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The Knowledge Which We Seek, the Answers for Which We Yearn, and the Strength Which We Desire
Believe me, our little consultation will not take long. We have strong obligations. We will call or come just as quickly as we can. As we turn to examine some major escape hatches, we see that some people escape from feelings of self-hate by developing physically illness. One patient, age 31, was a tall, athletically-built man of rather prepossessing appearance. He speaks in an intelligent, competent manner. He was obviously very tense, however, and seemed to be controlling himself only with some effort. He displayed a certain amount of hostility toward the testing procedure, but was overly cooperative and uncomplaining. The patient’s personality inventory is typical of the most clear-cut cases of psychopathy or impulse neurosis. Basic to the personality structure is a very deep and primitive oral fixation, with subsequent reaction formation against it. Direct satisfaction of libidinal impulses is sought, rather than repression or substitution. Conflicts tend to be acted out, and there is a constant flight from anxiety rather than an attempt to endure it. Associated with the underlying orality and passivity is considerable hostility which is also expressed orally (by such means as sarcasm, invective, and biting). What is most feared is the passivity, and dominance-submission is the characteristic conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
There is a considerable tendency toward self-dramatization. The primitive oral longing may lead to alcoholism or drug addiction, and pleasures of the flesh in such cases are usually polymorphous perverse. Such anxiety as is not handled by character defenses may be expressed gastrointestinally. There is a poverty of inner resources, an inability to sublimate or obtain substitutive gratification. Impulses are responded to in an uncontrolled fashion. Depression and anxiety are evident, the depression being the more prominent of the two. There is a good deal of preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh, and judgment defect manifests itself chiefly in that area. Otherwise, contact with reality is good. The patient had been divorced once, and he was not married to the woman with whom he was presently living, although they had been living together for several years. He came into the clinic purely on an impulse, although he had occasionally entertained the idea in the past because of vague feelings of dissatisfaction with certain aspects of his own behavior, such as his promiscuity, his predilection for comfort women, and his tendency to look for unusual forms of excitement and entertainment when he was inebriated. His common-law wife was fairly tolerant of these failings, but he was worried that sooner or later he would get in trouble with law enforcement, which would interfere with his profession as a teacher. He appeared to have no particular anxiety or neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The research that has been done into psychosomatic illness makes it evident that the body operates as a total organism and that most physical illness can either be caused or greatly modified by emotional factors. Two primary unconscious motivations appear to underlie such illness. In the first place, it seems evident that there is often a need to push one’s self. The person uses physical illness as an unconscious way of expressing one’s self-hate. Another motivation seems to be that of asking for help. It is almost as if the person were saying to the World, “Will not somebody please take care of me?” The therapist reported that the therapeutic interviews were generally “very man to man…the patient manipulated the situation so that we seemed to be sort jolly buddies rather than patient and doctor. He refused to admit of any professional distance between us.” The interviews were more like casual chats than therapeutic sessions. There was, nevertheless, a very strong transference. As the transference increased in intensity, and the patient’s passive desires got closer to the surface, his acting out of this conflict began to take a very hostile form. Therapists often report that they experience a great deal of trouble dealing effectively with physical illness caused by emotional difficulties. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It can be hard to deal with probably because the individual, in being ill, usually does satisfy some of the needs that motivate the illness in the first place. On one occasion, the patient came in drunk, having been drinking all night. At this time, he gave vent to considerable hostility, its first objection being the psychological tests and the psychologist. When the therapist pointed out that this too might be displaced, the patient turned violently upon the therapist himself, and began to compare psychologists very favorably with psychiatrists. The patient’s hostility was evinced plainly in his expressive movement during this hour, as he began many aggressive gestures which he quickly inhibited. Finally, he broke down and cried. Afterward, he said he felt better, “like after sleeping with a woman.” Following this, a good deal of passive homosexual material emerged in his associations, and this was dealt with very effectively and in an anxiety reliving manner by the therapist. The patient does succeed in pushing himself, and he often gains attention and care as a result of the illness. Both of these psychological gains, of course, are not ultimately satisfying, for there is usually growing resentment on the part of those who care for the ill person. This resentment is likely to be expressed in some form or other. Thus the stage is set for further feelings of rejection, more self-hate, and more pronounced physical problems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The cycle generally goes this way: Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into physical symptoms or illness, and further rejection (who likes somebody who is sick and complaining all the time?). When a person has been severely emotionally damaged as a child, the escape from self-hate may take the form of a severe mental illness, or psychosis. In this instance the feelings a person has about one’s self are so intolerable and life is so frightening that the person may escape into a fantasy World. One exchanges reality for unreality. All the gain that the therapist would claim for this patient after six months of psychotherapy was that the patient had been rendered more available for treatment. In view of the extreme difficulty of working with such psychopathic character disorders, this modest gain is indeed rather praiseworthy. Perhaps the escape from self-hate is seen most clearly in instance where the person becomes someone else in one’s imagination, someone who is powerful, good, or important in some way. One may acquire an unshakable belief that one is Jesus, Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Beyonce, Brad Pitt, Aaliyah, Reese Witherspoon, Paris Hilton, The Weekend, Drake, Elvis, Olivia Newton John, or some the famous person. The immediate gain from the illness is obvious. The person is no longer the hated self who seemed worthless, hopeless, and a failure. Now one can look on one’s self as an individual of great important and significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In spite of all our advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness, however, the psychotic person is almost certain to experience further feelings of rejection. Society will almost surely deem it necessary to segregate one’s self from normal people, at least during the acute phases of the illness. When one does return to society, one is likely to be regarded with suspicion, prejudice, and fear, with little understanding or even tolerance of one’s emotional problems. Again the cycle rejection cycle might start. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into mental illness, further rejection (why can he not snap out of it and face life like everybody else does?). Alcoholism and other forms of addiction provide other ways of attempting to escape from feelings of self-hate. For a large majority of people, the use of alcohol is a pleasant way to become more like the person they long to be. With the glowing warmth of two or three drinks, many people are able to talk more freely and enjoy their friends more openly. Usually too frightened of their love to reveal it, they are able to express their care more openly and with more feeling. The potential alcoholic, on the other hand, begins to rely on drinking as a way to avoid facing feelings of inadequacy, failure, and worthlessness. The alcohol numbs one to these feelings and, at least in the initial stages, helps one to escape one’s feeling of mediocrity and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
One is less aware of one’s fear of suffering further rejection and so one mixes more with people, somewhat mitigating the terrible loneliness experiences in sober hours. Feelings of rejection, lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape to alcoholism, further rejection (he used to be funny when he was drinking, but it seems now like he is drunk all the time and everybody suffers”), then further feelings or worthlessness ensue. However, when one is sober again, feelings of self-hate come closer to the surface, fortified now by guilt feelings about the meaningless waste of one’s hours of drunkenness. The only answer to the resulting moodiness and sense of emptiness seems to be possessed in resorting to drinking. Eventually the alcohol provides a more or less permanent escape from self-hate. Thus the alcoholic become more and more addicted. Meanwhile, one encounters ever more frequent rejection and one after another of his or her friends, and finally one’s family find one’s drinking and one’s behavior while intoxicated increasingly unbearable and desert the individual. The only way of gaining relief from these further feelings of rejection, or so it seems to one, comes through further drinking. And so the cycle runs it course. Homosexuality is another way of escaping feelings of self-hate. Sometimes have been cut off from both skills and the emotions of male existence. Yet, they also undoubtedly long for some kind of place in the male World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
With women, some of these men seem, superficially at least, very much at ease. They share many interests more typical of women in our culture. One may be artistic and creative. Yet, in relationships with girls that might have become intimate and meaningful at a deeper level, tend to become guarded and aloof. It is evident that one has a profound fear of being subtly manipulated and controlled by women, as one’s mother may have done (being made to do the household chores and care for the other kids, cook meals, becoming a pseudo mother, and without any male influence around). All women are seen by the male as threats to his individuality. It is not surprising that, when one is approached at college or work by men with similar problems, one falls quickly into homosexual practices. Though he later married, he seemed unable either to give up his homosexuality completely or to achieve genuine intimacy with his wife, although they were able to have pleasures of the flesh. After several years of attempting to make a satisfying married, she finally left him. With this individual, as with other homosexuals, his sexual relationship with men probably gave him some escape from his feelings of inability to satisfy his need for love and his feelings of worthlessness as a male. However, his escape into homosexuality led to further rejection by parents, other relatives, friends, and acquaintances who proved typically intolerant of problems with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
As often is the case, even he and his homosexual partners tended to despise each other. Such rejection seemed to lead only to the search for the reassurance of new sexual partners in an unbroken cycle of rejection. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into homosexuality, further rejections (he is different from other men. He is repulsive to me) and more feelings of worthlessness. No attempt is being made here to explain fully why a person chooses one escape from self-hate rather than another, as, for example, why one person becomes an alcoholic and another becomes a braggart or develops symptoms of physical illness. There are many complex reasons for these differences. Some of them certainly have to do with the kind of rejection that is experienced. Chance occurrences may lead to the expression of one symptom rather than another. For example, it is possible that the man, the homosexual just described, might have become an alcoholic if her had not been approached by an experienced homosexual and if his rigid religious training had not discouraged any experimentation with drinking. The purpose here, however, is to show that feelings of rejection, worthlessness, and self-hate lie at the root of these problems, whatever the various nuances may be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There is also room for inborn differences within this general pattern. Perhaps, for example, it is possible that some people are chemically more susceptible to alcoholic addiction than others. This would not mean that alcoholism would be a certainty for such a person even if it were found that such potentials occur. Without the need to escape from severe feelings of inadequacy and self-hate, the individual would not likely become an alcoholic. “The male patient then stood up, heaved a sigh and headed for the door. I asked if he needed a ride back home and he murmured that his car had brought him down town.” There is something creative in psychotherapy thus carried on. To the old patterns of perception and action is added a force for change, so that they gradually become something quite different, though retaining many of their former elements. It is important for people to learn to accept things at face value, and there should be a willingness to let the other person be as he or she wished, combined with an insistence on yourself being as you wish. It may sound absurd because the aim of psychotherapy is to induce changes in the behavior of the patient. Do we not want one to have fewer symptoms, better relations with people, a constructive set of social values, a happier out look on life? While we may have all of these desires as secondary goals for the patient, we must wish for one, above all else, and is necessary even at the expense of those secondary goals, simply that one be free to choose what one wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The patient may in the end choose to be much as one was in the beginning; the difference should be that one chooses freely and is not compelled by one’s own blind needs. It is, indeed, our faith that there are many things, to us undesirable, that free mortals would not choose for oneself; but we must be willing, in the final analysis and to state the case in its most extreme form, to grant the other’s right to choose destruction and evil, if one does so freely. If we accept this principle, we will not pity the patient, nor hold ourselves wise or good as compared to him or her, nor wish to impart on the individual our own virtues or visions. Rather, we will wish only to help one to understand who he or she is as a person, that one may be made more free to choose, and less the slave of one’s own history. Humans are generally ethical beings: but one’s achievement of ethical awareness is not easy. One does not grow into ethical judgment as simply as the California Golden Poppy (flower) grows toward the Sun. Indeed, like freedom and the other aspects of mortal’s consciousness of self, ethical awareness is gained only at a price of inner conflict and anxiety. With the loss of innocence and the rudimentary beginnings of ethical sensitivity, the person falls heir to the particular burdens of self-consciousness, anxiety and guilt feelings, but this awareness may not appear till later—that one is of dust. That is to say, when one realizes the one will some time die; one becomes conscious of one’s own finiteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The fall of man is seen as a fall upward because learning of right and wrong represent the birth of the psychological and spiritual person. The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s ignorance, and mortals can creatively use their powers, and to some extent transcend their limitations, only as one humbly and honestly admits these limitations to begin with so we do not become infected with false pride. Every society must have the influences which being ideas and ethical insight into birth, and the institutions which conserve that values of the past. No society would survive long without both new vitality and old forms, change and stability, the prophetic religion which attacks existing institutions and the priestly religion which protects the institutions. Many human beings are struggling toward enlarged self-awareness, maturity, freedom and responsibility, and some have the tendency to remain a child and cling to the protection of parents or parental substitutes. In capitalism, it is required for its functioning that there must be a strict obedience of the individuals to the laws, those that serve their true interests as well as those that do not. How oppressive or how liberal the laws and what the means for their enforcement are make little difference with regard to the central issue: the people must learn to fear authority, and not only in the person of the law enforcement officers because they carry weapons. This fear is not enough of a safeguard for the proper functioning of the state; the citizen must internalize this fear and transform obedience into a moral and religious category: sin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
People respect the laws not only because they are afraid but also because they feel guilty for their disobedience. This feeling of guilt can be overcome by the forgiveness that only the authority itself can grant. The conditions for such forgiveness are: the sinners repents, is punished, and by accepting punishment submits again. The sequence: sin (disobedience), feelings of guilt, new submission (punishment), forgiveness is a brutal cycle, inasmuch as each act of disobedience leads to increased obedience. A knowledge of truth and the answers to our greatest questions come to us as we are obedient to the commandments of God. We learn obedience throughout our lives. Beginning when we are very young, those responsible for our care set forth guidelines and rules to ensure our safety. Life would be simpler for all of us if we would obey such rules completely. Many of us, however, learn through experience the wisdom of being obedient. There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treacherous moral existence and return eventually to our Heavenly Fathers. The Savior demonstrated genuine love of God by living the perfect life, by honoring the sacred mission that was his. Never was he haughty. Never was he puffed up with pride. Never was he disloyal. Jesus as humble, sincere, and obedient. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
What is Given to the Eyes is the Intention of the Soul as the Soul is the Tension of the Body
I have given them every opportunity. Every type of advancement and profit sharing as well, but they want me in residence. They want my authority. Learning is not the accumulation of scraps of knowledge. It is a growth, where every act of knowledge develops the learner, thus making one capable of constituting ever more and more complex objectivities—and the object growth in complexity parallels the subjective growth in capacity. As we have been exploring the deeper significance of wish, we have noticed that a curious theme has been constantly emerging. Something more is going in a wish than meets the eye. This theme is implied when we speak of the autonomous element in wishing, or when we speak of the wish to imagination and spontaneity. And the theme is present especially when we consider the meaning of the wish, that aspect of the wish in human beings that goes beyond mere force and is expressed in language, art, and other symbols. The same theme was also present as the big “X” which James leaped over in his illustration of getting out of bed on a cold morning. Among the most common inner conflicts are those that are hard to resolve in any reasonable manner. Everyone has had to face the frustrations of wanting to hurt someone one likes, feeling guilty because of pleasures of the flesh they are feeling towards someone beyond their reach, aching to achieve certain unattainable goals, or feeling unworthy because one’s wishes to exploit others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
There is nothing in World more pitiful than an irresolute mortal, oscillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two, and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them. Most real-life situations cannot be neatly summarized. This is because there are important elements in the conflict that draw the person toward choice, but each good thing seems to be balanced by a disadvantage. One solution to such a conflict is to take the bad with the good. Another, of course, is to stay away from the entire situation, losing the benefits as well as the punishment. Making a choice can be so difficult, creates so much stress, that individuals experiences decidophobia—a fear of making a decision. Unless you are a very rare bird, you have undoubtedly experienced this particular phobia. In come people, it can get to be a pattern in which they never seem to be able to resolve any of their problems. This theme, running through our discussion like an obligato, is intentionality. By intentionality, I mean the structure which gives meaning to experience. It is not to be identified with intentions, but is the dimension which underlies them; it is mortal’s capacity to have intentions. It is our imaginative participation in the coming day’s possibilities in James’s example out of which comes the awareness of our capacity to form, to mold, to change ourselves and the day in relation to each other. James’s reverie as he lay in bed is a beautiful, albeit denied, expression of it. Intentionality is at the heart of consciousness. I believe that it is also the key to the problem of wish and will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
First, what does the term mean? We shall define it in two stages; the preliminary stage is the fact that our intentions are decisive with respect to how we perceive the World. This afternoon, for instance, I go up to see a house in the mountains. Suppose, first, that I am looking for a place which come friends can rent for the Summer months. When I approach the house, I shall question whether it is sound and well-built, gets enough Sun, and other things having the meaning of shelter to me. Or suppose that I am a real estate speculator: then what will strike me will be how easily the house can be fixed up, whether it will bring a price attractively higher than what I shall have to pay for it, and other things meaning profit. Or let us say that it is the house of friends I am visiting: then I shall look at it with eyes which see it as hospitality—its open patio and easy chairs which will make our afternoon talk more pleasant. Or, if this is a cocktail party at the house of friends who have snubbed me at a party at my house, I find myself feeing things that indicate that anyone would prefer my cottage to theirs, and other aspects of the invidious envy and social state for which we human beings are notorious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Or, finally, if this afternoon I am outfitted with my watercolor materials and bent on doing a sketch, I shall see how the house clings to the side of the mountain, the pattern of the lines of the roof leading up to the peaks above and sweeping away into the valley below, and, indeed, now I even prefer the house without too many fancy features for the greater artistic possibilities this give me. In each one of these five instances, it is the same house that provides the stimulus, and I am the same mortal responding to it. However, in each case, the house and experience have an entirely different meaning. However, this is only one side of intentionality. The other side is that it also does come from the object. Intentionality is the bridge between these. It is the structure of meaning which makes it possible for us, subjects that we are, to see and understand the outside World, objective as it is. In intentionality, the dichotomy between subject and object is partially overcome. The concept seems to me so important, and has been so neglected in contemporary psychology, that I ask the reader to go with me into an exploration of its meaning. What is given to the eyes [in our terms, what is perceived] is the intention of the soul. The soul is the tension of the body. It then meant how we know reality, that is, it was an epistemology. Two kinds of intentionality were made distinct: intensio primo, referring to knowing particular things—that is, objects which actually exist; and intensio secundo, the relations of these objects to general concepts—that is, knowing by conceptualization. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
All of this presupposes that we could not know a thing unless we already, in some way, participated in it. Intentionality is what the is what the intellect grasps about the thing understood. The intellect through a species of being informed in the act of intelligence through a species of being informed in the act of intelligence, forms itself some intention of the understood thing. In the process of knowing, we are in-formed by the thing understood, and in the same act, our intellect simultaneously gives form to the thing we understand. What is important here is the word in-form, or forming in. To tell someone something, to in-form one, is to form one—a process that can sometimes become very powerful in psychotherapy by the therapist’s saying just one sentence, or one word, at the right moment. How different this is from the indoctrination many of us got in graduate school, that information is simply dry data, external to us, which we manipulate! Intentionality thus begins as an epistemology, a way of knowing reality. It carries the meaning of reality as we know it. The mind is not simply passive clay on which sensations write, or something which merely absorbs and classifies facts. What really happens is that objects themselves conform to our ways of understanding. A good example of this is mathematics. These are constructs in our minds; but nature conforms, “answers,” to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical World, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. The human mind is an active, forming participant in what it knows. Understanding, itself, is then constitutive of its World. Consciousness is defined by the fact that it intends something, points toward something outside itself—specifically, that it intends the object. Thus, intentionality gives meaningful contents to consciousness. There are not-too-rare cases of the influence of the ideas of one mortal on another in such a germane way that they become part and parcel of the second mortal’s thought and may seem to have always been in his or hers. Intentionality is built into the warp and woof to free association, dreams, and fantasies. Consciousness never exists in a subjective vacuum but is always consciousness of something. Consciousness not only cannot be separated from its objective World, but, indeed constitutes its World. The upshot is that meaning is an intention of the mind. The act and experience of consciousness itself is a continuous molding and remolding of our World, self related to objects and objects to self in inseparable ways, self participating in the World as well as observing it, neither pole of self or World being conceivable without the other. This, of course, does not mean that we cannot bracket for the moment the subjective or objective side of the experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
When I measure my house to see how paint it will take to repaint it, or when I get a report on some endocrinological tests on my child, I bracket for the moment how I feel about it: I want only to understand as clearly as I can these measurements. However, then my responsibility is to put these objective facts back into the context in which they have meaning for me—my project to paint my house, or my caring for the health of my child. I believe that one of our serious errors in psychology is to bracket out part of experience and never put it back together again. If faith is the state of being ultimately concerned, all preliminary concerns are subject to it. The ultimate concern gives depth, direction and unity to all other concerns and, with them, to the whole personality. A personal life which has these qualities is integrated, and the power of a personality’s integration is one’s faith. It must be repeated at this point that such an assertion would be absurd if faith were wat it is in its distorted meaning, the belief in things without evidence. Yet the assertion is not absurd, but evident, if faith is ultimate concern. Ultimate concern is related to all sides of reality and to all sides of human personality. The ultimate is one object beside others, and the ground of all others. As the ultimate is the ground of everything that is, so ultimate concern is the integrating center of the personal life. Being without it is being with a center. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
When a person has lost their essence, such a state can only be approached but never fully reached, because a human being deprived completely of a center would cease to be a human being. For this reason once cannot admit that there is any mortal without an ultimate concern or without faith. The center unites all elements of a mortal’s personal life, the bodily, the unconscious, the conscious, the spiritual ones. In the act of faith every nerve of mortal’s body, every striving of mortal’s soul, every function of mortal’s spirit participates. However, body, soul, spirit, are not three parts of mortal. They are dimensions of mortal’s being, always within each other; for mortals is a unity and not composed of parts. Faith, therefore, is not a matter of the mind in isolation, or of the soul in contrast to mind and body, or of the body (in the sense of terrestrial faith), but is the centered movement of the whole personality toward something of ultimate meaning and significance. Ultimate concern is passionate concern; it is a matter of infinite passion. Passion is not real without a bodily basis, even if it is the most spiritual passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
In every act of genuine faith the body participates, because genuine faith is a passionate act. “Behold, when the time cometh that they shall dwindle in unbelief, after they have received so great blessings from the hand of the Lord—having a knowledge of the creation of the Earth, and all mortals, knowing the great and marvelous works of the Lord from the creation of the World; having power given them to do all things by faith; having all the commandments from the beginning, and having been brought by his infinite goodness into this precious land of promise—behold, I say, if the day shall come that they will reject the Holy One of Israel, the true Messiah, their Redeemer and their God, behold, the judgments of him that is just shall rest upon them,” reports 2 Nephi 1.10. The way in such the soul participates is manifold. The body can participate both in vital ecstasy and in asceticism leading to spiritual ecstasy. However, whether in vital fulfillment or vital restriction, the body participates in the life of faith. The same is true of the unconscious strivings, the so-called instincts of mortal’s psyche. They determine the choice of symbols and types of faith. Therefore, every community of faith tries to shape the unconscious strivings of its members, especially of the new generations. “My heart hath been weighed down with sorrow from time to time, for I have feared, lest for the hardness of your hearts the Lord your God should come out in the fulness of his wrath upon you, that ye be cut off and destroyed forever,” reports 2 Nephi 1.17. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Still, that is not the only fear I have been hiding in my heart, it is not the only burden that has been troubling my soul. I worry “that a cursing should come upon you for the space of many generations; and ye are visited by sword, and by famine, and are hated, and are le according to the will and captivity of the Devil. These things might come upon you, but you are a choice and favored people of the Lord. However, behold, his (God’s) will be done; for his ways are righteousness forever,” reports 2 Nephi 1.18-19. If the faith of somebody expresses itself in symbols which are adequate to one’s unconscious strivings, these strivings cease to be chaotic. They do not need repression, because they have received sublimation and are untied with the conscious activities of the person. Faith also directs mortal’s conscious life by giving it a central object of con-centration. The disrupting trends of mortal’s consciousness are one of the great problems of all personal life. If a uniting center is absent, the infinite variety of the encountered World, as well as of the inner movements of the human mind, is able to produce or complete disintegration of the personality. There can be no other uniting center than the ultimate concern of the mind. There are various ways in which faith unites mortal’s mental life and gives it a dominating center. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Faith can be the way of discipline which regulates the daily life; it can be the way of prayer and contemplation; it can be the way of concentration on the ordinary work, or on a special aim or on another human being. In each case, faith is presupposed; none of it could be done without faith. Mortal’s spiritual function, artistic creation, scientific knowledge, ethical formation and political organization are consciously or unconsciously expressions of an ultimate concern which gives passion and creative love to them, making them inexhaustible in depth and untied in aim. We have shown how faith determines and unites all elements of personal life, how and why it is its integrating power. In doing so we have painted a picture of what faith can do. However, we have not brought into this picture the forces of disintegration and disease which prevent faith from creating a fully integrated personal life, even in those who represent the power of faith most conspicuously, the saint, the great mystics, the prophetic personalities. Mortals are integrated only fragmentarily and have elements of disintegration or disease in all dimensions of one’s being. There is a close, inner relationship between caring and intentionality, suggested already by the fact that the root word “tend”—to take care of—is the center of the term intentionality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
A word itself embodies a cumulative, creative wisdom in that it is the product of centuries of molding, forming, and re-forming on the part of an infinite number of people who are trying to communicate something important to themselves and to the fellow members of their culture. Let us see what help we can find in understanding intentionality and its related terms intend and intention by tracking down their etymological sources. All of these terms come from Latin Stem intendere, which consists of in plus tendere, tensum, the latter, interestingly enough, meaning to stretch, and from which we get our word tension. This tells us immediately that intention is a stretching toward something. Now a fact which may be surprising to many readers, as it was to me, is that the first meaning given for intend in Webster’s does not have to do with purpose or design, as when we say, “I intend to do something,” but is rather, to mean, signify. Only secondly does Webster give the definition to have in mind a purpose or a design. Most people in our voluntaristic Victorian tradition have tended to skip over the primary and central meaning and to use the concept only in its derivative meaning of conscious design and purpose. And since our psychology soon became able to prove that such conscious designs and purposes were mostly illusions and that we are not at all creatures of these nice, freely-chosen, voluntary plans, we were constrained to throw out the whole package of intents with the caboodle of intentions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
We had known already that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and we now saw that these intentions, good or bad, were figments of our own self-conceit anyway. However, if you change self-conceit to self-concern and realize that there is no knowledge or act at all without this self-concern—that everything has its concern or intent in it, and that we know our World by virtue of these intents—if you make these sifts from the pejorative to the absolute form of the same words, how different the implication is! The more significant aspect of intention is its relation to meaning. We use this in one form in the legal phrase asking: What is the intent of the law? when referring to its meaning. Intent is the turning of the mind toward an object, hence a design, purpose. The design and purpose come after the hence. That is to say, the voluntaristic aspects of the experience are possessed in the fact that already the mind is turned toward an object which has a certain import and meaning for us. All the way through this etymology is, of course, that little word tend. It refers to movement toward something—tend toward tendency. To me, it seems to be the core of our whole quest; its presence there in the center is a perpetual reminder that our meanings are never purely intellectual or our acts purely result of pushes from the past; but in both we are moving toward something. And mirabile dictu, the word also means, as we briefly say, to take care of—we tend our sheep and cattle, and we tend to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Thus, when I declare, “Meaning is an intention of the mind,” I include both the meaning and the act, the movement toward something. I point out this dual meaning in the German language: the word meinung which signifies either opinion or meaning, has the same stem as the Germany verb meinen, to intend. In pondering the English language at this point, I was surprised—being brought up to think that the objective fact was the epitome of everything and occupied the place next to God is not indeed His Throne itself—to find that we also have that dual import. When I say, “I mean the BMW is black,” you take my sentence as giving you merely a statement of fact; it is a unilateral equivalence, “A” is “B.” However, when I say, “I mean to turn the corner, but the car says it is not recommended,” you take my mean as my intention, a statement of my commitment and conviction. Only later will we see if I can make it come true. Therefore, every meaning has within it a commitment. And this does not refer to the use of my muscles after I get an idea in order to accomplish the idea. And most of all, it does not refer to what a behaviorist might say on reading these paragraphs, “Just as we have always said—the consciousness is only in the act anyway, and we might as well study only the muscular action, the behavior, to start with.” No, our analysis leads to exactly the opposite conclusion, that a sheer movement of the muscles, as the larynx in talking, is exactly what you do not have. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
You have, rather, a human being intending something. And you cannot understand the overt behavior expect as you see it in relation to, and as an expression of, its intention. Meaning has no meaning apart from intention. Each act of consciousness tends toward something, is a turning of the person toward something, and has within it, no matter how latent, some push toward a direction for action. Cognition, or knowing, and conation, or willing, then go together. We could not have one without the other. This is why commitment is so important. If I do not will something, I could never know it; and if I do not know it; and if I do not know something, I would never have any content for my willing. In this sense, it can be said directly that mortals make their own meaning. Note that I do not say that they only makes one’s meaning, or that it is not dialectically related at every instant to reality; I say that if one is not engaged in making one’s meaning, one will never know reality. My task, so far, has been to define the concept of intentionality. I have emphasized that it contains both our knowing and our forming reality, and that these are inseparable from each other. From the point of view of intentionality, James’s reverie as he is compelled in bed is entirely sensible, and his sudden act of getting up is not at all a will-o’-the-wisp lucky instant or fortunate happening, but an understandable and reliable expression of his connection with the day’s events. It is his imaginative participation in the day and the events of the day, which is reaching out to him, grasping him, that accomplishes the getting up. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
One can also say that the integrating power of faith has healing power. This statement, however, needs comment in view of linguistic and actual distortions of the relation of faith and healing. Linguistically (and materially) one must distinguish the integrating power of faith from what has been called faith healing. Faith healing, as the term is actually used, is the attempt to heal others or oneself by mental concentration on the healing power in others or in oneself. There is such healing power in nature and mortals, and it can be strengthened by mental acts. In a non-depreciating sense one could speak of the use of magic power; and certainly there is healing magic in human relationships as well as in the relation to oneself. It is a daily experience and sometimes one that is astonishing in its intensity and success. However, one should not use the word faith for it, and one should not confuse it with the integrating power of an ultimate concern. The integrating power of faith in a concrete situation is dependent on the subjective and objective factors. The subjective factor is the degree to which a person is open for the power of faith, and how strong and passionate is his ultimate concern. Such openness is what religion calls grace. It is given and cannot be produced intentionally. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The objective factor is the degree to which a faith has conquered its idolatrous elements and is directed toward the really ultimate. Idolatrous faith has a definite dynamic: it can be extremely passionate and exercise a preliminary integrating power. It can heal and unite the personality, including its soul and body. The gods of polytheism have shown healing power, not only in a magic way but also in terms of genuine reintegration. The objects of modern secular idolatry, such as nation and success, have shown healing power, not only by the magic fascination of a leader, a slogan or a promise but also by the fulfillment of otherwise unfulfilled strivings for a meaningful life. However, the basis of the integration is too narrow. Idolatrous faith breaks down sooner or later and the disease is worse than before. The one limited element which has been elevated to ultimacy is attacked by other limited elements. The mind is split, even if each of these elements represents a high value. The fulfillment of the unconscious drives does not last; they are repressed or explode chaotically. The concentration of the mind vanishes because the object of concentration has lost its convincing character. Spiritual creativity shows an increasingly shallow and empty character, because no infinite meaning gives depth to it. The passion of faith is transformed into the suffering of unconquered doubt and despair, and in many cases into an escape to neurosis and psychosis. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Idolatrous faith has more disintegrating power than indifference, just because it is fait and produces a transitory integration. This is the extreme danger of misguided, idolatrous faith, and the reason why the prophetic Spirit is above all the Spirit which fights against the idolatrous distortion of faith. The healing power of faith raises the question of its relation to other agencies of healing. We have already referred to an element of magic influence from mind to mind without referring to the medical art, its scientific presuppositions and its technical methods. There is an overlapping of all agencies of healing and none of them should claim exclusive validity. Nevertheless, it is possible conceptually to limit each of them to a special function. Perhaps one can say that the healing power of faith is related to the whole personality, independent of any special disease of body or mind, and effective positively or negatively in every moment of one’s life. It precedes, accompanies and follows all other activities of healing. However, it does not suffice alone in the development of the personality. In finitude and estrangement mortals are not a whole, but are disrupted into different elements. Each of these elements can disintegrate independently of other elements. Parts of the body can become sick, without producing mental disease; and the mind can become sick without visible bodily failures. In some forms of mental sickness, especially neurosis, and in almost all forms of bodily disease the spiritual life can remain completely healthy and even gain in strength. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Therefore, medical art must be used wherever such separated elements of the whole of the personality are disintegrating for external or internal reasons. This is true of mental as well as bodily medicine. And there is no conflict between them and the healing power of the state of ultimate concern. It is also clear that medical activities, including mental healing, cannot produce a reintegration of the personality as a whole. Only faith can do this. The tension between the two agencies of health would disappear if both sides knew their special functions and their special limits. Then they would not be worried about the third agency, the healing by magic concentration on the powers of healing. They would accept its help while revealing at the same time its great limitations. There are as many types of integrated personalities as there are types of faith. There is also the type of integration which unites many characteristics of the different types of personal integration. It was this kind of personality which was created by early Christianity, and missed again and again in the history of the Church. Its character cannot be described from the point of view of faith alone; it leads to the questions of faith and love, and of faith and action. “And because of the intercession for all, all mortals come unto God; wherefore, they stand in the presence of him, to be judged of him according to the truth and holiness which is in him. I leave unto you a blessing, yea, even my first blessing,” reports 2 Nephi 2.9 and 10 and 2 Nephi 1. 28. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Having a family who want the worse for you and that you cannot trust is the biggest cruse in the World, worse than death. Count your blessings. Even if they are not the richest people, be happy they love and protect you. Eventually the tables turn, even in corruption, destiny has to take place, there is a wheel and sometimes you are low and other times you are high, hopefully you get a nice long spin on the high road to balance it out. Do not bother telling people the painful things you feel towards them, just hold on to it and release it in constructive ways. Talk to a friend or something. When people do bad things, especially to good people, it eventually has to reflect on their sou and one day they will know they need to seek forgiveness. All the money and possessions in the World cannot replace love and chances are bad people are not well loved anyway. They are all drying out from all of their emotions. As long as you try as hard as you can to be a good person and do the right thing is what matters. And stay sober. Like First Lady Nancy Reagan preached in the 1980s, “Just say no to drugs.” Enjoying reality with a clear mind is the best thing. We need to see things as they are and find safe ways to deal with things that can be unpleasant. “The is the work and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Who Has Not Found Heaven for Where Your Treasure is Will be Your Heart?
And then the room was empty. Perfectly empty. I turned, disconsolate and shuddering, and put my head down on my arm, as if I could go to sleep on my desk. I was considering William James, that psychologist-philosopher American-man-of-genius, who struggled all his life with the problem of his will. One of my esteemed colleagues, writing of James’s severe depression and the fact that for a number of years he was on the verge of suicide, asks us not to judge him harshly for those aspects of maladjustment. I take a different view. I believe that understanding the depressions James suffered and the way he dealt with them increases our appreciation and admiration for him. True, all his life he was plagued by vacillation and an inability to make up his mind. In his last years, when he was struggling to give up his lecturing at Harvard, he would write in his diary one day, “Resign,” the next day, “Don’t resign,” and the third day, “Resign” again. James’s difficulty in making up his mind was connected with his inner richness and the myriad of possibilities for him in every decision. However, it was precisely James’s depressions—in which he would often write of his yearning for “a reason for wishing to live four hours longer”—which forced him to be so concerned with will, and precisely in the struggle against these depressions that he learned so much about human will. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
William James believed—and, as a therapist, I believe that his judgment here is clinically sound—that it was own discovery of the capacity to will which enabled him to live a tremendously fruitful life up to his death at sixty-eight, despite his depressions and hos continual affliction with insomnia, eye troubles, back disorders, and so on. In our own “age of this disordered will,” as it has been termed, we turn to William James with eagerness to find whatever help he can give us with our own problem of will. He begins his famous chapter on will, published in 1890, by summarily dismissing wish as what we do when we desire something which is not possible for achievement, and contrast it with will, which exists when the end is within our power. If with the desire there is a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish. I believe that this definition is one of the places where James’s Victorianism shows through; wishes are treated as unreal and immature. Obviously, no wish is possible when we first wish it. It becomes possible only as we wish it in many different ways, and through considering it from this side and that, possibly over a great period of time, we generate the power and take the risk to make it happen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, then James launches into what turns out to be one of the most thrilling treatises on will in literature, which I can only touch on. There is, first, the primary type, which is distinguished by the fact it does not require a whole series of decisions. We desire to change our shirt or begin to write on paper, and once we start, a whole series of movements is set going by itself; it is ideomotor. This primary will requires absence of conflict. James is here trying to preserve spontaneity. He is taking his stand against Victorian Will power, the exercise of the separate faculty called will power which must have failed him dismally in his own life and led him into the paralysis which expressed itself in his depressions. Now we know in our day a lot more about this so-called absence of conflict, thanks chiefly to psychoanalysis, and that infinitely more is going on in states which seem without conflict. He then touches on the healthy will which he defines as action following vision. The vision requires a clear concept and consists of motives in their right ratio to each other—which is a fairly rationalistic picture. Discussing unhealth will, he rightly focuses on the obstructed will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Obstructed will, one illustration of this that James cites is the state that exists when our eyes lose focus and we are unable to rally our attention. We sit blankly staring and do nothing. The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin. Great fatigue or exhaustion marks this condition; and an apathy resembling that then brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a symptom of mental disease. It is interesting that he relates this apathy only to mental disease. I, for one, believe this is the chronic, endemic, psychic state of our society in our day—the neurotic personality of our time. The question then boils down to: Why does not something interest me, reach out to me, grasp me? And James then comes to the central problem of will, namely attention. I do not know whether he realized what a stroke of genius this was. When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort to attention; the strain in the willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, for instance, the strain of keeping the attention focused. The once-born type of well-adjusted person does not a lot. This leads one to a surprising, though very keen, statement of an identity between belief, attention, and will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Will and belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact. James then beguiles us with one of his completely human and Earthly illustrations. I cite it in detail because I wish to come back to it in discussing the unfinished aspects of James’ concept of will: We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how they very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. [The scene is New England before the advent of central heating.] Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this ignominious,” and so on. However, still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” and idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the col during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. James concludes that the moment the inhibition ceases, the original idea exerts its effect, and up we get. He adds, with typical Jamesian confidence, that “This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.” Let us now take, for our special examination, James’s own example. We note that then he gets to the heart of the problem of will in this illustration there comes a remarkable statement. He writes, “We suddenly find that we have got up.” That is to say, he jumps over the whole problem. No decision at all occurs, but only a fortunate lapse of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, I ask, what went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? True, the paralyzing bind of his ambivalence was released. However, that is a negative statement and does not tell us why anything else happened. Surely we cannot call this just a lucky instant, as James does, or a happenstance! If our basis for will rests on the mere luck or happenstance, our house is built upon the sands indeed, and we have no basis for with at all. Now I do not mean to imply that so far James, in this example, has not said something. He has, and it is very important: the whole incident shows the bankruptcy of Victorian will power, will consisting of a faculty which is based upon our capacity to force our bodies to act against their desires. Victorian will power turned everything into a rationalistic, moralistic issue, for instance, the attraction of the warmth of the bed, the giving in to of which is ignominious, as opposed to the so-called supergo pressure to be upright, that is, up and working. Dr. Freud described at length the self-deceit and rationalization involved in Victorian will power and I believe, dethroned it once and for all. The example shows James’s own struggle against the paralyzing effects of Victorianism, in which the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and the real moral issue get entirely lost in the shuffle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
So we return to our crucial question. What went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? James only tells us that we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life. Ah, here lies our secret! Psychotherapy has brought us a good deal of data about that revery which James did not have—and I do not believe that we fall into it at all. For purposes of clarity, I shall state here my own argument concerning unfinished business in James’s concept of will. I as it is also omitted by us in contemporary psychology. The answer does not lie in James’s conscious analysis or in Dr. Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, but in a dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and unconscious, and both cognition and conation. Along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, we also should recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves. As modern mortals have given up sovereignty over their bodies, so also have they surrendered the unconscious side of their personality, and it has become almost alien to them. When we cut off an exceedingly great and significant portion of the self, we are then no longer able to use much of the wisdom and power of the unconscious. It puts us in the position of trying to drive a BMW 5 series with the reins attached to only one wheel. Though the tendencies and intuitions in the unconscious are blocked off from our conscious awareness, they are still part of the self and accessible in various degrees to being made conscious. The sooner we recover sovereignty in that portion of the kingdom the better. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Understanding dreams is of course a subtle and complex matter—though it is not so complex as one would think when one reads about the esoteric symbols in much modern dream interpretation. These esoteric symbols put the whole problem back into a foreign language again—and that is another way, perhaps the typically modern way, of surrendering our sovereignty over the unconscious aspects of ourselves. As though we were saying the authorities and those who know the magic answers can understand our dreams, but we cannot ourselves! Dr. Erich Froom’s book, The Forgotten Language, points out that dreams, like myths and fairy tales, are not all a foreign language, but are in reality part of the one universal language shared my all humankind. Dr. Fromm’s book is to be recommended to the nontechnical reader who wishes to relearn something about this subconscious language of his fatherland. Dreams are expressions not only of conflicts and repressed desires, but also of previous knowledge that one has learned, possibly many years before, and thinks one has forgotten. Even the unskilled person, if one takes the attitude that what one’s dreams tell one is not simply to be rejected as silly, may get occasional useful guidance from one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And the person who has become skillful in the understand of what one is saying to oneself in one’s dreams can get from them, from time to time, marvelously valuable hints and insights into solutions to problems. The more self-awareness a person has, the more alive one is. The more consciousness, the more self. Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experiences of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring. This view of what it means to become a person, in conclusion, saves us from two errors. The first is passivism—letting the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. It was the epoch-making discovery of Dr. Freud to show how much every person is pushed by unconscious fears, desires and tendencies of all sorts, and that mortal is really much less a master in the household of one’s own mind than in the Victorian mortal of will power fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces, which Dr. Freud himself partly succumbed to. The early psychotherapist Dr. Grodeck, for example, wrote, “We are lived by our unconscious,” and Dr, Freud in a letter commended him for his emphasis on the passivity of the ego. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, we must underline to correct a partial misunderstanding, that the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness. The goal of psychoanalysis, as he said time and again, was to make the unconscious conscious: to enlarge the scope of awareness; to help the individual become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship; and this to help the person consciously direct one’s own ship. Hence the emphasis on the heightened awareness of one’s self, and the warning against passivism, have much in common with the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s thought. The other error of this view of the person enables us to avoid is activism—that is, using activity as a substitute for awareness. By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive. It should be clear that when we have used the term “the active I,” we have not meant busyness or merely doing things. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up their anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
People who are busy so they have something to focus on and as a result are distracted from their problems get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Chaucer has a sly and astute comment about this type, represented in the merchant in Canterbury Tales, “Methinks he seemed busier than he was.” It is true, however, when life is not going the way you like it and you have a lot of problems that you cannot resolve on your own, being busy gives you a sense of purpose, it makes life worth living and it makes the days rip by life a vampire speed reading a novel. You wake up, stay busy, and before you know it is bed time, you are one day closer to being free. Keeping busy is the only reason some people are still alive. Our emphasis on self-awareness certainly includes actin as an expression of the alive, integrated self, but it is the opposite to activism—the opposite, that is, to acting as an escape from self-awareness. Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western World, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to oneself, work for us modern mortals—who are the great toilers and producers—will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of person who has consciously affirmed one’s relatedness to one’s World and one’s fellow mortals. The nature of faith justifies the history of religion and makes it understandable as a history of mortal’s ultimate concern, of one’s response to the manifestation of the holy in many places in many ways. A divine figure ceases to create reply, it ceases to be a common symbol and loses its power to move for action. Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed truth of faith for a certain group now only remind of the faith of the past. They have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived. Probably not for those to whom they have died! A symbol of faith is infinite because it is not idolatrous. However, the human mind is a continuously working factory of idols. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Everything said about faith is derived from the experience of actual faith, of faith as a living reality, or in a metaphoric abbreviation, of the life of faith. Without the manifestation of God in mortals the question of God and faith in God are not possible. There is no faith without participation. Since the life of faith is life in the state of ultimate concern and no human being can exist completely without such a concern, we say: Neither faith nor doubt can be eliminate from mortals as mortals. Faith and doubt have been contrasted in such a way that the quiet certainty of faith has been praised as the complete removal of doubt. There is, indeed, a serenity of the life in faith beyond the disturbing struggles between faith and doubt. To attain such a state is a natural and justified desire of every human being. Doubt is not overcome by repression, but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. All this is declared about living faith, of faith as actual concern, and not of faith as a traditional attitude without tensions, without doubt and without courage. Faith in this sense, which is the attitude of many members of the churches as well as of society at large. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In mystical literature the vision of God is described as the stage which transcends the state of faith either after the Earthly life or in rare moments within it. In the complete reunion with the divine ground of being, the element of distance is overcome and with it uncertainty, doubt, courage and risk. The finite is taken into the infinite; it is not extinguished, but it is not separated either. This is not the ordinary human situation. To the state of separated finitude belong faith and the courage to risk. The risk of faith is the concrete content of one’s ultimate concern. Jesus and Satan appear as representative of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and mortals. Jesus is the representative being, and his manifestation is a symbol of the Savior of humanity. The World has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels. Yet even the victory of these principles could not destroy the longing for the realization of full being, expressed by Jesus as well as by many other great Masters who lived before him and after him. When you use things with a hardened heart, you use what is alien to you, and that indulgent, selfish use is avarice, which is the root of all evil. Some people hold to their selfish nature, and they may have the name of being saintly on the basis of the external appearances, but inside they are asses, because they do not grasp the meaning of divine truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, this does not mean that we should not have anything, it just means that we should not be bound by anything. God wants to act in the soul, and he himself must be in the place in which he acts—and that he would like to do. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves bad, they become bad; that is, when we hold onto them, when they become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block our self-realization. People need to uncover their most hidden secrete ties of selfishness, of intentions, and opinions. However, the fact of the matter is most people will not analyze their behavior nor recognize their own errors until they are faced with extreme hardship. It is not a character building exercise, but it reveals your truth self. Some people walk away from their trials and tribulations a much better person, others walk away from their trials and tribulations with a spirit of lack and limitation and will do whatever they can to prosper, even if it means hurting their own family to get ahead in the World. Therefore, people should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are. Thus take care that your emphasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of things to be done. Emphasize rather the fundamentals on which your work rests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Our being is the reality, the spirit that moves us, the character that impels our behavior; in contrast, the deeds or opinions that are separated from our dynamic core have no reality. We are to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy. Activity means to go out of oneself. Run into peace. The person who is in the state of running, of continuous running into peace is a Heavenly person. One continually runs and moves and seeks peace in running. The active vessel is alive and it grows and it is filled and never will be full. Out of this criterion comes the message which is the very heart of Christianity and makes possible the courage to affirm faith in the Christ, namely, that in spite of all forces of separation between God and mortals this is overcome from the side of God. One of the forces of separation is a doubt which tries to prevent the courage to affirm one’s faith. Although we are never able to bride the infinite distance between the infinite and the finite from the side of faith, this alone makes the courage of faith possible. The risk of failure, of error and of idolatrous distortion can be taken, because the failure cannot separate us from what is our ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
You Love No One but Still You Lost My Heart Like the Petals from a Rose—My Soul is at Liberty and Became so Wondrous Dear!
To return to the inescapable question of Salvation, yes, I do remain rooted in a relativistic Universe, no matter how spectacularly defined I have become as to form and function, and I find myself within the same dimension. The German word for resolve is Entschossenheit, and it points to the symbol of unlocking what anxiety, subjection to conformity, and self-seclusion have locked. Once it is unlocked, one can act, but not accord to norms given by anybody or anything. Nobody can give directions for the actions of the resolute individual—no God, no conventions, no laws of reason, no norms or principles. We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go. Our conscience is the call to ourselves. It does not tell anything concrete, it is neither the voice of God nor the awareness of eternal principles. It calls us to ourselves out of the behavior of the average mortal, out of daily talk, the daily routine, out of the adjustment which is the main principle of the conformist courage to be as a part. However, if we follow this call we become inescapably guilty, not through moral weakness but through our existential situation. Having the courage to be as ourselves we become guilty, and we are asked to take this existential guilt upon ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Meaninglessness in all its aspects can be faced only by those who resolutely take the anxiety of finitude and guilt upon themselves. There is no norm, no criterion for what is right and wrong. Resoluteness makes right what shall be right. The essence of mortals is their existence. That idea can be the most despairing and the most courageous idea in all of Existentialism. What it says is that there is no essential nature of mortals, expect in the point that one can make of oneself what one wants. Humans create what they are. Nothing is given to them to determine their creativity. The essence of one’s being—the should-be, the ought-to-be, –is not something which one finds; one makes it. Mortals are what they make of themselves. And the courage to be as oneself is the courage to make of oneself what one wants to be. We are surrounded by things of whose nature and origin we know nothing. The telephone, radio, phonograph, and all other complicated machines are almost as mysterious to us as they would be to a mortal from a primitive culture; we know how to use them, that is, we know which button to turn, but we do not know on what principle they function, expect in the vaguest terms of something we once learned at school. And things which do not rest upon difficult scientific principles are almost equally alien to us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
We do not know how bread is made, how cloth is woven, how a table is manufactured, how a glass is made. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. Our way of consumption necessarily results in the fact that we are never satisfied, since it is not our real concrete person which consumes a real or concrete thing. We this develop an ever-increasing need for more things, for more consumption. It is true that as long as the living standard of the population is below a dignified level of subsistence, there is a natural need for more consumption. It is also true tat here is a legitimate need for more consumption as mortals develop culturally and has more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, books, etc. However, our craving for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of mortals. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give mortals a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. Wit a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslave mortals. Mortals today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially, new things. One’s is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. 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 secondary. Modern mortals, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, and oneself having plenty of money with which to buy them. One would wander around open-mouthed with dreamy eyes in this Heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were every more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than he or she. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
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 attitudes, a certain sense of loving a possession existed between a mortal and their property. It grew on the individual. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one has to part from it because one could not use it anymore. There is very little left of this sense of property today. One loves the newness of the things bought, and is ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. There is this receptive orientation, in which the aim is to receive, to drink in, to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were. This receptive orientation is blended with the marketing orientation, while in the nineteenth century the hoarding was blended with the exploitative orientation. The alienated attitude toward consumption not only exists in our acquisition and consumption of commodities, but it determines far beyond this employment of leisure time. What are we to expect? If a mortal works without genuine relatedness to what one is doing, if one buys and consumes commodities in an abstractified and alienated way, how can one make use of one’s leisure time in an active and meaningful way? One always remains the passive an alienated consumer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
People consume ball games, moving pictures, newspapers and magazines, books, lectures, natural scenery, social gatherings, in the same alienated and abstractified way in which one consumes the commodities one has bought. One does not participate actively, one wants to take in all there is to be had, and to have as much as possible of pleasure, culture and what not. Actually, one is not free to enjoy one’s leisure; one’s leisure-time consumption is determined by industry, as are the commodities one buys; one’s taste is manipulated, one wants to see and hear what one is conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is an industry like any other, the customer is made to buy fun as one is made to buy dresses and shoes. The value of the fun is determined by its success on the market, not by anything which could be measured in human terms. In any productivity and spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In the alienated form of pleasure something happens within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. One of the most striking examples for this kind of pleasure consumption is the taking of snapshots, which has become one of the most significant leisure activities. The Kodak slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” which since 1889 has helped so much to popularize photography all over the World, is symbolic. It is one of the earliest appears to the push-button power-feeling; you do nothing, you do not have to know anything, everything is done for you; all you have to do is press the button. Indeed, the taking of snapshots has become one of the most significant expressions of alienated visual perception, of sheer consumption. The tourist with one’s camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the World. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually one does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for the individual, and the outcome of one’s pleasures trip is a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which one could have had, but did not have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Our actual helplessness before the forces which govern us appears more drastically in those social catastrophes which, even though they have denounced as regrettable accidents each time, so far have never failed to happen: economic depressions and wars. These social phenomena appear as if they were natural catastrophes, rather than what they really are, occurrences made by mortals, but without intention and awareness. The anonymity of the social forces is inherent in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to most other societies in which social laws are explicit and fixed on the basis of political power or tradition—Capitalism does not have such explicit laws. It is based on the principles that is only everybody strives for oneself on the market, the common good will come out of it, order not anarchy will result. There are, of course, economic laws which govern the market, but these laws operate behind the back of the acting individual, who is concerned only with one’s private interests. You can try to guess these laws of the market as a Calvinist in Geneva tried to guess whether God had predestined him for salvation or not. However, the law of the market, like God’s will are beyond the reach of your will and influence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Science cannot explain why the World makes scientific sense. It cannot explain why we are here, or, now that we are here, what we should do about it. For a moment, let us imagine what thinking must have been like for the firs people who were aware that they were aware. They had no words to describe the World they were experiencing. Because we think in symbols, it is difficult for us to imagine what those early people, who had no symbols, thought, but we can try. The first people began to collect information about the World. They saw a large, bright object move across the sky. It had a profound effect upon their bodies. While it was there, they felt warm, and they could see. In its absence, the World became dark and cold. As time passed, those first human beings saw the trees drop their leaves and die. Then, magically, the trees came back to life in brilliant colors and alluring smells. Finally, those trees produced an object that was good to eat. Then the trees appeared to die, only to return to give birth again and again. Try to imagine how awed early people must have been by these simple events. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The first humans were becoming aware. However, they had no word-symbols to express that awareness in thought or speech. Then perhaps one day two human beings both made a similar sound while grabbing for the same fruit. They walked on apart, but perhaps one of these people heard yet another person make the same sound, and, magically, the picture of the fruit appeared in the mind of this early human being. It was probably through random events such as this that people began the process of naming objects and understanding their World. The limits of our language mean the limits of our World. A new World is the beginning of a new language. A new language is the seed of a new World. The relationship the artist and the neurotic, often considered mysterious, is entirely understandable from the viewpoint presented here. Both artist and neurotic speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this absolutely, communicating what one experiences to one’s fellow people. The neurotic does this negatively. Experiencing the same underlying meanings and contradictions of one’s culture, one is unable to form one’s experiences into communicable meaning for oneself and one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Art and neurosis both have a predictive function. Since art is communication springing from unconscious levels, it presents to us an image of a person which is as yet present only in those members of the society who, by virtue of their own sensitized consciousness, live on the frontier of their society—live, as it were, with one foot in the future. The artist anticipates the later scientific and intellectual experience of the race. The water reeds and ibis legs painted in triangular designs on Neolithic vases in ancient Egypt were the prediction of the later development of geometry and mathematics by which the Egyptian read the stars and measured the Nile. In the magnificent Greek sense of proportion of the Parthenon, in the powerful dome of Roman architecture, and in the medieval cathedral, one can trace how, in a given period of history, art expresses the meanings and trends which are as yet unconscious, but which will later be formulated by the philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists of the society. The arts anticipate the future social and technological development by a generation when the change is more superficial, or by centuries when the change, as the discovery of mathematics, is profound. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
By the same token, we find the artists expressing the conflict in the society before these conflicts emerge consciously in the society as a whole. The artist—who is the antennae of the race—is living out, in forms that only one can create, the depths of consciousness which one experiences in one’s own being as one struggles with and molds one’s World. Here we are plunged immediately into the center of the issues for the World presented by our contemporary painters and dramatists and other artists is a schizoid World. They have presented the condition of our World which makes the tasks of living and willing peculiarly difficult. It is a World in which, amid all the vastly developed means of communication that bombard us on all sides, actual personal communication is exceedingly difficult and rare. The most significant dramatists of our time are those who take as their subject matter precisely this loss of communication between persons is all but destroyed. We live out our lives talking to tape recorder; our existence become more lonely as the digital assistants, radios and TV’s and computers and mobile phones and telephone extensions in our house become more numerous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Ionesco has a scene in his play, The Bald Soprano, in which a man and a woman happen to meet and engage in polite, if mannered, conversation. As they talk they discover that they both came down to New York on the ten o’clock train that morning from New Haven, and, surprisingly, the address of both is the same building on Fifth Avenue. Lo and behold, they also live in the same apartment and both have a daughter seven years old. They finally discover to their astonishment that they are man and wife. We find the same situation among the painters. Cezanne, the acknowledged father of the modern art movement, a man who in his own life was as undramatic and bourgeois as only a middle-class Frenchman can be, paints this schizoid World of spaces and stones and trees and faces. He speaks to us out of the Old World of mechanics but forces us to live in the new World of free-floating spaces. Here we are beyond causes and effects, both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cezanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. There is a rapport between Cezanne’s schizoid temperament and his work because the work reveals a metaphysical sense of the infirmary. In this sense to be schizoid and to be Cezanne come to the same thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Only a schizoid man could paint a schizoid World; which is to say, only a man sensitive enough to penetrate to the underlying psychic conflicts could present out World as it is in its deeper forms. However, in the very grasping of our World by art there is also our protection from the dehumanizing effects of technology. The schizoid character lies in both the confronting of the depersonalizing World and the refusing to be depersonalized by it. For the artist finds deeper planes of consciousness where we can participate in human experience and nature below superficial appearances. The case may be clearer in Van Gogh, whose psychosis was not unconnected with his volcanic struggle to paint what he perceived. Or in Picasso, flamboyant as he may seem to be, whose insight into the schizoid character of our modern World is seen in the fragmented bulls and torn villagers in Guernica, or in the distorted portraits with mislocated eyes and ears—paintings not named but numbered. This is the first age in which the artist does not have a community; one must now, like all of us, make one’s own. The artist presents the broken image of mortals but transcends it in the very act of transmuting it into art. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is one’s creative act which gives meaning to the nihilism, alienation, and other elements of modern mortal’s condition. Thus the illness ceases to be an absurd fact and a fate, and becomes a general possibility of human existence. The neurotic and the artist—since both lived out the unconscious of the race—reveal to us what is gong to emerge endemically in the society later on. The neurotic feels that same conflicts arising from one’s experience of nihilism, alienation, and so on, but one is unable to give them meaningful form; one is caught between one’s incapacity to mold these conflicts into creative works on one hand and one’s inability to deny them on the other. The neurotic is the artiste manqué, the artist who cannot transmute one’s conflicts into art. To admit this as a reality not only gives us our liberty as creative persons but also the basis of our freedom as human beings. By the same token, confronting at the outset the fact of the schizoid state of our World may give us a basis for discovering love and will for our own age. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Yet, people use different kinds of ploys to avoid intimate confrontation and interaction with other people. Some of these actions are Rituals we all use casually: “Hi; nice weather; right?” “Think it will rain?” “Wonderful party; we sure enjoyed ourselves,” “How are things with you?” These are familiar sayings; we all use them. They are Rituals when we do not much care about the answers or when we use these words to fill in awkward gaps in out time- and space-structuring. After Rituals come the Pastimes, activities used to full up time or space: Homework, TV Viewing, Dating, Fixing the Car, Solitaire, Eating Dinner. In other words, any activity in which we engage for the express purpose, conscious or otherwise, of avoiding intimate encounter is simply a Pastime. When we view TV in order to not talk to our family or spouse, we are indulging in an action that is less than authentic or sincere. Finally, the Games themselves. These are complex maneuvers, usually motivated by unconsciousness, designed to being about some kind of Payoff. The Payoff may be a put-down of someone else, or even of yourself. The Payoff may be a breaking off of a relationship that is too threatening or anxiety-producing. The Payoff may be getting somebody else hurt or wounded. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
It is also time we all recognize that psychotherapists are human beings, nothing more. Sometimes therapists, out of their Child’s need for extra credit, or their Parent’s need to be authoritative, will encourage games in the process of therapy, without realizing that they are playing them. Any therapist who has excessive needs for respect or worship is falling into a manipulative trap and may be exploiting his or her clients for one’s own self-enhancement. This is hardly self-actualizing behavior. Of course, sometimes clients put their therapists in a god-like role, either because they need an authority-father-figure to relate to, or as a way of conning the therapist. Sometimes a client can build the therapist up by flattering him or her (“You are Uncommonly Perceptive, Doctor”) as a way of keeping the focus on him or her, or so the therapist, out of some distorted sense of obligation, will not dig any deeper into one’s life. Therapy is a situation that is liable to the same pitfalls as any other interpersonal relationship. We still should be impressed with the need for human beings to develop the ability to be intimate with each other. Self-Disclosure is important for optimum mental health, or psychological wholeness, comes about when a person is able to disclose important feelings, ideas, fears, wishes, or memories to at least one significant person. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Self-disclosure should be at the level of intimacy, that is, real authentic, un-defensive, and part of the very person being of the individual. This is important in order that we experience the feeling of closeness of being personal with one other human being. The surprising truth is that our weaknesses can be a blessing when they humble us and turn us to Christ. Discontent becomes divine when we humbly approach Jesus Christ with our want, rather than hold back in self-pity. In fact, Jesus’s miracles often begin with a recognition of want, need, failure, or inadequacy. The truth is that each of us is one generation away from Deity—each is a child of God. And just as God has done with both prophets and ordinary men and women through the ages, so Heavenly Father intends to transform us. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. God is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, then you see God is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but God is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. Because of our Savior’s atoning sacrifice, we can be made equal to the tasks that lie ahead. Divine discontent can move us to act in faith, follow the Savior’s invitations to do good, and give our lives humbly to him. “Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth in the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no mortal,” reports Ether 3.21. Modern cynics are not ready to follow anybody. They have no belief in reason, no criterion of truth, no set of values, no answer to the question of meaning. They try to undermine every norm put before them. Their courage is expressed not creatively but in their form of life. They courageously reject any solution which would deprive them of their freedom of rejecting whatever they want to reject. The cynics are lonely although they need company in order to show their loneliness. They are empty of both preliminary meanings and an ultimate meaning, and therefore easy victims of neurotic anxiety. Much compulsive self-affirmation and much fanatical self-surrender are expressions of the noncreative courage to be as oneself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, in the crucible of Earthly trials, patiently move forward, and the Savior’s healing power will bring you light, understanding, peace, and hope. “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each person should give what one has decided in one’s heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. A it is written: He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.6-9. We search for happiness. We long for peace. We hope for love. And the Lord showers us with amazing abundance of blessings. However, intermingled with the joy and happiness, one thing is certain: there will be moments, hours, days, sometimes years when our souls will be wounded. “Let you in, into my World. I gave you things you said you deserved, but you took all I had and through it back in my face. Through the hardest time was possible place. I know that I was not to blame. So go ahead and take everything. When it is over, I will still be standing because I was here from the start. You love no one, but still you lost my heart. With all my plans, you followed me. You crossed you heart and said you believed,” reports Gareth Emery and Emma Hewitt – Take Everything. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
All Other Hearts I knew My Worthiness is All My Doubt—Conform My Soul as ‘t Were a Church
The Savage Garden—it is just a phrase I used to use for Earth in the old times when I did not believe in anything, when I believed the only laws were aesthetic laws. But I was young then and expecting further miracles. Before I knew we knew more of nothing, and nothing more. Sometimes I think of the phrase again when the night is like this, so accidentally beautiful. Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of mortal by mortal. Since the modern capitalist employs labor, the social and political form of this exploitation has changes; what has not changed is that the owner of capital uses other mortals for the purpose of his or her own profit. The basic concept of use has nothing to do with cruel, or not cruel, ways of human treatment, but with the fundamental fact that one mortal serves another for purposes which are not one’s own but those of the employer. The concept of use of mortal by mortal has nothing to do even with the question whether one mortal uses another, or uses oneself. The fact remains the same, that a mortal, a living human being, ceases to be an end in himself, and becomes the means for the economic interests of another mortal, or oneself, or of an impersonal giant, the economic machines. “For he truly spake many great things unto them, which were hard to be understood, save a mortal should inquire of the Lord; and they being hard in their hearts, therefore, they did not look unto the Lord as they ought,” 1 Nephi 15.3. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
There are obvious objections to the foregoing statements. One is that modern mortals are free to accept or to decline a contract, and therefore one is a voluntary participant in one’s social relation to the employer, and not a thing. However, this objection ignores the fact that in the first place one has no choice but to accept the existing conditions, and secondly, that even if one were not forced to accept these conditions, one would still be employed, that is, made use of for purposes not one’s own, but of the capital whose profit one serves. The other objection is that all social life, even in its most primitive form, requires a certain amount of social co-operation, and even discipline, and that certainly in the more complex form of industrial production, a person has to fulfill certain necessary and specialized functions. While this statement is quite true, it ignores the basic difference: in a society where no person has power over another, each person fulfills one’s functions on the basis of co-operation and mutuality. No one can command another person, except insofar as a relationship is based on mutual co-operation, on love, friendship or natural bonds. “Do ye not remember the things which the Lord hath said?—If ye will not harden your hearts, and ask me in faith, believing that ye shall receive, with diligence in keeping my commandments, surely these things shall be made known unto you,” reports 1 Nephi 15.11. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
Actually we find this present in many situations in our society today: the normal co-operation of husband and wife in their family life is to a large extent not any more determined by the power of the husband to command his wife, as it existed in antiquated forms of patriarchal society, but on the principle of co-operation and mutuality. The same holds true for the relationship of friends, inasmuch as they perform certain services for each other and co-operate with each other. In these relationships no one would dare to think of commanding the other person; the only reason for expecting one’s help lies in the mutual feeling of love, friendship or simply human solidarity. The help of another person is secured by my active effort, as a human being, to elicit one’s love, friendship and sympathy. In the relationship of the employer to the employee, this is not the case. The employer has bought the services of the worker, and however human one’s treatment may be, one still commands one, not on a basis of mutuality, but on the basis of having bought one’s working time for so many hours a day. The use of mortal by mortal is expressive of the system of values underlying the capitalistic system. Capital, the dead past, employs labor—the living vitality and power of the present. In the capitalistic hierarchy of values, capital stands high.er than labor, amassed things higher than the manifestations of life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Capital employs labor, and not labor capital. The person who owns capital commands the person who only owns one’s life, human skill, vitality and creative productivity. Things are higher than mortals. The conflict between capital and labor is much more than the conflict between classes, more than their fight for a greater share of the social product. It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the World of things, and their amassment, and the World of life and its productivity. Every time I insist on having my own rights, I hurt the Son of God, while in fact I can prevent Jesus from being hurt if I will endure the challenge myself. A disciple realized that it is one’s Lord’s honor that is at stake in one’s life, not one’s own honor. My life’s spiritual honor and duty is to fulfill my debt to Christ in relation to lost souls. Every tiny bit of my life that has value I owe to the redemption of Jesus Christ. Am I doing anything to enable Christ to bring his redemption into evident reality in the lives of others? “In the name of the Almighty God, I command you that ye touch me not, for I am filled with the power of God, even unto the consuming of my flesh; and whose shall lay his or her hands upon me shall wither even as a dried reed; and one shall be as naught before the power of God, for God shall smite that individual,” reports 1 Nephi 17.48. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Closely related to the problem of exploitation and use, although even more complicated, is the problem of authority in modern mortals. Any social system in which one group of the population is commanded by another, especially if the latter is a marginalized member of the population, must be based on a strong sense of authority, a sense which is increased in a strongly patriarchal society where the male gender is supposed to be superior to and in control of the female gender. Since the problem of authority is so crucial for our understanding of human relations in any kind of society, and since the attitude of authority has changed fundamentally from the past to the present, authority is not a quality one person has, in the sense that one has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to oneself. However, there is a fundamental difference between a kind of superiority-inferiority relation which can be called rational authority and one which may be described as inhibiting, or irrational authority. An example will show what I have in mind. The relationship between teacher and student that between slave owner and slave are both based on the superiority of the one over the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The interest of teacher and pupil are compelled in the same direction. If the teacher succeeds in furthering the pupil, he or she is satisfied. If the teacher has failed to do so, the failure is the teacher problem and the pupil’s problem. The slave owner, on the other hand, wants to exploit the enslaved human being, which is why the call them salves. It is an effort to classify them as problem which is not even worthy of being. The slave owner wants to exploit the slave as much as possible; the more one gets out of the slave, the more the slave master is satisfied. At the same time, the slave seeks to defend as best he or she can one’s claims for a minimum of happiness. These interests are definitely antagonistic, as what is of advantage to the one is detrimental to the other. The superiority has a different function in both cases: in the first, it is the condition for helping of the person subjected to the authority; in the second, it is the condition for one’s exploitation. The dynamics of authority in these two types are different too: the more the student learns, the less wide is the gap between one and the teacher. One becomes more and more like the teacher. In other words, the rational authority relationship tends to dissolve itself. However, when the superiority serves as a basis for exploitation, the distance becomes intensified through its long duration. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The psychological situation is different in each of these authority situations. In the first, elements of love, admiration, or gratitude are prevalent. The authority is at the same time an example with which one wants to identify one’s self partially or totally. In the second situation, resentment or hostility will arise against the exploiter, subordination to whom is against one’s own interests. However, often as in the case of a slave, one’s hatred would only lead to conflicts which would subject the slave to suffering without a chance of winning. Therefore, the tendency will usually be to repress the feeling of hatred and sometimes even to replace it by a feeling of blind admiration. This has two functions: to remove the painful and dangerous feeling of hatred, and to soften the feeling of humiliation. If the person who rules over me is so wonderful or perfect, then I should not be ashamed of obeying him or her. I cannot be one’s equal because he or she is so much stronger, wiser, better, and so on, than I am. As a result, in the inhibiting kind of authority, the element either of hatred or of irrational overestimation and admiration of the authority will tend to increase. In the rational kind of authority, the strength of the emotional ties will tend to decrease in direct proportion to the degree in which the person subjected to the authority becomes stronger and thereby more similar to the authority. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The difference between rational and inhibiting authority is only a relative one. Even in the relationship between slave and master there are elements of advantage for the slave. One gets a minimum of food and protection which at least enables one to work for the master. (Provided one does not get beat to death for not producing enough, or disabled to the point they cannot work and are deemed useless, at which point food and shelter and the luxury of life might cease.) On the other hand, it is only in an ideal relationship between teacher and the student that we find a complete lack of antagonism of interests. There are many gradations between these two extreme cases, as in the relationship of a factory worker with his or her boss, or a farmer’s son with his father, or a hausfrau with her husband. Nevertheless, although in reality the two types of authority are blended, they are essentially different, and an analysis of a concrete authority situation must always determine the specific weight of each kind of authority. The character of society a mixture of rational and irrational authority, with essentially a hierarchical blend, based on divine law and tradition, where the ownership of capital allows one to buy and thus command labor of those who do not, and the latter has to obey, under penalty of going on government relief or starvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
One cannot deny that in America today, there is a certain blending between slavery and freedom, the new and the old hierarchical pattern. The state, especially in the monarchial form, cultivates the antiquated virtues of obedience and submission, and applies them to new contents and values. Obedience, int the middle class, is still one of the fundamental virtues and disobedience one of the elementary vices. “They were confounded and could not contend against me; neither durst they lay their hands upon me nor touch me with their fingers, even for the space of many days. Now they durst not do this lest they should wither before me, so powerful was the Spirit of God; and this it has wrong upon them. And it came to pass that the Lord declared unto me: Stretch forth thine hand again unto thy brethren, and they shall not wither before thee, but I will shock them, saith the Lord, and this will I do, that they may know that I am the Lord their God. And it came to pass that I stretched forth my hand unto my people, and they did not wither before me; but the Lord did shake them, even according to the word which he had spoken,” reports 1 Nephi 17.52-54. At the same time, however, rational authority had developed side by side with irrational authority. Since the Reformation and the Renaissance mortals had begun to rely on their own reason as a guide to action and value judgment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
The mortals felt proud to have convictions which were theirs, and they respected the authority of scientists, philosophers, historians, who helped them to form one’s own judgments and to be sure of one’s own conviction. The decision between true and false, right and wrong, was one of the utmost important and, indeed, both the moral and the intellectual conscience assumed a paramount place in the character structure of current mortals. One may not have applied the rules of one’s conscience to mortals of a different color or even of a different social class, yet to some extent one was determined by one’s sense of right and wrong, and at least by the repression of the awareness of wrong-doing, if one did succeed in avoiding wrong action. “May God arise, may his enemies be scattered; may his foes flee before him. As smoke is blown away by the wind, may you blow them away; as wax melts before the fire, may the wicked perish before God. However, may the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; may they be happy and joyful. Sing to God and praise to his name, extol him who rides on the clouds—his name is the LORD—and rejoice before him. A father to the fatherless, a defender of windows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a Sun-scorched land,” reports Psalm 68.1-6. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the possession of the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or we suffer from this neglect of ourselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. “And the fire will never leave us though the path divides between us. You always had the strength to walk alone and the quiet hours would haunt you and the wilder winds, they called you, I almost had the strength to let you go. Why were you falling? Far, far away. I still remember you and those days could not get better. I keep it all, this will not fade, I will never let it. I know you gave it all so good, I cannot forget it. Still lost in you, on that day we will stay forever. Stay forever. And I know that time is speeding, experiences fleeting. I would give them all away to bring you home. Why were you falling? Far, far away. Forever lost in you and those days could not get better. I keep it all, this will not fade, I will never let it. I know you gave it all so good, I cannot forget it. Still lost in you, on that day we will stay forever. Forever lost in you…” reports Emma Hewitt (Still remember). Power incubates within the soul and then makes its influential move into life as the expression of the soul. If there is so soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soulfulness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Not with a Club the Heart is Broken, Nor with a Stone—I think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven!
Oh, and it is the same old beat with you, Erich, you Devil, you want to do it, you want to, you want to see it, you greedy little beast, you cannot give her over to the Angels and you know they are waiting! You know the God who can sanctify her suffering has purified her an will forgive her last cries. Mental health is to be determined objectively and society has both a furthering and a distorting influence on mortals, contradicts not only the relativistic view, discussed in the past, but two other views which I want to discuss now. One, decidedly the most popular one today, wants to make us believe that contemporary Western society and more especially, the American way of life corresponds to the deepest needs of human nature and that adjustments to this way of life means mental health and maturity. Social psychology, instead of being a tool for the criticism of society, thus becomes the apologist for the status quo. The concept of maturity and mental health in this view, corresponds to the desirable attitude of a worker or employee in industry or business. Maturity is the ability to stick to a job, the capacity to give more on any job than is asked for, reliability, persistence to carry out a plan regardless of the difficulties, the ability to work with other people under organization and authority, the ability to make decisions, a will to life, flexibility, independence, and tolerance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Maturity is the virtues of a good worker, employee or soldier in the big social organizations of our time; they are the qualities which are usually mentioned in advertisements for a junior executive. To one, and many others who think like one, maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. “And now my beloved beings, I had said these things unto you that I might awaken you to a sense of your duty to God, that ye may walk blameless before him, that ye may walk after the holy order of God, after which you have been received,” reports Alma 7.22. If you remain true, you will get the sign that God is with you. When you come to your wits’ end and feel inclined to panic—do not! Stand true to God, and he will bring out his truth in a way that will make your life an expression of worship. Put into practice what you have learned. Make a determination to trust in God. “The house of the LORD God is to be here,” reports 1 Chronicles 22.1. If you have always prided yourself on your sensitivity to the needs of others, you may find resistance when you adopt toughness. Sometimes when people look at it, it is like someone turned on the Christmas lights, it makes them giddy and full of joy. Will you be accepted? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. However, in contrast to this view is the one which runs from Dr. Freud, and which assumes a basic and unalterable contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction which follows from the alleged asocial nature of mortals. For Dr. Freud, mortals are driven by two biologically rooted impulses: the craving for sexual pleasure, and for destruction. The aim of one’s sexual desire is complete sexual freedom, that is, unlimited access to all women and men one might find desirable. Some mortals discovered by experience that sexual (genital) love affords them their greatest gratification, so that it becomes in affect the prototype of all happiness to him or her. These types of people must have been impelled to seek their happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make genital erotism the central point of one’s life. Primitive humans have yet to cope with no, or exceedingly few restrictions to the satisfaction of those basic desires. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Primitive mortals can give vent to their aggression, and there are few limitations to the satisfaction of one’s sexual impulses. In actual fact, most primitive mortals knew nothing of any restrictions on their instincts, some do not even “feel” that they have instincts. Civilized humans have exchanged some part of their changes of happiness for a measure of security. The happy savage’s aggressiveness has two sources: one, the innate striving for destruction (death instinct) and the other the frustration of one’s instinctual desires, imposed upon him or her by society. While mortals may channel part of one’s aggression against oneself, through the Super-Ego, and while a minority can sublimate their sexual desire into love of humanity, aggressiveness remains ineradicable. Mortals will always compete with, and attack each other, if not for material things, then for the prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancor and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect and that the ineffable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Since for Dr. Freud love is in its essence sexual desire, he is compelled to assume a contradiction between love and social cohesion. Love, according to him, is by its very nature egotistical and antisocial, and the sense of solidarity and humanly love are not primary feelings rooted in mortal’s nature, but aim-inhibited sexual desires. One the basis of his concept of mortals, that of their inherent wish for unlimited sexual satisfaction, and of his destructiveness, Dr. Freud must arrive at a picture of the necessary conflict between civilization and mental health and happiness. Primitive mortals are healthy and happy because one is not frustrated in one’s basic instincts, but one lacks the blessings of culture. Civilized humans are more secure, enjoy art and science, but they are bound to be neurotic because of the continued frustration of one’s instincts, enforced by civilization. For Dr. Freud, social life and civilization are essentially in contrast to the needs of human nature as he sees it, and mortals are confronted with the tragic alternative between happiness based on the unrestricted satisfaction of one’s instincts, and security and cultural achievements based on instinctual frustration, hence conducive to neurosis and all other forms of mental sickness. Civilization, to Dr. Freud, is the product of instinctual frustration and thus the cause of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Dr. Freud’s concept of human nature as being essentially competitive (and asocial) is the same as we find it in most authors who believe that the characteristics. Dr. Freud’s theory of the competitive struggles for survival. It can also be translated into the sphere of economy. There are basically two types of people, the homo sexual is and the homo economicus. One is after sex, the other is after money. Both the economic mortal and the sexual mortal are convenient fabrications whose alleged nature—isolated, asocial, greedy and competitive—makes Capitalism appear as the system which corresponds perfectly to human nature, and places it beyond the reach of criticism. The necessary conflict between human nature and society, imply the defense of contemporary society and they both are one-sided distortions. Furthermore, most ignore the fact that society is only in conflict with the asocial aspects of mortals, partly produced by itself, but often also with one’s most valuable human qualities, which is suppresses rather than furthers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
An objective examination of the relation between society and human nature must consider both the furthering and the inhibiting impact of society on humans, taking into account the nature of mortals and the needs stemming from it. The neglected pathogenic function of modern society needs to be highlighted. Many of the self-defeating behaviors are motivated by conscious needs. For instance, there appear to be people all around us who have a strong dislike for themselves. In each of us there may be a tinge of dislike for some aspect of our self: freckles, hair, teeth, vocabulary, color, accent. However,most of us manage to combine our dislike of parts of ourselves with very good feelings about the rest of the package. A few people, though, manage to reach a point where they entertain active hatred for their entire beings. They manage to pull off some of the greatest self-defeating stunts since the six hundred marched into the Valley of Death in the Crimean War! Some of these people do it with alcohol, using it precisely because they know it will put them into a state in which they will commit self-defeating or losing behavior. They drink to get courage or strength enough to hurt themselves. There are many who do the same with drugs of various kinds. Again, this is not to dispute the physiological factors of addiction or habituation. It is simply to emphasize that even before the physiological hook gets into some people, they hook themselves onto a drug or habit that will inevitably bring them down. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
An example of the conscious needs that motivate self-defeating behavior is dependency. Some people refuse to take their medicine because they like or need to be dependent on their doctors or they need their family’s concerns. Others get themselves in trouble with authorities because they need to keep themselves tied to their parents or spouses; they build a bond of trouble-rescue-restriction-release-trouble, a cycle that repeats itself week after month after year in some cases. Why? It is a bit too simple to say that the needs are always entirely conscious or even always entirely unconscious.Just as our physiques are three-dimensional, our complexities encompass behaviors that have horizontal, vertical, and depth dimensions as well. Add to this the dimensions that we call time and space and you have a model of human behavior that cannot be sketched on a flat piece of paper. Therefore, we must keep in mind the person, who will play more roles in one’s life, but—like an actor—the mortal is one person and all one’s roles are the individual, too. This multi-dimensioned person is each of us. Mixed in with all the motivations we have described as being universal are the ones that are unique to each of us. There is, therefore, no one answer to the “why?” of the behavior, whether it is the behavior of one or many. It may be instructive, but only instructive, to see what may cause actions in particular cases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If a mortal has a strong need to enter into complicated situations from which one cannot extricate oneself, we may uncover some of the reasons why, but only some of them. If you do something, even after an authority figure has told you to stop, changes are that among your individually unique needs is the need to engage in whatever destructive behavior you have been warned to stop, apparently this need is stronger than your need to stay out of danger. Some people engage in bad behavior because they feel a strong need to be punished. They feel that they can only be satisfied or happy when they are being pushed out or put into a situation where they are in some sort of danger of losing out. When these types of people win or achieve something, they feel and empty, hollow sort of triumph. Only when these individuals have guilt so ingrained in their being are punishing themselves or being punished can they admit to feelings of satisfaction. It is hard for guilt given people to admit this to friends. Not even their wives or husbands have ever heard them say these things, but their spouses notice over the years that they only seem completely happy and at ease when they are being pressured, when they are driving themselves to take on unnecessary extra work. It seemed to one woman that her husband was “trying to kill himself,” with his overly emotional and wild criminal behaviors. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Dr. Freud thought we each have an instinctive death wish. We do not find the evidence for this to be either conclusive or impressive. However, we know that many people learn to deal with their guilt feelings or their negative self-concepts by punishing themselves or by being punished. Without using the term as a diagnosis, this behavior is often called masochism. A person who is still doing something dangerous, even after being warned not to, is a symbol of all the things one does that one has been told one should not do. One is almost totally absorbed by and concerned with guilt. The diagnosis of potential death and danger us almost like a priestly issue of penance: this is what one must undergo to purge oneself of one’s guilt. Some people are begging to be punished because they want to get their just desserts, which could even be death, for being the bad person they are. “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the LORD what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing,” reports 1 Chronicles 21.24. This long example, we repeat, deals only with one person. It is not meant to explain all people who engage in risky behaviors or careers, all compulsive people, or to condemn all teachings about guilt. It is, however, instructive. Guilt, as experienced by most of us, is the feeling we have when we have let ourselves down, when we have not lived up to our own expectations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
As such, it is a good motivator: guilt enables us to shift our gears and try a different speed or direction in our behavior. We should feel guilt for committing certain social indiscretions or violations of necessary and expected behaviors. If I step on the foot a woman by accident, both my love for people and my social responsibility will produce guilt feelings. Hopefully, I will be a more careful walker in the future. However, if I tore up my feet, sold my shoes, and swore never to go near people again, I would probably be labeled neurotic—given to extreme guilt reactions. When anxiety and other strong emotions produce fears or self-defeating responses in us, we are experiencing a form of neurosis. This particular problem in living is quite common in the lives of most of us. Each of us at times, precisely because we view our many facets as separate, lets this imagined separateness become virtually real. As the gaps in our thinking about our selves grow, so the gaps and distortions really grow in our everyday behavior. It we imagine that we have a good self and a bad self, any attempt to emphasize the one we want or need to emphasize exaggerates our behaviors in that direction, almost as if we were to say: “See? That other part of me does not even exist!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Of course it exists, It is just as real and as important apart of your total self as any other part. However, it is only a part. However,it is only a part. It is so interwoven and inextricably tied in with all the other facets that often you do not know which one is which. That in itself is not bad, either. Rather than trying to single out which part is which, one would be much better off simply accepting and living with the entire package. However, this is so simple to say and so difficult to do. We are encouraged by our society’s values, by its mores, by so many things, to live only partially. Some of the negative consequences of such splitting up are separateness, marginality, and alienation. “There is a God, and he created all things, both the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon,” reports 2 Nephi 2.14. As children of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of moral agency, the capacity and power of independent action. Endowed with agency, we are agents, and we primarily are to act and not merely be acted upon—especially as we seek learning by study and also by faith. As gospel learners, we should be doers of the word, and not just hearers only. Our hearts are open to the influence of the Holy Ghost as we properly exercise agency and act in accordance with correct principles—and we thereby invite God’s teachings and testifying power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Green Bean Casserole Recipe
Preheat oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit
Use a 9 x 13 in (22.5 x 33 cm) pan
Get two pounds of green beans (fresh or frozen or even from a can). If frozen defrost first. Be sure to wash the green beans if fresh or frozen
Also get season whole wheat bread crumbs
A 26 ounce can of Cream of Mushroom Condensed Soup (1 pound 10 ounces) or (737 grams)
Mozzarella cheese low-moisture Part-skim
¼ red onion
½ yellow bell pepper
½ pack of Hillshire Farm Beef Smoked sausage diced
½ potato diced
½ pound of shredded turkey (precooked)
A few light dashes of Chef Merito Sal de Ajo (Garlic salt)
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Preparation:
Lightly sprinkle bread crumbs at the bottom of the casserole dish
Shred about ¼ a cup of mozzarella cheese and sprinkle it over the bread crumbs
Evenly apply the green beans to the casserole dish
Next add sprinkle the bell pepper, onion and meats over the green beans
Then add the 26 ounce can of Cream of Mushroom Condensed Soup and evenly spread it over the casserole mixture (do NOT dilute)
Add more bread crumbs on top as you desire (lightly and evenly over the top)
Sheard more mozzarella cheese as you desire (lightly and evenly over the top)
Then bake for about 15 to 25 minutes (make sure to set a timer so not to overcook. I would look in every 10 minutes).
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For a beverage I paired mine with a Beringe Main and Wine California White Merlot (chilled)
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And for music I listened to Artento Divini Featuring Bengaluru [Who’s Afraid of 138?!] Future Favor
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Enjoy your meal! Bon appétit !
#RandolphHarris 5 of 5
I Years Had Been from Home and Now Before the Door I Dared Not Open—Lest a Face I Never Saw Before!
The gentlemen had risen to see me off. I murmured my superficial farewells, and only then did the secret grip release me. Nonebeingis dependent on the being it negates. Dependent means two things. It points first of all to the ontological priority of being over nonbeing. The term nonbeing itself indicates this, and it is logically necessary. There could be no negation if there were no preceding affirmation to be negated. Certainly one can describe being in terms of non-nonbeing; and one can justify such a description by pointing to the astonishing prerational fact that there is something and not nothing. One could say that being is the negation of the primordial night of nothingness. However, in doing so one must realize that such an aboriginal nothing would be neither nothing nor something, that it becomes nothing only in contrast to something; in other words, that the ontological status of nonbeing as nonbeing is dependent on being. Secondly, nonbeing is dependent on the special qualities of being. In itself nonbeing has no quality and no difference of qualities. However, it gets them in relation to being. The character of the negation of being is determined by that in being which is negated. This makes it possible to speak of qualities of nonbeing and, consequently,of types of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Up to now we have used the term nonbeing without differentiation, while in the discussion of courage several forms of self-affirmation were mentioned. They correspond to different forms of anxiety and are understandable only in correlation with them. I suggest that we distinguish three types of anxiety according to the three directions in which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens human’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens human’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, absolutely in terms of condemnation. The awareness of this threefold threat is anxiety appearing in three forms, that of fate and death (briefly, the anxiety of death), that of emptiness and loss of meaning (briefly, the anxiety of meaninglessness), that of guilt and condemnation (briefly, the anxiety of condemnation). In all three forms anxiety is existential in the sense that it belongs to existence as such and not to an abnormal state of mind as in neurotic (and psychotic) anxiety. The nature of neurotic anxiety and its relation to existential anxiety will be discussed in another chapter. We shall deal now with the three forms of existential anxiety, first their reality in the life of the individual, then with their social manifestations in special periods of Western history. However, it must be stated that the differences of types does not mean mutual exclusion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
We have seen for instance that the courage to be as it appears in the ancient times conquers not only the fear of death but also the threat of meaninglessness. Sometimes we find that in spite of the predominance of threat of meaninglessness, the anxiety of death and condemnation is passionately challenged. In all representatives of classical Christianity death and sin are seen as the allied adversaries against which the courage of faith has to fight. The three forms of anxiety (and of courage) are immanent in each other but normally under the dominance of one of them. However, nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western World of the twenty first century,are eminently sane. Even the fact that a great number of individuals in our midst suffer from more or less severe forms of mental illness produces little doubt with respect to the general standard of our mental health. We are sure that by introducing better methods of mental hygiene we shall improve still further the state of mental health, and as far as individual mental disturbances are concerned, we look at them as strictly individual incidents,perhaps with some amazement that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture which is supposedly so sane. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except oneself. Many a severe neurotic believes that one’s compulsive rituals or hysterical outbursts are normal reaction to somewhat abnormal circumstances. What about ourselves? Let us, in good psychiatric fashion, look at the facts. In the last one hundred and sixty-three years, in the Western World, have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Everyone is looking with a mixture of confidence and apprehension to the World leaders of the various people, ready to heap all praise on them if the succeed in avoiding a war, and ignoring the fact that it is only these very World leaders who ever cause a war, usually not even through their bad intentions, but their unreasonable mismanagement of the affairs entrusted to them. In the last 3,000 years of history, no less than about eight thousand peace treaties were signed,each one supposed to secure permanent peace, and each one lasting on an average two years. Our direction of economic affairs is scarcely more encouraging. We live in an economic system in which a particularly good crop is often an economic disaster, and we restrict some of our agricultural productivity in order to stabilize the market, although there are millions of people who do not have the very things we restrict, and who need them badly. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Right now our economic system is function very well, because, among other reasons, we spend billions of dollars per year to produce armaments. Economists look with some apprehension to the time when we stop producing armaments, and the idea that the state should produce houses and other useful and needed things instead of weapons, easily provokes accusations of endangering freedom and individual initiative. We have a literacy above 90 percent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. However, instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of people with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in while. However, the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no immortality occurs on the screen. Any suggestion that the government should finance the production of movies and radio programs which would enlighten and improve the minds of our people would be met again with indignation and accusations in the name of freedom and idealism. “And now my children, see that ye take care of these sacred things, yea see that ye look to God and live. Go unto this people and declare the word, and be sober. My children, farewell,” reports Alma 37.44. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
A Wider Sunrise in the Dawn and a Deeper Twilight on the Lawn Keep the Faith and You Have Won!
We may work that we may keep pace with the Earth and the soul of the Earth. Always we have been told that work is a curse and a labour a misfortune. However, I say to you that when we work we fulfill a part of the Earth’s furthest dream, assigned to us when that dream was born. Work is love made visible. And if we cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that we should leave our work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11. Work, productivity, labor, creativity, and blood, sweat, and tears—it is basically our responsibility. There are conflicting views being bandied about these days concerning work and labor. As human beings in the process of finding out the most about ourselves and acting on that insight, we have a definite obligation to understand this important area of human experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
The principle of work has been taught from the foundation of the World. It is the bottom line of any forward motion of success. More than 6,000 years ago, Father Adam received the commandment, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” reports Genesis 3.19. Many people believe that people work from the cradle to the grave and that a real person is one that does his or her work and does it well. This viewpoint is in keeping with the Protestant (or Puritan) Ethic. Work is far more than just a system devised by economists or managers to keep things going. It is a part of the very nature of things, just as the Earth turns. Too often we find work to be a chore, a burden, an unpleasant thing to be avoided and it is frightening how the disappearance of work as a part of our basic ethic is becoming acceptable. We constantly hear the statements, “It is too hard, give me something easier to do,” “I cannot wait that long,” coming from our young people. The ugly disease of nothing to do is growing in epidemic proportions among us. It undermines the basic fabric of our nations. “See that ye have faith, hope, and charity, then ye will abound in good work,” Alma 7.24. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
We are what we are as a people because our ancestors were not afraid of honest, hard work. Our forefathers understood the necessity of it; sheer survival demanded it. A common ingredient among all successful people is an understanding of what constitutes paying the price of success. A common ingredient among all successful people is an understanding of what constitutes paying the price of success. Basic in that formula of paying the price is an inner gift of determination that “I will do whatever it takes. I will work hard, with integrity, to achieve my goal.” It I as natural for us to take part in the responsibilities of life as it is to breathe. Hard work is a blessing of God. It involves going after it with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. That alone is the difference between the average and the excellent. However, why is it that often we find ourselves unable to appreciate the beauty and glory of work? Why is it that even the most glamorous and stimulating work can at times seem like drudgery? It is because humans are basically lazy? It is because people consider work to be foreign to one’s nature, foreign to one’s desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain? #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
We believe that leftover vestiges of the Work-Sin Ethic and the loss of personal significance resulting from increased technology are responsible for human’s increasingly negative attitudes toward work. The system of thought and action called the Work-Sin Ethic is the underlying philosophy of the capitalistic economy of the United States and most nations in Western civilization because victory is brought to pass by one’s personal diligence and commitment to hard work, and it deserves some attention. The view of a champion, and the glory that surrounds one, must never be overshadowed by the long process of becoming one. Oddly enough, a cursory exploration of this system takes us into the realm of theology and Christian Church history. One of the ultimate strivings is the search for perfection. Based on the Old Testament account of the fall of man (“In Adam’s Fall we sinned all” says a colonial proverb), a strong notion grew up in medieval times that people should seek salvation and thus restore oneself to Adam and Eve’s original perfection. By the fifteenth century, secular affairs—economics, wars, feudal estates, monarchies, art—had become heavily entrenched in European life and the Church found itself no longer the monolithic leader in the lives of people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
The Renaissance opened people’s minds to the idea that they might be not just animals but fallen Angels. They also possessed abilities and could enjoy the products of achievement. The Protestant Reformation, usually credited to Martin Luther in 1517, added to the disunity of the Catholic World. Not only were secular affairs interfering with the spiritual strivings, but nationalistic power plays broke up the one World that had been led by the Church of Rome since the fifth century. Further, Martin Luther told people that no amount of good works would save their souls; it required only a simple faith in God. One of those directly influenced by Martin Luther was a Swiss reformer by the name of John Calvin. The Evangelical, Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and Presbyterian Churches are all direct-line heirs of John Calvin; American and European capitalism owes much of its widespread development to Calvinist theology. John Calvin had a unique theological system. It insisted that the paternal God of Martin Luther was unrealistic. The tern, autocratic God of the Old Testament was more true. This God had determined—predestined—before the beginning of time just who would be saved and who would be damned. Working out salvation by Catholic means and believing it by Lutheran faith were both futile. Only the Grace of God was involved; nothing done by humans. So, there were the elect and the damned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Calvin met the desperate queries of his followers by saying that the elect knew intuitively of their foreordained salvation, just as the damned knew of their lostness. Furthermore, declared Calvin, the elect must participate in the affairs of this World. Thus, he gave the concept of Work as a vocation a theological base Vocation comes from a Latin word meaning calling, and the term is still used when Roman Catholic clergy speak of their work as their Vocation. In Calvin’s thought, conscience, as a subjective mode of revelation, was closely related to the sense of divinity. Conscience too, he said, is part of the native endowment of all people, written upon the hearts of all. Typically he spoke of it as a sort of knowledge whose object is God’s will; or, equivalently, the difference between good and evil, the law of God, or the law of nature. Thus it is by virtue of conscience the people are aware of their responsibility—aware of the moral demands to which one is subject with respect to God and humans. Inward law, written, even engraved, upon the hearts of all, in a sense asserts the very same things that are to be learned from the [Decalogue]; and what the Decalogue requires is perfect love of God and of our neighbor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The belief system of vocation being one’s true calling assisted the economic system in Switzerland and, as it spread into Germany, did much to reinforce economic forces there. Calvin had told people that one sign of a person was one of the elects of God was one’s success in this life. Calvin also taught by reflecting on the structure of the external World and the pattern of history. “God has not only sowed in people’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken but revealed oneself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the Universe. As a consequence, people cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him,” declared John Calvin. God’s attributes—preeminently for the display of his goodness to us but also of his glory, wisdom, power, and justice. And supposedly, the damned were the failures on Earth. In fairness, the economists and historians do not blame Calvin himself for this interpretation so much as they do his secular followers. Economic success, then, came to be viewed as direct evidence of the hard work, sacrifice and self-denial found among good servants of God. O LORD, be gracious to us; we long for you. Be our strength every morning, our salvation in time of distress,” reports Isaiah 33.2. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
The Calvinist theology found its way into the lives of the people we call Puritans. The takeovers of Puritanism in Europe is a bleak, cold period of history, where art, literature, decoration and beauty were sacrificed to the harsh dictates of the stern religious teachings. The Puritan emphasized sacrifice, hard work, ambition in work and social position, temperance, and worship. The puritans made their way to the New World, and the colonial period of American history is a continual study in the gray, harsh, rigid life pattern we still refer to as Puritanism. It was in this period that children were taught that the Devil finds work for idle hands. Play was not only a luxury, but a sin. Work was human’s highest virtue, and the person who got up before the Sun and worked until one dropped, having little or no time for relaxation, creative avocations, play, or leisure-time pursuits, was the hero of colonial times. Even children were included. From the time she could hold a needle, a young colonial girl had to sew. She learned her lessons and her morality by stitching the samplers many people today collect as cherished relics and antiques. “By their work ye shall know them,” reports Moroni 7.5. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Carving out a new Europe in the hostile, forbidding colonies was considered by many to be a new Crusade. Setting up churches and converting the pagan aborigines was God’s will, the colonial theology insisted. Only incidentally were the economic exploitations acknowledged. They were justified, when someone brought them up, on evangelical grounds. Colonialism was conceived (and has been interpreted by historians ever since) as part of a God-inspired program for proving the hardihood of his elect, for enlarging his churches’ membership, and as The Great Adventure. During this time the concept of work grew into an enlarged version of the theological notion of Vocation. Work became the privilege of the elect, since it provided opportunities to demonstrate salvation through economic success and achievement. Even for those who were not too sure they were elected, there were the examples and lessons of the successful for them to follow. Workers were told not to despair if success eluded them; it was sure to be right around the corner. The Lord has commanded us not to be idle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Developing the capacity to work helps us contribute to the World in which we life. It brings an increased sense of self-worthy. It blesses us and our families, both now and in the future. However, even those who drifted away from the religious teachings of the Puritan leaders—and to do so too dramatically was to court the charge of witchcraft and heresy—the divinity of work persisted in their thinking. Work was considered noble and Godly. The morality of the times developed alongside this perception. Good people worked hard and steadily and bad people were idle or unemployed. Many of the so-called Blue Laws, still on the law books in many Eastern states, made it a crime to engage in any kind of recreation or frivolity on Sunday. Sunday for the religious was the day for worship, not just for an hour in the morning, but by Bible reading during the afternoon and church attendance in the evening. Sunday for the less religious was a day of rest, derserved by the hardworking, and given some biblical justification by the verse in Genesis telling how God had rested on the seventh day after six days of hard work creating the World. However, for Seventh Day Adventists, Saturday is the Sabbath and the day of rest and followers are not supposed to use any kind of electronic device. They are supposed to only read the Bible and go to church and pray. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
We are heirs to this puritan tradition called the Protestant or Puritan Ethic by historians and economists. It gibes all virtue to hard work, ambition, thrift, temperance, and personal piety. Since many of those who follow this philosophy are in no way connected with puritan religions, we prefer the newer labeling, the Work-Sin Ethic. What role has work played in your life? How has it blessed you and your family, both temporally and spiritually? “Thou shalt not idle away thy time, neither shalt thou bury they talent,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 60.13. Work is honorable. Developing the capacity to work will help us contribute to the World in which we live. It will bring us an increased sense of self-worthy. It will bless us and our family, both now and in the future. Learning to work begins in the home. Help your family by willingly participating in the work necessary to maintain a house. Learn early to handle your money wisely and live within your means. Follow the teachings of the prophets by paying your tithing, avoiding dent, and saving for the future. Set high gals for yourself, and be willing to work hard to achieve them. Develop self-discipline, and be dependable because if human life is to be renewed and our natural gifts are to be healed and God’s supernatural gifts restored, sin must be overcome. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Implanted on the hearts of all and clarified in the Scriptures is the affairs of a civil society. Partly due to its religious background and partly due to its traditionally being practiced, it has taken firm hold in American life: humans must work to demonstrate their humanity and their productivity and justify their being on Earth. Not to work is to be a parasite. The analogy of a large rowboat is frequently used. Each citizen is part of the crew of this Ship of State, and each one must pull one’s own oar if the vessel, USS John F. Kennedy CV-67, is not to founder. The choice was between working and being baggage, between being a good person and being a sinful person. Today, we see this attitude not only in older people who were chronologically to puritan times, but in their children and grandchildren. We find attitudes toward work that approach a worshipful level. This ethic has, of course, resulted in a tremendous vitality and upsurge in economic productivity in this nation. It has also resulted in feelings of worthlessness and guilt in people who could not keep up with the pace, who could not produce, or who had to retired before they were finished feeling productive. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Randolph Harris II International Institute 