, and it is the task of conscious thought to relate them to one another. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The real work, of course, comes in making out of this material a communication, for instance, giving it a social reality, which involves discrimination, selection, technique, purpose, and understanding both of the material itself and of an audience of at least one other person who can appreciate it. Most fictions, including many that are published in book form, are not works of art and do not possess social reality in the sense of which I have spoke of it. The World of the psychotic, and to a lesser degree of the neurotic, is a private World, and the creator of it is bond to feel alone in it. Probably the feeling of isolation is the most poignant aspect of neurotic suffering, rather than the effects that we designate as symptoms. It is obvious to everybody that we are in a process of cultural self-destruction. What is left is also not secure any more. It still stands because it was not exposed to the destructive pressure to which the rest has already succumbed. However, it too is built on gravel. The next landslide can take it along. The cultural capacity of modern mortals is diminished because the circumstances which surround them diminish them and damage them physically. The industrial being is unfree, unconcentrated, incomplete, and in danger of losing their humanity because society with its developed organization exercises a hitherto unknow power over mortals, mortal’s dependency on it has grown to a degree that one almost has ceased to live a mental existence of one’s own. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Thus we have entered a new Middle Ages. By a general act of will freedom of thought has been put out of function, because many give up thinking as free individuals, and are guided by the collective to which they belong. With the sacrifice of independence of thought we have—and how could it be otherwise—lost faith in truth. Our intellectual-emotional life is disorganized. The overorganization of public affairs culminates in the organization of thoughtlessness. The industrial society is characterized not only by a lack of freedom but also by overeffort. For two or three centuries many individuals have lived only as working begins and not as human beings. The human substance is stunted and in the upbringing of children by such stunted parents, an essential factor for their human development is lacking. The overoccupation the adult person succumbs to leads more and more to the need for superficial distraction. Absolute passivity, diverting attention from and forgetting of oneself are a physical need for modern humans. As a result, people need to make the most of the resources, make them last longer, and focus on the spiritual so they have more time to develop and grown. However, mortals are not to retire into an atmosphere of spiritual egotism, remote from the affairs of the World, but to lead an active life in which one tired to contribute to the spiritual perfection of society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
If among modern individuals there are so few whose human and ethical sentiments are intact, not the least reason is the fact that they sacrifice constantly their personal morality on the altar of the fatherland, instead of being in constant living interchange with the collective and giving it the power which drives the collective to its perfection. The present cultural and social structure drives toward a catastrophe, from which only a new Renaissance, much greater than the old one, will arise; we must renew ourselves in a new belief and attitude, unless we want to perish. Essential in this Renaissance will be the principle of activity, which rational thinking gives into our hands, the only rational and pragmatic principle of historical development produced by mortals. If we decide to become thinking human beings, I have confidence in my faith that this revolution will occur. We must have a reverence for life. As the basis of ethics, people have generally ignored that the decay of human society and the World is being brought about through the practice of industrialized life; at the beginning of this century we already saw the weakness and dependency of the people, the destructive effect of obsessional work, the need for spiritual development and less consumption. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
The necessity for a Renaissance of collective life will be organized by the spirit of solidarity and reverence for life. If one takes the World as it is, it is impossible to endow it with meaning in which the aims and goals of mortals and of humankind make sense. The only meaningful way of life is activity in the World; not activity in general but the activity of giving and caring for fellow creatures. There must be a demand for giving up the having orientation, and for more of a social activity in the spirit of care and human solidarity. A radical inner human change is the only alternative to economic catastrophe. There must be a New World consciousness, a new ethic in the use of material resources, a new attitude toward nature, based on harmony rather than on conquest, and a sense of identification with future generations. For the first time in mortal’s life on Earth, they are being asked to refrain from doing what one can do; they are being asked to restrain their economic and technological advancement, or at least to direct it differently from before; humans are being asked by all future generations of the Earth to share their good fortune with the unfortunate—not in a spirit of charity but in a spirit of necessity. Humans are being asked to concentrate now on the organic growth of the total World system. Can mortals, in a good conscience, say no? Without these fundamental human changes, Homo sapiens are as good as doomed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It is to be hoped that the Club of Rome comes to grips with the problem of those social and political changes that are the preconditions for attaining the general goals. It is time for an ethical World change, not as a consequence of ethical beliefs but as the rational consequence of economic analysis. Material increase of consumption does not necessarily mean increase in well-being; a characterological and spiritual change must go together wit the necessary social changes; unless we stop wasting our natural resources and destroying the ecological conditions for human survival, catastrophe within a hundred years if foreseeable. Our failures are the result of our success, and our techniques must be subordinated to our real human needs. Economy as a content of life is a deadly illness because infinite growth does not fit into a finite World. Economy should not be the content of life, and that fact that it cannot be is evident today. If one wants to describe the deadly illness in more detail, one can say that it is similar to an addiction like alcoholism or drug addiction. It does not matter too much whether this addiction appears in a more egotistical or more altruistic form, whether it seeks its satisfaction only in a crude materialistic way or also in an artistically, culturally, or scientifically refined way. Poison is poison, even if wrapped in sliver paper. If spiritual culture, the culture of the inner mortal, is neglected, then selfishness remains the dominating power in a mortal and a selfishness fits this orientation better than a system of love for one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Considering present technology and patterns of behavior our planet is grossly overpopulated now. The large absolute number of people and the rate of population growth are major hindrances to solving human problems. We are seeing climate change, not only because it is natural, but because there are more people on the planet. The limits of human capability to produce food by conventional means have very nearly been reached. Problems of supply and distribution already have resulted in roughly half of humanity being undernourished or malnourished. Some 20-30 million people are starving to death annually now. Attempts to increase food production further will tend to accelerate the deterioration of our environment, which will eventually reduce the capacity of the Earth to produce food. It is not clear whether environmental decay has now gone as far as to be essentially irreversible; it is possible that the capacity of the planet to support human life has been permanently impaired. Such technological success as automobiles, pesticides, and inorganic nitrogen fertilizers are major causes of environmental deterioration. There is reason to believe that population growth increases the probability of a lethal Worldwide plague and of a thermonuclear war. Either could provide an undesirable death rate solution to the population problem; each is potentially capable of destroying civilization and even driving Homo sapiens to extinction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
There is no technological panacea for the complex of problems composing the population-food-environment crisis, although technology properly applied in such areas as pollution abatement, communications, and fertility control can provide massive assistance. The basic solutions involve dramatic and rapid changes in human attitudes, especially those relating to reproductive behavior, economic growth, technology, the environment, and conflict resolution. The real problem for people in our day is preparatory to love itself, namely to become able to love. To be capable of giving and receiving mature love is as sound a criterion as we have for the fulfilled personality. However, by that very token it is a goal gained only in proportion to how much one has fulfilled the prior condition of becoming a person in one’s own right. Assuming the premise is right—that only a fundamental change in human character from a preponderance of the having mode to a predominantly being mode of existence can save us from a psychological and economic catastrophe—the question arises: Is large-scale characterological change possible, and if so, how can it be brought about? I suggest that human character can change if these conditions exist: We are suffering and are aware that we are, we recognize the origin of our ill-being, we recognize that there is a way of overcoming our ill-being, and we accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
There needs to be a historical development that will liberate human beings from those socioeconomic and political conditions that make people inhuman—prisoners of things, machines, and their own greed. When patients consult a doctor, it is because they have suffered and they are aware that they have suffered. However, they are not usually aware of what they suffered from. The goal is to help the patient become aware of what causes their ill-being. As a consequence of such knowledge, patients can arrive at the next step: the insight that their ill-being can be cured, provided its causes are done away with. However, I do not believe anything lasting can be achieved by persons who suffer from a general ill-being and form whom a change in character is necessary, unless they change their practice of life in according with the change in character they want to achieve. For instance, one can analyze the dependency of individuals until doomsday, but all the insights gained will accomplish nothing while they stay in the same practical situations they were living in before arriving at these insights. To give an example: a woman whose suffering is rooted in her dependency on her father, even though she has insight into deeper causes of the dependency, will not really change unless she changes her practice of life, for instance separates from her father, does not accept his favors, takes the risk and pain that these practical steps toward independence imply. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Insight separated from practice remains ineffective. Be very careful, because if you should pass over something important through your own fault it would be a pity. This should make one see intellectual honesty in a new light. It is not opposed to faith, but in some people there are obstacles to the faith, impure obstacles, such as prejudices, and habits. One must face the whole question of faith, doctrines and covenants, and the sacraments, this will oblige them to consider them closely and at length with the fullest possible attention, making once see them as thing which they have obligations to discern and perform. And there is a great blessing of another order when one gains friendship by charity, as it will provide one with a source of the most compelling and pure inspiration that is to be found among human things. For nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God, than friendship for the friends of God. Nothing will better enable an individual to measure the breadth of a true friend’s charity than the fact that they bore one for so long and with such gentleness. It may seem like a joke, but that is not the case. A friend may not have the same motives as self, but you will know that their patience can only spring from a supernatural generosity. “Learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God,” reports Alma 37.35. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Life Touches the Remote Mysteries of the Divine Encounter and Reverse Cannot Befall that Fine Prosperity!
In the beauty of the World brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea waves, or on the almost eternal fold of the mountain? We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. We are free only to change the direction of our glance; we cannot walk into Heaven; we cannot rise without being lifted by grace. The vertical is forbidden to us because the World is the province of gravity and dead weight (pasanteur). The whole Universe, as we know it though the senses of the imagination, has been turned over by God to the control of brute mechanism, to necessity and blind force, and that primary physical law by which all things eternally fall. The very act of creation entailed the withdrawal of the Creator from the created, so that the sum total of God and his World and all of its creatures is, of course, in the process of becoming more like God through their own volition. God grace penetrates, like a ray of light, the dark mechanical realm of unlimited mystery. And we love this World, because we can feel God and have virtue. To God, we are like the smile of the beloved through pain, and this makes him want to redeem us and his World. God in his mercy sometimes prevents people from reading the mystics, so that is should be evident to them that they have not invented this absolutely unexpected contact. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I called out to the very most ancient one, “Aaliyah, I have made promises to those I love. Help me to keep them. Lend your most powerful ear to those whom I love. Lend your most powerful ear to me.” Where was she, the tower of ivory? The great ancestor. The one who now and then came to our assistance. I had no clue, because I had never bent my stiff neck to go in search of her. However, I knew that in her centuries of endurance she had acquired powers that surpassed all dreams and fears of mine, and that she could hear me if she chose. Aaliyah, our guardian, our mother, listen to my plea. Hear me, Sweet Aaliyah, wherever you are. Surely you know this World as no one else knows it. Have you spied these tall children? I do not dare to say their names. And then I wrapped myself in comforting phantasms, roaming the winds for my own sake, dissolved now and then in the poetry of love, and envisioning bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where I am the one I coveted could dwell. It was a blessed vision, and it is mine to enjoy. I want to lead us on a wonderous journey that weaves art and clinical insight together to project a pattern for more humane psychotherapy and better mental health. Psychological well-being comes from the act of making, from making art of stone or oils, love or death. The task of becoming human is an artist’s task, and art is thus a birthright shared by us all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Art not only enhances individual lives, it makes authentic social existence possible. If modern art seems unsure of its direction, it is because art is always first to register convulsive changes in culture. A sure index to the future is the way society reacts to its art. That may be why a society in which violence and terrorism are on the increase is actually one in which the ecstasy is actually one in which the ecstasy promised by beauty in art has doubled back on itself in a viciously destructive coil. Art thus reflects a culture’s preferences, predicts its future and provokes it to change. My firm belief is that one paints, as one writes, not out of a theory but out of the vividness of experience. When Lorenzo de’ Medici assumed control of his family in 1469, Florence, Italy was still the cultural center of the Western World. Lorenzo’s predecessors had founded the Platonic Academy of Philosophy, where the artist Sandro Botticelli studied a brand of Neoplatonic thought that transformed the philosophic writings of Plato almost into a religion. According to the Neoplatonists, in the contemplation of beauty, the inherently corrupt soul could transform its love for the physical and material into a purely spiritual love of God. Thus, Botticelli uses mythological themes to transform his pagan imagery into a source of Christian inspiration and love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
His Birth of Venus (circa 1482), the first monumental representation of the goddess in her birthday suit since ancient times, represents innocence itself, a divine beauty free of any hint of the physical and sensual. It was this form of beauty that the soul, aspiring to salvation, was expected to contemplate. For the short period at the outset of the sixteenth century, Florence was again the focal point of artistic activity. The three great artists of the High Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—all lived and worked in the city. There is a surprisingly close parallel between art and psychotherapy, and in my life they both came out of the same source. In each a new form is born not out of ideas but out of the intensity of experiences. Rational thoughts follow to anchor theoretically the truths that already have grasped us a vision. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. Our free will consists in nothing but the ability to turn, or refuse to turn, our eyes toward what God holds up before him. We are looking at what saves us. Here on Earth we must be content to be eternally hungry; indeed, we must always welcome hunger, for it is the sole proof we have of the reality of God, who is the only sustenance that can satisfy us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
In the spring of the second year of college, I realized tat the rules, principles, values by which I used to work and live simply did not suffice anymore. I got so completely fatigued that I had to go to bed for four weeks to get enough energy to continue my teaching. I had learned enough psychology at college to know that these symptoms meant that something was wrong with my whole way of life. I had to find some new goals and purposes for my living and to relinquish my moralistic, somewhat rigid way of way of existence. In the Untied States nowadays I would have gone to a therapist, but back then, I was in a psychologically strong culture where only a few people spoke my language and they did not like to bring excess attention to things that go on in their private lives. What to do? Ascending one hill I found myself suddenly knee deep in a field of wild poppies covering the whole hillside. It was a gorgeous sight: brilliantly crimson and scarlet, the poppies were lovely forms as they bent delicately in one direction and the another. Their perfect movements together seem like people in a ballet, perhaps the “Nutcracker Suite” at Christmas time. I stood there, intoxicated, wholly captivated by this sight. My poppies in their dance were swaying in unison and bowing in the slight breeze, each of them having a miraculous perfection of beauty in itself. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
When the poppies nodded toward me they presented their yellow-black centers, and when they nodded away they then seemed a fiery scarlet. I thought how good it would be to sit among these flowers and draw their forms so that I would never forget them. So I went back on the house and borrowed a pencil and pad and came out to kneel among the poppies to sketch them. They made an imprint on my mind that seems as vivid today as it was then. However, I realized that I had not listened to my inner voice, which had tried to talk to me about beauty. I had been too hard-working, too principled to spend time merely looking at flowers! It seems it had taken a collapse of my whole former way of life for this voice to make itself heard. This inner voice hereafter would always be redolent with the slight perfume that covered the hillside that morning. Thus began my devotion to art and to beauty. Beauty is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection; beauty conducts us into the World of ideas, without however taking us from the World of sense. By beauty the sensuous mortal is brought back to matter and restored to the World of sense. Life touches the mysteries of the Divine Encounter, on the other it is rooted in a World with which we are familiar. To those who consider themselves on the safe side of belief, it is a way to become closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, but it is not an easy faith. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even though many are submerged in materialism, this is still a peaceful and enchanted World. Some unbelievers rather smugly despise the churchgoer for seeking what they consider an easy consolation, but this reveals the secret of one’s own cowardice, as one’s agnosticism may itself only an opiate, a dodge to avoid facing the grace of God’s reality and the grace of his love. I have been wondering lately about the will of God, what it means, and how we can reach the point of conforming ourselves to it completely. In this domain everything that comes about is in accordance with the will of God, without any exception. Here then we must love absolutely everything, as a whole and in each detail, we must fee the reality and presence of God through all external things, without exception, as clearly as our hand feels the substance of paper through the penholder and the nib. The second domain is that which is placed under the rule of the will. It includes the things that are purely natural, close, easily recognized by the intelligence and the imagination, and among which we can make our own choice, arranging them from outside so as to provide means to fixed and finite ends. In this domain we have to carry out, without faltering or delay, everything that appears clearly to be a duty. When any duty does not appear clearly, we have sometimes to follow our inclination, but in a limited degree; for one of the most dangerous forms of sin, or perhaps the most dangerous, consists of introducing what is unlimited into a domain that is essentially finite. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The third domain is that of the things, which, without being under the empire of the will, without being related to natural duties, are yet not entirely independent of us. In this domain we experience the compulsion of God’s pressure, on condition that we deserve to experience it and exactly to the extent that we deserve to do so. God rewards the soul that think of him with attention and love, and he rewards it by exercising a compulsion upon it strictly and mathematically proportionate to this attention and this love. We have to abandon ourselves to the pressure, to run to the exact spot whiter it impels us and not go one step farther, even in the direction of what is good. At the same time we must go on thinking about God with every increasing love and attentiveness, in this way gaining the favor of being impelled ever further and becoming the object of a pressure that possesses itself of an ever-growing proportion of the whole soul, we have attained the state of perfection. However, whatever stage we may have reached, we must do nothing more than we are irresistibly impelled to do, not even in the way of goodness. Our prayers often constitute a mystery in so far as they involve a certain kind of contact with God, a contact that is mysterious but real. It is important for us to have real faith and be true lovers of God because it we are just acting, it is like just as a false diamond is like a real one, so that those who have no spiritual discernment are effectively taken in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
For the matter of that, a social and human participation in the symbols and ceremonies of the sacrament are an excellent and healthy thing in it as it marks a stage of the journey for those who travel that way. For many, it helps put ever more attention and love into their thought of God. If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, most people would still choose to obey God because his ways are righteous. This is felt in moments of attention, love, and prayer. God also teaches us that we have the vocation to move among people of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises. It is because we long to know others so as to love them just as they are. For if we do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom we love, and our love will be unreal. God ways teach us how to form a natural purity of the soul. And although crimes may horrify us, they no longer surprise us. We can feel the possibility of them, and this discernment that teaches us to do things so we are not horrified by things we can possibility prevent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The natural disposition is dangerous and very painful, but like every variety of natural disposition, it can be put to good purpose if one knows how to make the right use of it with the help of grace. It is the sign of a vocation, the vocation to remain in a sense anonymous, ever ready to be mixed into the paste of common humanity. Now at the present time, the state of mortal’s minds is such that there is a more clearly marked barrier, but most people know that we cannot deny Christ or we will be denied before his Father which is in Heaven. I love God, Christ, and the faith as much as it is possible for a human to love them. I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives—apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider saints. I love the people of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the religious liturgy, hymns, architecture, stained glass windows, rites, and ceremonies. I love the Church and I know all saints felt this love. Some believe this type of love constitutes a condition of spiritual progress, but everyone has their own level of progress and we are not to judge what is right for some for the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent. It is my business to think about God. It is for God to think about me. The fate of the World is decided out of time; and it is in this recorded legend that humankind has its sense of true history, the eternal idea of salvation and grace. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
If one defines originality as the ability to respond to stimulus situations bot adaptively and usually, and if one defines intelligence simply as the ability to solve problems, then at the upper level of problem-solving ability the manifestation of intelligence will be also a manifestation of originality. People with a disposition toward integration of diverse stimuli suggests an openness in the more original subject to a variety of phenomena, combined with a strong need to organize those phenomena into some coherent pattern. This might best be described as a resistance to premature closure, combined with a persistent effort to achieve closure in an elegant fashion. In brief, everything that can be perceived must be taken cognizance of before configuration is recognized as possibly final one. Our every experience of Divine Love will come to sustain us at the intersection of body and soul. To contemplate the social is as good a means of purification as retiring from the World. Many people experience the joy and bitterness of Christ’s passion as a real event. This leads many people to give their key to the beyond, in thoughtful prayer, as a way to approach an encounter with God. In a moment of intense physical suffering, when I was forcing myself to feel love, but without desiring to give a name to that love, I felt, without being in any way prepared for it, there was a presence more personal, more certain, more real than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the senses and the imagination. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
While it is believed that common minds have no conception of true courage, this is the error which comes from identifying courage with obviously spectacular acts like the soldier’s charge of Michelangelo’s struggles in completing the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. With our present knowledge of the unconscious working of the mind, we know that struggles requiring courage equal to that of the soldier’s charge take pace in almost anyone’s dreams and deeper conflict in times of difficult decision. To reserve courage for heroes and artists only shows how little one knows of the profundity of almost any alive human being’s inner development. Courage is necessary in every step in a person’s movement from the mass—symbolically the womb—to becoming a person of one’s own right; it is at each step as though one suffers the pangs of one’s own birth. Courage, whether the soldier’s courage in risking death or the child’s in going off to school, means the power to let go of the familiar and the secure. Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for one’s own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of one’s building of oneself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility. “And the Lord said unto me: Thy fathers have also required of me this thing; and it shall be done unto them according to their faith; for their faith was like unto thine,” reports Enos 1. 18. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Thus we are not talking about heroes. Indeed, obvious heroism, such as rashness, is often the product of something quite different from courage: in the last war the hot pilots in the air force who appeared to be very brave in taking risks were often the ones who were unable to overcome their anxiety inwardly and had to compensate for it by courting danger in external rash deeds. Courage must be judged as an inner state; otherwise external actions can be very misleading. It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. This if the term hero is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every mortal. If we could come back to see that life is like a mirror, tending to reflect back to us the images of our own thinking, then we should realize that by changing our thinking we can change the reflections in the mirror. “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul; and all the day long did I cry unto him; yea, and when the night came I did still raise my voice high that it reached the Heavens,” reports Enos 1.4. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Aliveness is Conducive to Joy, as the Wise think about Life—The Past is Such a Curious Creature
We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not image it. Aliveness is conducive to joy. Many people read the word joy as pleasure, but the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, particularly so in reference to the distinction between the being and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the differences, since we live in a World of joyless pleasures. What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in different ways, considering its popular thought, it seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied. Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in having social success, earning more money, winning a lottery; the conventional pleasures of the flesh; eating to one’s heart’s content; winning a race; the state of elation brought about by drinking, trance, elicit substances; the pleasures in satisfying one’s sadism, or one’s passion to alter what is alive. Of course, in order to become rich of famous, individuals must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the sense of birth within. When they have achieved their goal they may be thrilled, intensely satisfied, feel they have reached a peak. However, what peak? Maybe a peak of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or orgiastic state. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, they may have reached this state driven by passions that, though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. However, they are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures. In this respect, modern society is in the same position the Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins. Moses said: “You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things,” reports Deuteronomy 28.47. Joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a peak experience, which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one’s essential human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have not increased. One has made the attempt to break through the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has unified all one’s energies—expect reason and love. One has attempted to become superhuman, without being human. One seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has changed within oneself. As is to be expected, joy must play a central role in those religious and philosophical systems that proclaim being as the goal of life. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin. Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourself. Our human center does not lie in ourselves, but in the authority to which we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own productive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing approval by the authority. We have a leader (secular or spiritual, king/queen or God) in whom we have faith; we have security as long as we are humble. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The submission to God is not necessarily conscious as such, it can be mild or severe, the psychic and social structure need not blind us to the fact that we live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian structure of our society. By submission or by domination or by trying to silence reason and awareness—these ways succeed only for the moment, and block the road to a true solution. There is but one way to save ourselves from this Hell: to leave the prison of our egocentricity, to reach out and to one ourselves with the World. If egocentric separateness is the cardinal sin, then the sin is atoned in the act of loving. The very word atonement expresses this concept, for it etymologically derives from atonement, the Middle-English expression for union. Since the sin of separateness is not an act of disobedience, it does not need to be forgiven. However, it does need to be healed; and love, not acceptance of punishment, is the healing factor. The concept of sin as disunion has been expressed by some of the church fathers, who followed Jesus’ nonauthoritarian concept of sin, and suggests where there are sins there is diversity. However, where virtue rules there is uniqueness, there is oneness. Through Adam’s sin the human race, which should be a harmonious whole without conflict between mine and thine, was transformed into a dust cloud of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Similar thoughts concerning the destruction of the original unity in Adam can also be found in the idea that the fact of salvation appears necessary as the regaining of the lost oneness, as the restitution of the supernatural oneness with God and at the same time the oneness of mortals among each other. The concept of sin and repentance tells us that we shall be as Gods for an examination of the whole problem of sin. In the having mode, and thus the authoritarian structure, sin is disobedience and is overcome by repentance: punishment, renewed submission. In the being mode, the nonauthoritarian structure, sin is unresolved estrangement, and it is overcome by the full unfolding of reason and love, by at-onement. One can indeed interpret the story of the Fall in both ways, because the story itself is a blending of authoritarian and liberating elements. However, in themselves the concept of sin as, respectively, disobedience and alienation are diametrically opposed. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel seems to contain the same idea. The human race reached here a state of union, symbolized by the fact that all humanity has one language. By their own ambition for power, by their craving to have the great tower, the people destroy their unity and are disunited. In a sense, the story of the Tower is the second Fall, the sin of historical humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The story is complicated by God’s disapproving of the people’s unity and power being used to attack him. “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech,” reports Genesis 11.6-7. Of course, the same difficulty already exists in the story of the Fall; there God is afraid of the power that man and woman would exercise if they ate of the fruit of both trees. There are two escae hatches that it is well to examine in more detail because they play so important a part in many families, spiritual or human. One of these is the attempt to escape from feelings of self-hate by hating others. This involves a mental process psychologist call projection. When a motion picture projector casts a picture on a screen, what the view sees is not determined primarily by the screen, although its quality can affect the image. The picture comes from within the projector, although the viewer may become so lost in the drama unfolding on the screen that one is no longer consciously aware of the source of the image. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the phenomenon of projection, psychologically speaking, the individual is both the projection machine and the viewer. In other words, a person sees what he or she projects onto the screen. In many ways, by using various scientific methods, psychologists have shown that all of us do a great deal of projecting, some of us more than others. In other words, when we look out at the World around us our view of reality is more or less distorted by the image we project, without conscious awareness, from our own minds. So, for example, psychologists have demonstrated that if we are shown a broken line drawing suggesting some image with which we are familiar, we have a tendency to complete that image in our mind when we look at the incomplete drawing. Projection is an important consideration here, because we have a tendency to project onto others qualities or feelings that we cannot accept ourselves. Thus, for example, a person who cannot accept his or her own feelings about pleasures of the flesh may feel that every man or woman who glances at him or her is out to seduce one. Since the feeling that we hate ourselves is such a threat to us, we cannot accept it in ourselves. Projection of self-hate onto others becomes one readily available way of avoiding these feelings. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
It is no surprise, then, that some children faced with frequent situations in which they feel rejected by others learn to avoid the feelings of worthlessness and self-hate by this means. Instead of being aware of the feeling, “I hate myself,” such a child will feel “They hate me!” It is only a small step further, of course, for the child’s reaction to be “Since they hate me, I hate them.” The child then has a target toward which to express all of the hostility seething within one—hostility because one feels worthless and because one has been rejected. When we project feelings we do not choose our targets indiscriminately. They usually make some kind of sense. A natural target for the child is the parents from whom one has felt rejection. And it is the child whose parents have been overly punishing and who have severely restricted the child’s freedom who most often tends to develop the reaction “My parents hate me, therefore I hate them!” When the child yells out one’s anger toward one’s parents or rebels against their directives, one is likely to meet more severe punishment and restriction. As a result, one feels more rejection and slips deeper into feelings of self-hate that is again converted into “You hate me, so I hate you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
If this cycle is not broken, the hatred of others often widens in scope to people outside the family circle as the child grows older. Often those in positions of authority, who are probably unconsciously identified with the parents, become the great target of increasing hatred; and so the child may get into difficulty with school officials and later with the police. Thus the rebellion against parents who do not seem to care can spread to rebellion against a society that does not seem to care. And if a person becomes a parent, he or she will probably be too emotionally disadvantaged and frightened to express his or her love to one’s children. One, too, will probably be punitive and hurtful. And thus, unless the cycle is broken, the blight of self-hate perpetuates itself from one generation to another. Feelings of rejection become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate becomes escape by hating others instead of one’s self, and further rejection (he or she has gotten into one scrape after another. Punishment does not seem to help. He seems hopeless!) and this all cycles back around to create more feelings of worthlessness. In psychotherapy, we want to know, “Did the patient improve or not?” where the word “improve” means some fairly general changes in state from bad to good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Some example changes used to measure the patient are such as these: (a) the patient feels better, is more comfortable, takes more interest in life, and the like; (b) important interpersonal relations are straightened out a bit; (c) physical symptoms have been relieved or cured; (d) important health-tending decisions have been made; (e) there has been an increase in insightful remarks and behavior. Each therapist then makes a formal presentation before these two judges of every case one has handled; prior to the presentation the judges have read all of the material concerning the patient that has been recorded in the clinical chart. In the instruction to the judges it is emphasized that the crucial variable is not the general level of functioning of the patient at the conclusion of therapy, but rather the change in state that had occurred between beginning and end of therapy. Further, it is made clear to the judges that part of their function is to evaluate the therapist’s involvement in one’s own account of the therapeutic process, and to weigh that factor in coming to a best estimate as to the degree of change that has actually occurred. On the basis, then, of two main sources of information (formal presentation of the case by the therapist, and an evaluation from the clinical chart), the expert raters assign cases, first of all, into two main categories, those who have shown definite improvement and those who had failed to improve or who have improved only slightly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
It is of some interest to examine the kinds of incidents and outcomes that the judges considered indicative of improvement or lack of it. Here a case of improvement: A man who entered therapy in a very depressed, anxious physically upset state, and whose troubles centered on his relations with his foreman on a construction job (a relationship in which was outwardly submissive and cooperative but inwardly enraged finally learned to stand up to the foreman and express his feelings. There was clear advance in his feelings of independence and esteem, and toward the conclusion of the therapy the patient left the former job and started a business of his own. Here is a case where no improvement was seen: A man with a history of homosexuality attempted to seduce his male therapist, who responded with anger as well as some anxiety. The patient had to be transferred to another therapist. The kind of outcomes in improvements are generally when the patient reports feelings of well-being at the conclusion of therapy, in contrast to depression and anxiety at its start. Specific symptoms, such as headaches, frigidity, or impotence, gastric disturbances, menstrual difficulties, skin disorders, and so forth, tend to be relieved or totally cleared up; in some cases there are significant changes in the direction of more mature interpersonal relations, especially with patents, parent-substitutes, or spouses. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The failures in psychotherapy could often be traced to the inability of the therapist to handle some particularly difficult problems. Perhaps with more experienced psychotherapists some of the patients who did not improve would have made some progress; however, there seems little doubt that the cases that were marked down as therapeutic failures were basically more difficult problems. Generally, more disturbed individuals do not improve. As stated in the past, the fear that one may lose one’s possessions is an unavoidable consequence of a sense of security that is based on what one has. I want to carry this thought a step further. It may be possible for us not to attach ourselves to property and, hence, not fear losing it. However, what about the fear of losing life itself—the fear of dying? Is this a fear only of older people or of the sick? Or is everybody afraid of dying? Does the fact that we are bound to die permeate our whole life? Does the fear of dying grow only more intense and more conscious the closer we come to the limits of life by age or sickness? We need of large systematic studies by psychoanalysts investigating this phenomenon from childhood to golden years and dealing with the unconsciousness as well as the conscious manifestations of the fear of dying. These studies need not be restricted to individual cases; they could examine large groups, using existing methods of sociopsychoanalysis. Since such studies do not now exist, we must draw tentative conclusions for many scattered data. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Perhaps the most significant datum is the deeply engraved desire for immortality that manifests itself in the many rituals and beliefs that aim at preserving the human body. On the other hand, the modern, specifically American denial of death by the beautification of the body speaks equally for the repression of the fear of dying by merely camouflaging death. It is not just woman any more, men in the entertainment industry are buying lace front wigs and caking on makeup to try and appear twenty to thirty year young than they are. However, there is only one way—taught by the Buddha, by Jesus, by the Stoics, by Master Eckhart—to truly overcome the fear of dying, and that way is by not hanging onto life, not experiencing life as a possession. Yet, it takes a cute young lady on TV to remind people of these Biblical principals before they manifest them. Nevertheless, the fear of dying is not truly what is seems to be: the fear of stopping living. Death does not concern us, since while we are, death is not yet here; but when death is here we are no more. To be sure, there can be fear of suffering and pain that may precede dying, but this fear is different from that of dying. While the fear of dying may this seem irrational, this is not so if life is experienced as a possession. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The fear, then, is not of dying, but of losing what I have: the fear of losing my body, my ego, my possessions, and my identity; the fear of facing the abyss of nonidentity, of being lost. To the extent that we live in the having mode, we must fear dying. No rational explanation will take away this fear. However, it may be diminished, even at the hour of death, by our reassertion of our bond to life, by a response to the love of others that may kindle our own love. Losing our fear of dying should not begin as a preparation for death, but as the continuous effort to reduce the mode of having and to increase the mode of being. The wise think about life, not death. The instruction on how to die is indeed the same as the instruction on how to live. The more we rid ourselves of the craving for possession in all its forms, particularly our ego-boundness, the less strong is the fear of dying, since there is nothing to lose. Research in psychotherapy by Harris and Christiansen declares that there is so significant relationship between improvement and intelligence. The Harris-Christiansen sample consisted of already hospitalized persons who were given psychotherapy because of delayed recovery from physical infirmary, surgery, or accident, whereas almost all patients in the present study had elected on their own initiative to seek psychotherapy at the clinic, and in their waking hours wen about business of life in an upright position. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
This difference might well account for the IQ difference between the samples, as well as for the fact that these self-referred patients were a good standard deviation above the general population mean in intelligence. Simply being aware of the fact that psychotherapy is to be had and that it makes sense to seek it when you are in personal difficulties is probably related beneficially to general intelligence and cultural sophistication. It is also to be expected on theoretical grounds that greater effectiveness of cortical functioning should be associated with a factor of modifying ability in personality and structure. Intelligence certainly involves the ability to cognize relationships adequately, including emotional relationships, and to correct one’s cognitions on the basis of new evidence. It would seem that in this sample, at any rate, the more intelligent patients were better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to induce desired personality changes. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all people. And since there are endless ways of being honest and dishonest, one definition of honest is: Honesty implies freedom from lying, stealing, cheating, and bearing false witness. “Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from deceitful tongue,” reports Psalms 102.2. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International 