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Life Touches the Remote Mysteries of the Divine Encounter and Reverse Cannot Befall that Fine Prosperity!
In the beauty of the World brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea waves, or on the almost eternal fold of the mountain? We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. We are free only to change the direction of our glance; we cannot walk into Heaven; we cannot rise without being lifted by grace. The vertical is forbidden to us because the World is the province of gravity and dead weight (pasanteur). The whole Universe, as we know it though the senses of the imagination, has been turned over by God to the control of brute mechanism, to necessity and blind force, and that primary physical law by which all things eternally fall. The very act of creation entailed the withdrawal of the Creator from the created, so that the sum total of God and his World and all of its creatures is, of course, in the process of becoming more like God through their own volition. God grace penetrates, like a ray of light, the dark mechanical realm of unlimited mystery. And we love this World, because we can feel God and have virtue. To God, we are like the smile of the beloved through pain, and this makes him want to redeem us and his World. God in his mercy sometimes prevents people from reading the mystics, so that is should be evident to them that they have not invented this absolutely unexpected contact. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I called out to the very most ancient one, “Aaliyah, I have made promises to those I love. Help me to keep them. Lend your most powerful ear to those whom I love. Lend your most powerful ear to me.” Where was she, the tower of ivory? The great ancestor. The one who now and then came to our assistance. I had no clue, because I had never bent my stiff neck to go in search of her. However, I knew that in her centuries of endurance she had acquired powers that surpassed all dreams and fears of mine, and that she could hear me if she chose. Aaliyah, our guardian, our mother, listen to my plea. Hear me, Sweet Aaliyah, wherever you are. Surely you know this World as no one else knows it. Have you spied these tall children? I do not dare to say their names. And then I wrapped myself in comforting phantasms, roaming the winds for my own sake, dissolved now and then in the poetry of love, and envisioning bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where I am the one I coveted could dwell. It was a blessed vision, and it is mine to enjoy. I want to lead us on a wonderous journey that weaves art and clinical insight together to project a pattern for more humane psychotherapy and better mental health. Psychological well-being comes from the act of making, from making art of stone or oils, love or death. The task of becoming human is an artist’s task, and art is thus a birthright shared by us all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Art not only enhances individual lives, it makes authentic social existence possible. If modern art seems unsure of its direction, it is because art is always first to register convulsive changes in culture. A sure index to the future is the way society reacts to its art. That may be why a society in which violence and terrorism are on the increase is actually one in which the ecstasy is actually one in which the ecstasy promised by beauty in art has doubled back on itself in a viciously destructive coil. Art thus reflects a culture’s preferences, predicts its future and provokes it to change. My firm belief is that one paints, as one writes, not out of a theory but out of the vividness of experience. When Lorenzo de’ Medici assumed control of his family in 1469, Florence, Italy was still the cultural center of the Western World. Lorenzo’s predecessors had founded the Platonic Academy of Philosophy, where the artist Sandro Botticelli studied a brand of Neoplatonic thought that transformed the philosophic writings of Plato almost into a religion. According to the Neoplatonists, in the contemplation of beauty, the inherently corrupt soul could transform its love for the physical and material into a purely spiritual love of God. Thus, Botticelli uses mythological themes to transform his pagan imagery into a source of Christian inspiration and love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
His Birth of Venus (circa 1482), the first monumental representation of the goddess in her birthday suit since ancient times, represents innocence itself, a divine beauty free of any hint of the physical and sensual. It was this form of beauty that the soul, aspiring to salvation, was expected to contemplate. For the short period at the outset of the sixteenth century, Florence was again the focal point of artistic activity. The three great artists of the High Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—all lived and worked in the city. There is a surprisingly close parallel between art and psychotherapy, and in my life they both came out of the same source. In each a new form is born not out of ideas but out of the intensity of experiences. Rational thoughts follow to anchor theoretically the truths that already have grasped us a vision. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. Our free will consists in nothing but the ability to turn, or refuse to turn, our eyes toward what God holds up before him. We are looking at what saves us. Here on Earth we must be content to be eternally hungry; indeed, we must always welcome hunger, for it is the sole proof we have of the reality of God, who is the only sustenance that can satisfy us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
In the spring of the second year of college, I realized tat the rules, principles, values by which I used to work and live simply did not suffice anymore. I got so completely fatigued that I had to go to bed for four weeks to get enough energy to continue my teaching. I had learned enough psychology at college to know that these symptoms meant that something was wrong with my whole way of life. I had to find some new goals and purposes for my living and to relinquish my moralistic, somewhat rigid way of way of existence. In the Untied States nowadays I would have gone to a therapist, but back then, I was in a psychologically strong culture where only a few people spoke my language and they did not like to bring excess attention to things that go on in their private lives. What to do? Ascending one hill I found myself suddenly knee deep in a field of wild poppies covering the whole hillside. It was a gorgeous sight: brilliantly crimson and scarlet, the poppies were lovely forms as they bent delicately in one direction and the another. Their perfect movements together seem like people in a ballet, perhaps the “Nutcracker Suite” at Christmas time. I stood there, intoxicated, wholly captivated by this sight. My poppies in their dance were swaying in unison and bowing in the slight breeze, each of them having a miraculous perfection of beauty in itself. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
When the poppies nodded toward me they presented their yellow-black centers, and when they nodded away they then seemed a fiery scarlet. I thought how good it would be to sit among these flowers and draw their forms so that I would never forget them. So I went back on the house and borrowed a pencil and pad and came out to kneel among the poppies to sketch them. They made an imprint on my mind that seems as vivid today as it was then. However, I realized that I had not listened to my inner voice, which had tried to talk to me about beauty. I had been too hard-working, too principled to spend time merely looking at flowers! It seems it had taken a collapse of my whole former way of life for this voice to make itself heard. This inner voice hereafter would always be redolent with the slight perfume that covered the hillside that morning. Thus began my devotion to art and to beauty. Beauty is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection; beauty conducts us into the World of ideas, without however taking us from the World of sense. By beauty the sensuous mortal is brought back to matter and restored to the World of sense. Life touches the mysteries of the Divine Encounter, on the other it is rooted in a World with which we are familiar. To those who consider themselves on the safe side of belief, it is a way to become closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, but it is not an easy faith. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even though many are submerged in materialism, this is still a peaceful and enchanted World. Some unbelievers rather smugly despise the churchgoer for seeking what they consider an easy consolation, but this reveals the secret of one’s own cowardice, as one’s agnosticism may itself only an opiate, a dodge to avoid facing the grace of God’s reality and the grace of his love. I have been wondering lately about the will of God, what it means, and how we can reach the point of conforming ourselves to it completely. In this domain everything that comes about is in accordance with the will of God, without any exception. Here then we must love absolutely everything, as a whole and in each detail, we must fee the reality and presence of God through all external things, without exception, as clearly as our hand feels the substance of paper through the penholder and the nib. The second domain is that which is placed under the rule of the will. It includes the things that are purely natural, close, easily recognized by the intelligence and the imagination, and among which we can make our own choice, arranging them from outside so as to provide means to fixed and finite ends. In this domain we have to carry out, without faltering or delay, everything that appears clearly to be a duty. When any duty does not appear clearly, we have sometimes to follow our inclination, but in a limited degree; for one of the most dangerous forms of sin, or perhaps the most dangerous, consists of introducing what is unlimited into a domain that is essentially finite. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The third domain is that of the things, which, without being under the empire of the will, without being related to natural duties, are yet not entirely independent of us. In this domain we experience the compulsion of God’s pressure, on condition that we deserve to experience it and exactly to the extent that we deserve to do so. God rewards the soul that think of him with attention and love, and he rewards it by exercising a compulsion upon it strictly and mathematically proportionate to this attention and this love. We have to abandon ourselves to the pressure, to run to the exact spot whiter it impels us and not go one step farther, even in the direction of what is good. At the same time we must go on thinking about God with every increasing love and attentiveness, in this way gaining the favor of being impelled ever further and becoming the object of a pressure that possesses itself of an ever-growing proportion of the whole soul, we have attained the state of perfection. However, whatever stage we may have reached, we must do nothing more than we are irresistibly impelled to do, not even in the way of goodness. Our prayers often constitute a mystery in so far as they involve a certain kind of contact with God, a contact that is mysterious but real. It is important for us to have real faith and be true lovers of God because it we are just acting, it is like just as a false diamond is like a real one, so that those who have no spiritual discernment are effectively taken in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
For the matter of that, a social and human participation in the symbols and ceremonies of the sacrament are an excellent and healthy thing in it as it marks a stage of the journey for those who travel that way. For many, it helps put ever more attention and love into their thought of God. If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, most people would still choose to obey God because his ways are righteous. This is felt in moments of attention, love, and prayer. God also teaches us that we have the vocation to move among people of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises. It is because we long to know others so as to love them just as they are. For if we do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom we love, and our love will be unreal. God ways teach us how to form a natural purity of the soul. And although crimes may horrify us, they no longer surprise us. We can feel the possibility of them, and this discernment that teaches us to do things so we are not horrified by things we can possibility prevent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The natural disposition is dangerous and very painful, but like every variety of natural disposition, it can be put to good purpose if one knows how to make the right use of it with the help of grace. It is the sign of a vocation, the vocation to remain in a sense anonymous, ever ready to be mixed into the paste of common humanity. Now at the present time, the state of mortal’s minds is such that there is a more clearly marked barrier, but most people know that we cannot deny Christ or we will be denied before his Father which is in Heaven. I love God, Christ, and the faith as much as it is possible for a human to love them. I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives—apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider saints. I love the people of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the religious liturgy, hymns, architecture, stained glass windows, rites, and ceremonies. I love the Church and I know all saints felt this love. Some believe this type of love constitutes a condition of spiritual progress, but everyone has their own level of progress and we are not to judge what is right for some for the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent. It is my business to think about God. It is for God to think about me. The fate of the World is decided out of time; and it is in this recorded legend that humankind has its sense of true history, the eternal idea of salvation and grace. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
If one defines originality as the ability to respond to stimulus situations bot adaptively and usually, and if one defines intelligence simply as the ability to solve problems, then at the upper level of problem-solving ability the manifestation of intelligence will be also a manifestation of originality. People with a disposition toward integration of diverse stimuli suggests an openness in the more original subject to a variety of phenomena, combined with a strong need to organize those phenomena into some coherent pattern. This might best be described as a resistance to premature closure, combined with a persistent effort to achieve closure in an elegant fashion. In brief, everything that can be perceived must be taken cognizance of before configuration is recognized as possibly final one. Our every experience of Divine Love will come to sustain us at the intersection of body and soul. To contemplate the social is as good a means of purification as retiring from the World. Many people experience the joy and bitterness of Christ’s passion as a real event. This leads many people to give their key to the beyond, in thoughtful prayer, as a way to approach an encounter with God. In a moment of intense physical suffering, when I was forcing myself to feel love, but without desiring to give a name to that love, I felt, without being in any way prepared for it, there was a presence more personal, more certain, more real than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the senses and the imagination. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
While it is believed that common minds have no conception of true courage, this is the error which comes from identifying courage with obviously spectacular acts like the soldier’s charge of Michelangelo’s struggles in completing the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. With our present knowledge of the unconscious working of the mind, we know that struggles requiring courage equal to that of the soldier’s charge take pace in almost anyone’s dreams and deeper conflict in times of difficult decision. To reserve courage for heroes and artists only shows how little one knows of the profundity of almost any alive human being’s inner development. Courage is necessary in every step in a person’s movement from the mass—symbolically the womb—to becoming a person of one’s own right; it is at each step as though one suffers the pangs of one’s own birth. Courage, whether the soldier’s courage in risking death or the child’s in going off to school, means the power to let go of the familiar and the secure. Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for one’s own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of one’s building of oneself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility. “And the Lord said unto me: Thy fathers have also required of me this thing; and it shall be done unto them according to their faith; for their faith was like unto thine,” reports Enos 1. 18. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Thus we are not talking about heroes. Indeed, obvious heroism, such as rashness, is often the product of something quite different from courage: in the last war the hot pilots in the air force who appeared to be very brave in taking risks were often the ones who were unable to overcome their anxiety inwardly and had to compensate for it by courting danger in external rash deeds. Courage must be judged as an inner state; otherwise external actions can be very misleading. It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. This if the term hero is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every mortal. If we could come back to see that life is like a mirror, tending to reflect back to us the images of our own thinking, then we should realize that by changing our thinking we can change the reflections in the mirror. “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul; and all the day long did I cry unto him; yea, and when the night came I did still raise my voice high that it reached the Heavens,” reports Enos 1.4. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I am as You Desire Me and When Night is Almost Done, Sunrise Grows so Near that We Can Touch the Spaces—it is Time to Smooth the Hair!
The night sounds were at one particular and at the same time a deep hum on the warm breeze, and the Moon was high, sometimes penetrating a break in the garden that suddenly revealed its beautiful glistening light more subtly. I looked at the scattered stars—so cunningly bright in the Cresleigh Rocklin Trails night. And I loved them, as usual. What a comfort was it to be discovered in the endless Universe, a marvelous being on a beautiful blue, green and white diamond of revolving divinity, whose forefathers had read patterns and meanings into these countless unknowable points of cold white fire, which gave us faith with their entrancing, dramatic display of twinklingly glimmers of light. Thankful they shine over us to guide lost soul back to Heaven as they illuminate the pastureland, the distant clusters of over, and cast glory on the warmly lighted houses. My soul is with the garden tonight. The most important fact for understanding both the character and the secret religion of contemporary human society is the change in the social character form the earlier era of capitalism to the twenty-first century. The authoritarian-obsessive-hoarding character that has begun to develop in the sixteenth century, and continued to be the dominant character structure at least in the middle classes until the end of the nineteenth century, was slowly blended or replaced by the marketing character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
I have called this phenomenon the marketing character because it is based on experiencing oneself as a commodity, and one’s value not as use value but as exchange value. The living being becomes a commodity on the personality market. The principle of evaluation is the same on both the personality and the commodity markets: on the one, personalities are offered for sale; on the other, commodities. Value in both cases is their exchange value, for which use value is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Although the proportion of skill and human qualities on the one hand and personality on the other hand as prerequisites for success varies, the personality factor always plays a decisive role. Success depends largely on how well personal sell themselves on the market, how well they get their personalities across, how nice a package they are; whether they are cheerful, sound, aggressive, reliable, ambitious; furthermore, what their family backgrounds are, what clubs they belong to, and whether they know the right people. The type of personality required deepens to some degree on the special field in which a person may choose to work. A stockbroker, a salesperson, a secretary, a railroad executive, a college professor, or a hotel manager must each offer a different kind of personality that, regardless of their differences, must fulfill one condition: to be in demand. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a given task are not sufficient; one must be able to put one’s personality across in competition wit many others in order to have success. If it were enough for the purpose of making a living to rely on what one knows and what one can do, one’s self-esteem would be in proportion to one’s capacities, that is, to one’s use value. However, since success depends largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences oneself as a commodity or, rather, simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold. A person is not concerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming salable. The aim of the marketing character is complete adaptation, so as to be desirable under all conditions of the personality market. The marketing character personalities do not even have egos (as people in the nineteenth century did) to hold onto, that belong to them, that do not change. Foe they constantly change their egos, according to the principle: “I am as you desire me.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Those with the marketing character structure are with goals, moving, doing things with the greatest efficiency: if asked why they must move so fast, why things have to be done with the greatest efficiency, they have genuine answers, such as, “To keep you from unnecessarily having to wait behind fifty people when your order is always ready,” or “Because this is what the manufacture recommends for safety reason and optimal performance,” or “In order to promote from within and employee retention,” or “This is the way to maximize profits, keep shareholders and customers happy, and it helps the company grow,” and that is much better than rationalizations. Many people are also getting back to having more interest (at least subconsciously) in philosophical or religious questions, such as why one lives, and why one is going in this direction rather than in another. They have their developing consciousness that is opening up to the infinite idea of God and eternal life, and are developing a self, a core, and a sense of identity. However, if people are having an identity crisis it is produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other giant bureaucracies), as a primitive individual’s identity rests upon memberships in the clan. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We have to make sure our character either loves or hates. These old-fashion emotions have to fit into a character structure that functions almost entirely on the cerebral level and accepts feeling, whether good or evil ones, because they are what assist us with the marketing characters’ main purpose: selling and exchanging—or to put it even more precisely, functioning according to the logic of the Universal Soul, of which we are a part, and we must of course be concerned with how well we function, as indicated by our advancement in the bureaucracy. Since we are in marketing and people can sense and feel us, we must have deep attachment to ourselves and to others, we have to care, in a deep sense of the word, because we want our reactions to feel real and for people to like us. This may also explain why we are concerned with dangers in our communities and ecological catastrophes, even when the data that point to these dangers is being hidden. That we are concerned with our community, people in it, and the environment might still be explained by the idea that we have great courage and unselfishness; and that we have a concern for our children and grandchildren is included in such an explanation. The expressiveness of concern on all these levels is the result of the increase of emotional bonds, even to people were merely associate with as well as those nearest to us. The fact is, we are close to marketing characters; and we are close to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Many contemporary human beings love to buy and consume, and they are so attached to what they buy, and this significant display of the marketing character phenomenon is so appear with how architects design homes, then builders furnish them so you can see the many lovely moments you can have in a house with similar items. The marketing character is seen in how people groom and educate their children to make them as attractive and respectful as possible in faith that they will lead a successful life. And look at the prestigious cars people buy, not only for the comfort and safety they give, but for the style and brand recognition. For many people, they love their car as much as their dogs or other pets. The things we own are utterly indispensable, along with our friends and relations, who are irreplaceable, too, since some deeper bind exists to tall of them. The marketing character goal, proper functioning under all circumstances, makes us respond to the World mainly cerebrally. Reason in the sense of understand is an exclusive quality of Homo sapiens; controlling intelligence as a tool for the achievement of practical purposes is common to animals and humans. Controlling intelligence without reason is dangerous, however, because it makes people move in directions that may be self-destructive from the standpoint of reason. In fact, the more brilliant the uncontrolled intelligence is, the more dangerous it is. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
It was no less a scientist than Charles Darwin who demonstrated the consequences and the human tragedy of a purely scientific, alienated intellect. He writes in his autobiography that until his thirtieth year he had intensely enjoyed music and poetry and pictures, but that for many years afterward he lost all his taste for these interests: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” The process Darwin describes here has continued since his time at a rapid pace; the separation from reason and hearts is not something we want. We have to put God first, have love in our hearts, and we can still have nice material possessions. However, it is a loss of special interest that this deterioration of reason had taken place in the majority of the leading investigators in the most exacting and revolutionary sciences (in theoretical physics, for example) and that they were people who were deeply concerned with philosophical and spiritual questions. I refer to such individuals as Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Harriet Tubman, Buddha, Empress Dowager Cixi, Sarah and William Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Albert Einstein, N. Bohr, L. Szillard, W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The supremacy of cerebral, controlling thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life. Since it is not cultivated or needed, but rather an impediment to optimal functioning, emotional life has remained stunted and never matured beyond the level of a child’s. As a result the marketing characters are peculiarly naïve as far as emotional problem are concerned. They may be attracted by emotional people, but because of their own naivete, they often cannot judge whether such people are genuine or fakers. This may explain why so many pseudo human beings can be successful in the spiritual and religious fields; it may also explain why politicians who portray strong emotions have a strong appeal for the marketing character—and why the marketing character cannot discriminate between a genuinely religious person and the public relations product who fakes strong religious emotions. The term marketing character is by no means the only one to describe this type. It can also be described by the term alienated character; persons of this character are alienated from their work, from themselves, from other human beings, and from nature. In psychiatric terms the marketing person who is detached and not genuine could be called a schizoid character; but the term may be slightly misleading, because a schizoid person living with other schizoid persons and performing well and being successful, because of one’s schizoid character entirely lacks the feeling of uneasiness that the schizoid character has in a more normal environment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In a study of two hundred and fifty executives, managers, and engineers in two of the best-run large companies in the United States, it was discovered that many of these people are found to possess features of the cybernetic person, particularly the predominance of the cerebral along with the underdevelopment of the emotional sphere. Considering that the executives and managers are and will be among the leaders of American society, the social importance of this study is substantial. It was found that 0 percent of these people had a deep scientific interest in understanding, dynamic sense of the work, animated. 22 percent were centered, enlivening, crafts-person- like, but lacks the deeper scientific interest in the nature of things. 58 percent found the work itself stimulates interest, which is not self-sustained. 18 percent were moderate productive, not centered. Interest in work is essentially instrumental, to ensure security, income. 2 percent are passive unproductive, diffused. 0 percent rejecting of work, rejects the real World. Two features are striking: deep interest in understanding (reason) is absent, and for the vast majority either the stimulation of their work is not self-sustaining or the work is essentially a means for ensuring economic security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
In complete contrast is the picture of what we call the love scale. 0 percent were loving, affirmative, creatively stimulating. 5 percent were responsible, warm, affectionate, but not deeply loving. 40 percent possessed moderate interest in another person, with more loving possibilities. 41 percent were found to have conventional concern, decent, and are role oriented. 13 percent are passive, unloving, uninterested. And 1 percent were considered to be rejecting of life, hardened heart. No one in the study could be characterized as deeply loving, although 5 percent show up as being warm and affectionate. All the rest are listed as having moderate interest, or conventional concern, or as unloving, or outright rejecting of life—indeed a striking picture of emotional underdevelopment in contrast to the prominence of cerebralism. The cybernetic religion of the marketing character corresponds to that total character structure. Hidden behind the façade of agnosticism or Christianity is a thoroughly pagan religion, although people are not conscious of it as such. This pagan religion is difficult to describe, since it can only be inferred from what people do (and do not do) and not from their conscious thoughts about religion or strict doctrines of religious organization. Most striking, at first glance, is that mortals have made themselves into a god because one has acquired the technical capacity for a second creation of the World, replacing the first creation by the God of traditional religion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We can also formulate: We have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine. It matters little the formulation we choose; what matters is that human beings, in the state of their greatest real impotence, imagine themselves in connection with science and technique to be omnipotent. This aspect of cybernetic religion corresponds to a more hopeful period of development. However, the more we are caught in our isolation, in our lack of emotional response to the World, and at the same time the more unavoidable a catastrophic end seems to be, the more malignant becomes the new religion. We cease to be the masters of technique and become instead its slaves—and technique, once a vital element of creation, shows its other face as the goddess of destruction (like the Indian goddess Kali), to which men and women are willing to sacrifice themselves and their children. While consciously still hanging onto the hope for a better future, cybernetic humanity represses the fact that they have become worshippers of the goddess of destruction. “And thus we see the great call of diligence of people to labor in the vineyards of the Lord; and thus we see the great reason of sorrow, and also rejoicing—sorrow because of death and destruction among mortals, and joy because of the light of Christ unto life,” reports Alma 28.14. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
This thesis has many kinds of proof, but none more compelling than these two: that the great (and even some smaller powers continue to build nuclear weapons of ever-increasing capacity for destruction and do not arrive at the one sane solution—destruction of all nuclear weapons and the atomic energy plants that deliver the material for nuclear weapons—and that virtually nothing is done to end the danger of corruption, economic and ecological catastrophe. In short, nothing serious is being done to plan for the survival of the human race. “And thus we see how great the inequality of mortals is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil, which comes by cunning plans which he hath devised to ensnare the hearts of mortals,” Alma 28.13. Attitudes of superiority provide another way of expressing anger indirectly. It is quite hostile after all to say to another person, in effect, “I am so more better than you and any opinions or feelings you may have count for nothing, my human!” And when such superiority feelings are used cleverly, such as portraying oneself as condescendingly tolerant of another, they become a powerful and cutting weapon. Many mortals who feel themselves to be trained in logic and the scientific method use this distancing device with great effectiveness. Such a mortal will convey the feeling to one’s wife that there is something suspect about any emotional reaction she may have. “After all,” he says, “you have to approach life rationally. You are letting your emotions influence your judgment.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
And, of course, the wife may turn the tables and adapt her own superior attitude and declare, “Well, I was just reading in a book the other day that it is important and right to show our emotions. So there!” (Well, of course she is right, but she is using it in an assertive way, which could lead to a fight!) Sometimes we express hostility indirectly by misplacing our anger. We may nag and express irritation about many little things, while avoiding the genuine anger which we are afraid to reveal. For example, a wife might “pitch a fit” continually about her husband not fixing the things on the “honey do list,” when she is really afraid that if he lets it go too long, it might reflect poorly on him as an employee and create a lack of advancement in the company organization when his boss comes over for dinner or finds out about it otherwise, as it is a small community. Sometimes we misplace our hostility to other people. Often this involves a pecking order in which we misplace anger from a person who is a considerable threat to us, like a spouse or a boss, and place it on someone less threatening, like our children, who in turn may pull the display deviant behavior as a result. We sometimes express anger indirectly by projecting it onto another person and seeing that individual as being hostile toward us. This process, too, serves the purpose of maintaining emotional distance, for if we can purpose of maintaining emotional distance, for is we can preserve the idea that another person is unfriendly and hostile there is little danger of our becoming close. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In fact, the person may become increasingly unfriendly and hostile as one reacts to our reactions to one’s imagined hostility. A discussion of the costs we pay in damage to ourselves and damage in our relations with others when we suppress anger cannot be concluded without a discussion of the violent explosions that sometimes occur. And the fact that such explosions do occur is often frightening to those who sense something of this potential violence within themselves. It is not unusual to feel as one man who stated, “I have so much anger bottled up in me that I am afraid if I ever let myself express it, it would be the point of no return.” Often this fear has little or no basis in fact. It serves as an excuse for imposing control on ourselves. We are really afraid of an open relationship in which we could express our anger freely. The fear that we will do violence is substituted to give ourselves a more plausible reason for not being genuine. On the other hand, the fear of violence may have some basis of truth. The fallacy of continuing a rigid control of our anger, however, is that this simply increase the inner tension and makes the possibility of violence more real. The frequently used analogy of the steam boiler under pressure is probably the most appropriate one. If hostility is permitted to build up and none of the pressure is allowed to escape, the possibility of an explosion increases. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The person who fears violence within oneself may need to consult professional help immediately to assess the reality of his or her fear and help him or her to find safe ways to dissipate the inner pressure. Nick was such a person. He was in construction work; and when irritating situations arose on the job, he often became frightened with himself. He seethed with so much anger, particularly toward his foreman on these occasions, that he was afraid he might end the life of one of them if he ever got carried away and began to express his feelings. The therapist he sought out helped him talk through a lot of his feelings, including a huge backlog of anger toward his father that he had probably misplaced on the foreman. Nick also discovered that he could talk over some of his irritations with his boss and that when he did this his feeling of wanting to do violence disappeared even when he and his boss did not reach complete agreement. In brief, we are trying to help people become more intelligent, widely informed, concerned wit basic problems, cleaver and imaginative, socially effective and personally dominant, verbally fluent, and possessed of initiative. Instead of being seen as conforming, rigid and stereotyped, uninsightful, commonplace, apathetic, and dull. Whatever you believe to be truth about God, declare to be the Truth about yourself. Know that the power within you is God, and the law of good establishing right action in your life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Reverse Cannot Befall that Fine Prosperity Whose Sources are Interior and Security is Loud, I Guess that Means Listen!
I have given them every opportunity. Every type of advancement and profit sharing as well, but they want me in residence. Resident curator! Ah, that sounds brilliant. However, will I take the job? I have finished my Ph.D. and am ready to start teaching. I wish I could take the job. I spent years in Europe with you and Aunt Queen. It was a luxurious journey. I am thoroughly ruined for ordinary life. I would love nothing better than to be curator here, to maintain the Easter and Christmas traditions for the sake of the parish, and whatever else I want, whie earning a high salary, having a gorgeous house and ample time to write a couple of books in my academic field. Some people believe that I have the style and grace to pull it off. Oh, this could be the answer, but I have a few reservations. However, think about it. In my idle hours, I could begin to build a proper library on shelves put on the inside walls of the double parlor. And I could write a short history of Rocklin, to be printed up for the tourists, you know, with architectural details and blueprints and legends and such. Throw in the limousine and driver twenty-four hours a day, and a new car of my own every two years, and a deep-pocket expense account and paid vacations to New York and Tennessee, and I think it would be possible, but only time will tell. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
That homely yearning for simplicity which we have been discovering in ourselves and in the great majority of people who have taken our preference tests has not escaped the hearts of educators any more than of the parents and the children they teach. One sign of it is the immense popularity of the notion that intelligence can not only be measured, but can be expressed in a simple number, with a base of reference something like a dollar—the I.Q. (intelligence quotient), one hundred units of which can be counted upon to indicate that the Lord dealt out to his servant an average number of talents, to be buried or used according to one’s character and personal worthiness, for better of for worse. The enduring vogue of the I.Q. is certainly testament to our natural desire to keep the story simple, and psychologist and teachers have been the worst offenders in supporting this popular simplification. The fact is, of course, that intelligence is a complex set of interrelated aptitudes and abilities, some of them verging closely upon the temperamental rather than being limited to what we usually think of as intellective. Of course, we also have to consider the results of a studies designed especially to discover some of the determinants, other than a simple one-number estimate of intelligence, that are important in the production of the sorts of original perceptions and problem-solutions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Another study we have seen, employed a wide variety of psychological tests in the usual living-in assessment setting. Both because of the nature of the sample and because of the method employed for discovering significant relationships, several restrictions upon the generalizability of the results must be organized. For one thing, correlation coefficients between the measure of originality and several hundred other variables were computed in a search for significant associations, and the observed correlations have not as yet been checked in any other sample that is this similar to the general population (simply because we changed track and decided to work particularly with a view to discovering the traits of original persons; they had not engaged themselves in work that called for a high order of original thought, nor was originality an important value in their lives. In brief, the correlations to be reported may not reflect anything concerning the way in which highly creative people differ from the norm. The results therefore are germane to the question of how originality varies with other personal characteristics only if originality be considered as a variable that is distributed continuously throughout the general population. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
In spite of these strictures inherent in the design of the study, there is some reason to believe that the results are generalizable to the problem of creative process in the highly original person. In the past, we saw that originality in free-response performance tests is sufficiently consistent across test to be considered a dimension, and that in addition the test dimension itself is related to personality variables which were hypothesized on theoretical grounds to be characteristics of highly original persons. Thus the testing of theory in that respect suggests that generalizable relationships may be discovered in this sample, and perhaps in fact that it particularly favors the finding of valid relationships. The central characteristic of the various indirect expressions of anger is that they create barriers of emotional distance between ourselves and the other person. Thus they keep us from experiencing emotional intimacy. Since, as we have seen, we are very much afraid of the experience of love, it seems likely that we often use these indirect expressions of anger as a way of preserving the safety of distance. Evasion of direct expression of anger thus becomes a tool of our fear of love. Looking at it from the other side, then, expression of anger in indirect ways becomes a means of cheating ourselves of what we most want—the experience of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
One indirect expression of anger that we sometimes use is apparent indifference. Now, of course, if we are really angry, we are not all indifferent. However, that is the point! We resist letting the other person know that we care enough to let them get under our skins. To express the anger directly would be to risk a genuine encounter. So instead we express our hostility by saying in effect, “You do not matter to me.” One man recalls that, when we felt angry, hurt, and frustrated, as a child on certain occasions, by his mother’s stipulations, he would shout through tears, “I do not care! I do not care!” One can guess that those were rather unsuccessful attempts to appear indifferent! Grievance collecting is another indirect expression of anger in which we store up anger for future use, particularly at times when there is danger of intimacy we fear. So, for example, one woman often countered any expression of love from her husband with something like, “Well, you should have thought of that six years ago when you were off getting drunk at the Ritz Hotel bar, slow dancing with that frisky bleached-blonde tramp, buying her Paris Hiltons (sex on the beach) because she can’t drink whiskey, while I was in the hospital giving birth to your baby!” And this particular weapon in her grievance arsenal is so effective and important that she may never let herself be aware that her husband was so “shook up” by his caring for her and by the possibility of becoming a father (and experiencing love for his child) that he could not face his emotions at the moment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Often our grievance collecting take less dramatic, but just as effective, form. We may have an almost inexhaustible supply of minor resentments. Probably, if we tried, it would be hard for us to put them all into words, but they provide enough impetus to keep us almost constantly irritable or moody with the other person without bringing about the explosion that might clear away the tension between us and permit some frightening moments of closeness. The quality that above all deserves the greatest glory in art—and by that word we must include all creation of mind—is courage; courage of a kind of which common minds have no conception, and which is perhaps described here for the first time…To plan, dream, and imagine fine works is a pleasant occupation to be sure….However, to produce, to bring to birth, to bring up the infant work with labor, to put it to bed full-fed with milk, to take it up again every morning with inexhaustible maternal love, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in lovely garments that it tears up again and again; never to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life, and to make of it a living masterpiece that speak to all eyes in sculpture, or to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music—that s the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to obey the mind. And the creative moments of the mind do not come to order…And work is a weary struggle at once dreaded and loved by those find and powerful natures who are often broken under the strain of it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
If the artist does not throw one’s self into his or her work like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, one does dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock…the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the death by suicide of one’s own talent…And it is for that reason that the same reward, the same triumph, the same laurels, are accorded to great poets as to great generals. One of the reasons creative activity takes so much courage is that to create stands for becoming free from the bonds to the infantile past, breaking the old in order that the new can be born. For creating external works, in art, business or what not, and creating one’s self—that is, developing one’s capacities, becoming freer and more responsible—are two aspects of the same process. Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom, and that, as we have seen in the Promethean (who stole fire from the Gods), and Adam from the Garden of Eden legends, may involve considerable inner conflict. A landscape painter, whose main problem was freeing himself from ties to a possessive mother, had for years wanted to paint portraits but had never dared. Finally pulling his courage together, he dove in and painted several portraits in the course of three days. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
The portraits turned out to be excellent. However, strangely enough, he felt not only considerable joy but strong anxiety as well. The night of the third day he had a dream in which his mother told him he must commit suicide, and he was calling up his friends to say good-bye with a terrifying and overwhelming sense of loneliness. The dream was saying in effect, “If you create, you will leave the familiar, and not create.” It is highly significant, when we see the nature of this powerful unconscious threat, that he could paint no more portraits for a month—until, that is, he had overcome the counterattack of the anxiety which had appeared in the dream. Believing that the Universal Spirit comes to fullest consciousness in mortal’s innermost Self, we strive to cultivate the inner life, knowing that spiritual certainty is the result of an impact on God upon the soul. We seek the witness of the Inner Spirit. There is a presence pervading all, an intelligence running through all, a power sustaining all, binding all into one perfect whole. The realization of this presence, intelligence, power, and unity constitutes the inner nature of the mystic Christ, the indwelling spirit, the image of God. The mind has the possibility of projecting limitless expressions of itself, but each expression is unique and different from any other. Thus the infinite is not divided, but multiplied. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
The Faculty of Wonder Tires Easily but the Grace of God is Capacity to Change!
I was graced by the divine and sacramental! People talk about the gift of faith, well, I am telling you it was more like miracle! It did sheer pleasure to my psyche. One of the first things necessary for a creative relationship to the inherited wisdom in the religious traditions is to remove religious discussion from such deteriorated forms as the debates over the belief in the existence of God. The tendency to make that issues central—as thought God were an object alongside other objects, whose existence can be emphatically proved or disproved as we prove of disprove Quadrilateral and triangle area theorems or if there is enough DNA in the average person’s body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back 17 times—shows our modern tendency to split up reality. It is noteworthy that in some ways the subjects who hold to a personally evolved religious belief are similar to the group of atheists and agnostics, while in other ways they are distinctly different. The ways in which they are similar are in their relatively high valuation of the thinking process and of intellectual achievement, and in the absence of ethnocentrism or authoritarianism in their make-up; the ways in which they are different are in their robust psychological health, their genuine independence, originality, and growth-orientation, and in their relatively high degree of desire for positions of community leadership and status, as contrasted with the degree of social isolation and preference for going-it-alone which marked the radically skeptical group. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
There is a good deal of psychological strength in the subjects we have interviewed, whatever their troubles may be. They are able to take account equally of the inner and the outer experience; while they are highly interoceptive and have much self-insight, they are also socially perceptive and are able to use techniques of manipulation and mastery in relation to the environment in order to achieve security and to attain gratification of the needs which the culture itself defines as gratifiable. They are both self-aware and aware of others. Their life experience is broad as well as deep. While they have had happy childhoods and feel very affectionate towards their parents, they at the same time are capable of experiencing considerable anxiety, for they do not utilize repression to deal with unpleasant memories or affects, but rather face things as they are, including their feelings and impulses. They are complex rather than simple psychodynamically, and they admit new experiences into their perceptual systems even at the cost of insoluble contradictions. The ability to do this is based in part on one’s faith that one can finally achieve a synthesis, that reality ultimately makes sense and that one can oneself discern that sense. Most important, as a result of this pattern of attributes, the person has great capacity for further growth, which involves somehow being able to leave oneself behind, to shed old coast, to molt, to metamorphose, to find a new order of selfhood in obedience to internal demands for change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
This capacity for self-renewal is related to the whole problem of precocity and impedance in the formation of the self; it is of the great importance in the psychology of individual development. It involves the way in which a person places oneself in the time span which is defined by oneself as process. The most distinctive characteristic of the self is its unceasing growth and change within the matrix of sameness given by memory. Memory seems to make the self timeless even while it presents to reflection the evidence for irreversibility of all that has occurred. The extent to which a person acts in the present seems to me an index of whether the self is perceived as continuing to evolve or perceived as static and essentially no longer alive. My guess is that perception of the self in relation to time is most crucial in determining attitude towards biological death, as well as the very experience of dying, which surely must show as much variation among people as does their experience of living. What this means in terms of religious belief is that belief is not a rigid doctrine, not a set of forever-prescribed particularities, not static abstraction at all, but a formative process with faith as its foundation and vision as its goal—faith in the intelligibility and order of the Universe, leading through necessary difficulties of interpretation and changing meanings to moments of spiritual integration which are themselves transient. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
To make God an entity, a being over against other beings, located in space Heaven only knows where, is a carry-over of a primitive view, full of contradictions and easily refutable. The existence of God implies as much atheism as to argue against it. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as to deny it. God is being itself, not a being. We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be one’s ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at the point where one has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for. We obviously do not mean that all religious traditions or attitudes are equally constructive: they may be destructive, as illustrated in the religious fervor of the Nazis, or in the Inquisition. The problem always remains for theology, philosophy and ethics, with the assistance of the sciences and history of mortals, to determine what beliefs are most constructive and most consistent with other truth about human life. Psychologically religion is to be understood as a way of relating to one’s existence. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” There is much less difference between a mystic’s faith in God [the indigenous convictions of the religious person rather than other-Worldly creeds] and an atheist’s rational faith in humankind than between the former and that of a Calvinist whose faith in God is rooted in the conviction of one’s own powerlessness and in one’s fear of God’s power. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
When one is able to relate creatively to the wisdom of one’s fathers in the ethical and religious traditions one finds that one discovers anew one’s capacity for wonder. It is self-evident that the capacity for active, responsive wonder has been largely lacking in modern society. This is one side of the vacuity and emptiness which so many people feel in our period. Wonder may be described in many ways, from two things incline the heart to wonder, the moral law within and the starry sky above, to the wonder which grips us as one aspect of the feelings of pity and terror which purge the soul when we see dramatic tragedy. Though certainly not the exclusive province of religion, wonder is traditionally associated with it: and I would consider wonder, when it appears as is so often the cause in scientists or artists, as the religious aspects of these other vocations. Those who take a rigid view either of religious or scientific truth become more dogmatic and lose the capacity to wonder; those who acquire the wisdom of their fathers without surrendering their own freedom find that wonder adds to their zest and their conviction of meaning in life. The importance of wonder underlies Jesus’s high regard for the attitudes of children: “Except ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” This statement has nothing whatever to do with childishness or infantilism; it refers to the child’s capacity for wonder, a capacity for wonder, a capacity found likewise in the most mature and creative adults, whether they are scientists like Einstein or artists like Matisse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Wonder is the opposite to cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant, responsive. It is essentially an opening attitude—an awareness that there is more to life than one has as yet fathomed, an experience of new vistas in life to be explored as well as new profundities to be plumbed. Nor is it an easy attitude to hold. The faculty of wonder tires easily. Life would seem a great deal fuller than it does if we understood this is the World that we must empathize with. We must give ourselves to it in a Universe of basic forms in which our own life is grounded. This is the challenge to our consciousness. Wonder is a function of what one holds to be of ultimate meaning and value in life. Though it may be cued off by a tragic drama, it is not a negative experience; since it is essentially an enlarging of life, the over-all emotion which accompanies wonder is joy. The highest to which mortal can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes one wonder, let one be content; nothing higher can it give one. Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The less affluent people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easy-going ways. Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The less affluent are too helpless, to exposed, to behave like us, even thought they are first class citizens. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sickness, and evils of social institutions. They can never see the World in the old way again, never experience life in the old way; once the old consciousness is shattered, there is no chance of building it up again. We have to present strong, solid forms on which life can look secure, we should not be lulled into failing to realize that in life wonder also goes with humility—not the pseudo-humility of submission, which generally is the reverse side of arrogance, but the humility of the generous-minded person who can accept the given just as one, in one’s own creative efforts, is able to give. The historical term grace has a rich meaning at this point, despite the fact that for many people the World has been so much identified with deteriorated forms of the grace of God that it is useless. One speaks of the graceful flight of a bird, the grace of a child’s movements, the graciousness of the generous person. Grace is something given, a new harmony which emerges; and it always inclines the heart to wonder. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
We must emphasize that in every use of these terms—wonder, humility, grace—the connotation is not that of the person being passive and acted upon, as in some traditional religious attitudes. There is a very common misconception in our society that one gives oneself over to creative ecstasy, or to the loved one, or to religious belief. It is as though one falls in love by way of gravitation, or is seized by the hounds of Heaven, or write music or paints in a state of being carried away. It is amazing both how prevalent these passive ways of thinking are in our culture, and how false they are. Any artist or writer or musician—those who are supposedly carried away—will tell you that in the creative experience there is a greatly heightened consciousness and very intense acidity on one’s own part. This is the opposite of the divide-and-conquer fragmentation which has characterized modern mortal’s relation to nature since Francis Bacon and has led us to the brink of catastrophe. We can, and must, will and love the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. There is a new language of myth and symbol which will be more adequate to love and will in the new conditions we must confront. It is the passion of the artist, of whatever type or craft, to communicate what one experiences as the subconscious and unconscious significance of one’s relation to our World. Communicate is related to commune, and, in turn, both are avenues to the experience of communion and community with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
We love and will the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the World, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it means to be fully related to one’s World. I do not imply that the World does not exist before we love or will it; one can answer that question only on the basis of one’s assumptions, and, being a Californian with inborn realism, I would assume that it does exist. However, no reality, no relation to me, as I have no effect upon it; I move as in a dream, vaguely and without viable contact. One can choose to shut it out—as New Yorkers do when riding the subway—or one can choose to see it, create it. In this sense, we give responsiveness which implies aliveness. And certainly the grace, or given quality of any experience is in direct proportion to how much one participates in it. A patient in therapy expressed it simply but beautifully, “The grace of God is the capacity to change.” What does this mean concerning our personal lives, to which, at last, we now return? The approach we are here recommending as the creative use of tradition makes possible a new attitude toward conscience. The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the Universe is known. It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of mortal that one can be conscious of oneself and one’s World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
For consciousness surprises the meaning in our otherwise absurd acts. Love, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the soul—that often nettlelike voice which is at the same time our creative power—leads us into life if we do not terminate these soulful experiences but accept them with a sense of the preciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of oneself, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action. We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History—that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow—has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. If our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground, what does it matter? The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it. For in every act of love and will—and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act—we mold ourselves and our World simultaneously. That is what it means to embrace the future. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
It is important as the creative use of tradition to take a new attitude toward conscience. As everyone know, conscience is generally conceived of as the negative voice of tradition speaking within one—the “thou-shalt-not’s” echoing down from Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of prohibitions which the society has taught its members for centuries. Conscience is then the constrictor of one’s activities. This tendency to think of conscience as that which tells the individual not to do things, is so strong that it seems to operate almost automatically. When I was discussing this point with a class of students in a college, one student volunteered that it is quite possible to use one’s conscience beneficially. When I agreed and asked him for examples, he offered, “When you don’t want to go to class, your conscience tells you to.” I pointed out that this actually was a negative sentence. He then searched his mind and came up with a second example, “When you don’t want to study, your conscience makes you.” He was at first entirely unaware that this example too was negative. Conscience in each case was seen as acting against what one supposedly wants to do; it was the taskmaster, the whip. The significant point is that the young man said nothing about conscience in his examples as a guide to help him get the most value from the class, or conscious as the voice of one’s own deepest purposes and goals in the enterprise of studying and learning. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Conscience is not a set of handed-down prohibitions to constrict the self, to stifle its vitality and impulses. Nor is conscience to be thought of as divorced from tradition, as, in the liberalistic period when it was implied that one decided every act de novo. Conscience, rather, is one’s capacity to tap one’s own deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity and awareness, in which tradition and immediate experience are not opposed to each other but interrelated. The etymology of the term reveals this point. Composed of the two Latin words meaning “to know” (scire) and “with” (cum), conscience is very close to the term consciousness. In fact in some countries, such as Brazil, the same word (“consciencia”) is used both for “conscience” and “consciousness.” Conscience is our ability to recall ourselves, the recall is not opposed to historical traditions as such, but only to the authoritarian use of the tradition. For there is a level on which the individual participates in the tradition, and on that level tradition assist mortals in finding one’s own most meaningful experience. We wish thus to emphasize the beneficial aspect of conscience—conscience as the individual’s method of tapping wisdom and insight within oneself, conscience as an opening up, a guide to enlarged experience beyond good and evil. This is the transmoral conscience. With this view it will no longer be true that conscience does make cowards of us all. Conscience, rather, will be the taproot of courage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
All a Little too Incredible–She Was Not Altogether in Love and Looking Around for a Philosophy Which Would Bring Contentment!
She was painfully confused, trying to crush her sobs, trying to crush her rage against me. The word “crisis” is Greek in origin, and in that language its primary meaning is “decision.” In medical pathology, a crisis is that point in the course of a disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. In general, a crisis is a turning point, the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. In speaking of “the crisis in belief,” I refer to a point in the course of individual development at which the person must decide for oneself whether the picture one has been given of the nature of the World is a true one. It is the point at which one is called upon to think for oneself about the important matters of cosmology and ethics. It is time of decision about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the coerciveness of moral law, the place of mortals in nature, the freedom of the individual will, and all other great issues with which philosophy deals. Not all of us are philosophers, of course, but if we are human we must have a philosophy. Our intellect demands that experience should be accounted for; the need for things to be intelligible is a basic human need. Thus we are all, willy-nilly, philosophers of a sort, in the sense that we tell ourselves one story or another about most of the enduring issues with which systematic philosophy deals, and without which we cannot face life with any sense that it has meaning and worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The crisis in belief need not occur at any special age, and in fact it need not occur very conspicuously at all. For most people, however, it comes with adolescence, and it is ushered in partly by the challenge that the newly awakened and intense pleasures of the flesh and aggressive urges of puberty offers to morality and the civilized code of the pleasures of the flesh. It is a function as well, I think, of the growth of intelligence, which is beginning to reach full power concurrently with physiological maturation. It comes at that period when the mind, like the body, is getting ready to leave home in search of a new home of its own. Less dualistically, we may say that the maturing human form, freeing itself, under the push of natural development, of the habitat of its childhood, emerges into a new World in which it is no longer provided for and ministered to, but in which it must seek its own sustenance and meaning, and must choose anew for itself. With choices comes responsibility, self-valuation, and self-affirmation or self-rejection. The crisis in belief is often a time of categorical repudiation or total acceptance, of radical chance of rigid stasis. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a time of the greatest psychological danger, in which the integrity of the self is challenged, and in which old selves die and new selves are born. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As psychologist interested in the way in which psychological forms develop, and therefore, I shall add, intensely interested in the individual life, we assessors necessarily pay a great deal of attention to that part of the individual’s history in which one was faced with a serious crisis of development. The work of assessment requires us to understand how a person came to one’s beliefs about the nature of the World and one’s own place in it, and how solidly founded and ready for action one’s philosophy of life really is. I need hardly say that in order to arrive at such an understanding we must not only inquire deeply into one’s beliefs on great issues, but must synthesize what we know of the nature and genesis of those beliefs with what we have been able to understand about one’s entire character and life history. Moral posture and beliefs about the cosmos are themselves frequently determined at least in part by psychodynamic forces, and a complete personality formulation gives an account not only of what actions our philosophy determines, but what forces our philosophy is determined by. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The question of the existence of God is of course of central importance, in terms both of its implications for the nature of belief or disbelief in Providence, in Heavenly justice and mercy, in life after death, and in the efficacy of prayer, and hence in the dependability of a benevolent supernatural power. It is designed to elicit opinions and feelings and determinism, theism, good and evil, and the like. One problem, for example, describes events leading up to a criminal action, in which the external and internal determinants of the person’s behavior were made manifest. This problem served as the point of departure for discussion of individual responsibility in affairs in which individual appeals compelled by forces within and without to act in an apparently irresponsible way. Another problem concerned a man shipwrecked along on a desert island, with certain knowledge that he could never get off it. The question then was, could such a man, being part of no human community, do an evil action? This immediately led into the difficult problem of the locus of ethical sanctions, whether in society or in the individual, which in turn, of course, is central to the psychological problem of the internalization or externalization of the superego, with all its implications for the management of aggression and sexuality, and anarchic impulse in general. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There was this woman who was rated by the assessment staff as being exceptionally well adjusted, and indeed her life seemed agreeably proportioned with secure community position, healthy and happy children, a professionally successful husband, and constructive social service activities through which she expressed something of her individuality and in which she felt worthwhile. This woman said that she decided to drop religion early in college, having reached a conclusion that it was all a little too incredible. Chapel services were compulsory at the college at that time, and she always went to services, taking along an interesting non-religious book to read during the sermon. Shortly after graduation she married a man of exceptional eligibility in terms of the status symbols of that time and place, but with whom, she confessed she was not altogether in love. She had two children, and while they were still very young, she began to feel quite unhappy, always worn-out and cross. She began, she says, “looking around for a philosophy which would bring contentment.” She found it in Lecomte du Nouy’s book, Human Destiny, which she says enabled her to feel justified in returning to church membership and to religious belief. She now believes in a personal God, to whom she prays and in whom she finds support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Of her belief, she says, “It’s satisfactory enough, and it fills a definite need. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether I just thought it all up to fill a gap in my life.” She does not believe in the after-life. However, she says that her unbelief in this respect is not complete or final; I may some day, in the future, come to believe in an after-life as well.” The implication was that if she needed to believe it, she would believe it. That she suspects that she has perhaps made rather too much of a good thing out of the flexibility is indicated, however, in her Thematic Apperception Test (which is a psychological personality test) stories, several of which communicate a sense of shallowness (as she sees it) and a lack of profound meaning in her life. On Card 19, for example, she tells this story, which purports to deal with a single day in a girl’s life, but which suggests the emotional tone of the subject’s own life in its totality, as she perceives it: Virginia has had a thrilling say. She has had a good start on learning to ski. She emerged with no broken bones or even sprains, though she had a glorious day of climbing, sliding, leaping, staggering, and falling with her legs, skis, and ski poles all mixed up. The air was so clear, so wonderful—not as cold as all her friends had told her the horrid north would be. And how nice Johnny Evans was. So friendly, no more and no less. Everyone laughed a lot, and they the most of all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Better get ready, now! The day is by no means over. Square dancing tonight, with Johnny and all the others, then the long ride home, and serious business—job hunting in a day or two. “How silly I was,” thought Virginia, “to be so childishly frightened about my luck up north. It’s just like anywhere!” But will Virginia find her grandfather’s watch with the lost ruby of the Whitehall family? Or trace her friend Johnny’s surprising ancestry? Read the December issue of Bang to find out!!! This story, like all complex symbolic productions, may be interpreted at many levels of meaning. I find it most touching and poignant, and to interpret it is in some sense a shame. Yet: she tells us that she has emerged happily from the first years of her feared adulthood (the horrid north) with no damage done (no broken bones, or even sprains; in fact, it has been a glorious and exciting and lucky day up north). However, the day is not yet over; indeed, it is “by no means over.” There are things not yet found our; Johnny, for instance, though is so nice and friendly (no more and no less) has a surprising ancestry (where did the beasts begin?). And then there is the lost ruby which should pass on from generation to generation, encased in a patriarchal time-piece (this jewel of sexuality, agent of transmission of the matter of life through the generations). And fear with it, that true generation has not passed through her, or seized her for its fulfillment. And the final sentence: “Read the December issue of Bang to find out”: the sum of the tale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
A “bang” is, of course, what one gets out of life, and December is the last issue of the year. The final crisis of selfhood is still before her, and the very facility of her adjustment seems to represent the greatest danger to her integrity. So far as religion is concerned, I vaguely believe this woman would have evolved a very different interpretation of experience out her transitory atheism if she had had the courage to sound her own depths instead of accepting pragmatically what seemed to satisfy her immediate needs. As things stand, I believe that she perceives herself unconsciously as having forfeited profound experiences in the interests simply of facile adjustment. (Which is not to say that she is right in his self-perception; the story is a deeply experienced one.) I should perhaps pause at this point to make it plain, if it is not already so, that we are not here concerned with the validity of religious beliefs in their cognitive aspect. Rather, we are concerned with the depth of feeling with which a cognitive belief is experienced and with the question of integration or dissociation of such feelings in the structure of the self. Quite another aspect of this problem is the deepening of religious faith in persons who have not experienced doubt, but who have rather experiences semi-mystical confirmation, or even transfiguration of their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In general, however, it should be noted that I am addressing myself to these problems as a psychologist interested in inner experience, and not as a philosopher interested in discerning the truth about the outer cosmos (if there can be such a true difference). Speaking as a psychologist, then, what I find primarily in this subject in both these ways of resolving the crisis in belief (i.e., in the atheistic resolution and in the repudiation of a transitory atheism in favor of a return to religion) is an acceptance of emotional polarities as being genuine oppositions which necessitate a choice between them. This slavery to the antinomies shows itself wherever repudiation is necessary to the maintenance of some way of living, whether it be in matter of private philosophy, religious belief, ethnic group-membership, affairs of the heart, allegiances to opposed scientific theories, esthetic preferences, or psychodynamic mechanisms. Rebellion is a form of submission, suppression of impulse is a form of belief. Essentially what I think we have observed in this crisis is not resolution at all, in the sense of estrangement of a higher-level integration, but rather perpetuation of the conflict through acceptance of polarities as real, and deferment of the decision to a later point in life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Women who have indeed settled the crisis belief communicate quite a different sense of selfhood from the case we have considered, and they have much greater serenity and spontaneity, and freedom of both feeling and thought, in their make-up. I need hardly say that in the assessment of the strength of any personality it is most important to know what is settled and what is unsettled, which crises are past and which are present or still ahead. Our fear of freedom also expresses itself in other ritualistic and compulsive behavior. So, for example, when a person—like Lady Macbeth—has a compulsion to wash one’s hands many times a day, the behavior not only provides a symbolic way of dealing with guilt feelings, but is also gives the person something with which to be preoccupied. It is almost as though he has an unconsciously concluded that “idle minds [and hands] are the devil’s workshop” and has substituted a meaningless activity to keep us both busy. All of us probably do some of this sort of thing in one way or another, f it is only making a game of stepping on every crack (or avoiding stepping on any cracks) in the sidewalk. Some executives become busier and busier, having to work longer and longer hours. Although they may not be consciously aware of it, they may be doing this because they feel much more comfortable and safe at work than they do in their free time when they could be with their families or engaged in other exciting, but frightening, activities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Extreme emphasis on cleanliness and its preservation often performs similar functions. One young woman described how her mother had set aside the living room of the hose so that no member of the family entered it except on Christmas and Easter. Although there was no physical barrier to the room, even the family dog avoided it, because he somehow got the message that to enter it was to invite disaster. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “the cleaning lady was a very important part of our household because she got to go in there very week!” One wonders how the parents feel about their perfectly preserved living room with its unmarred furniture now that the children are married and gone. It certainly represents some lost opportunities in living. However, living is frightening. Fear of freedom can always be expressed in other specific fears that limit our freedom. Many such fears have been catalogued and given phobia names. There is fear of open places, closed places, high places, crowds, snakes, spiders, heart attack, death, being alone, and so forth. All of us experience some of these fears. They may be very mild or very intense. There may be considerable grounds for them in reality, or they may be quite unrealistic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Much can probably be said about the symbolic meaning and origin of these fears in our lives, but their function appears to be that of limiting our freedom. Any one of these fears, if taken seriously, can limit our activities. And even if we attempt to ignore them and act in spire of them, they are likely to enter our minds and keep us from enjoying freedom. A young married woman tells how she becomes very uneasy whenever she goes a few miles from home. And she remains anxious until she returns. It is easy to see how she might live out her life in a geographical box if she does not find relief from this fear. She might well deprive herself of a whole World of adventure. A young executive was bothered daily by the fear that his children would die. Every morning, before leaving on the long commuting trip to his office, he would have to go into each child’s room and check to make sure each was breathing. During the working day the fear would frequently recur and he would call home to check up on things. To go out of town on a business trip of several days would be almost intolerable. This he kept himself in bondage. He was too preoccupied with his fear to relax with his children or fully express his love for them or allow himself the freedom to enjoy them while he had them. Fatherhood was more frightening than it was fun. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Love and will take place within the forms of the society. These forms are the myths and symbols viable at that period. The forms are the channels through which the vitality of the society flows. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. And the present revolt against forms only proves the point in reverse: in our transitional age, we are hunting, exploring, reaching about, struggling to assert whatever we can find in the experiment for some new forms. In homely illustration, Duke Ellington recounts that when we writes music, he must keep in mind that his trumpeter cannot hot the very high notes securely, whereas the trombonist is very good at them; and writing under these impediment, he remarks, “It’s good to have limits.” Not only with strength and passion, but other forms of love as well: full satisfaction means the death of the human being; love runs itself out with the death of lovers. It is the nature of creativity to need form for its creative power; the impediment thus has a beneficial function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
These forms of the society are molded and presented first of all by the artist. It is the artists who teach us to see, who break the ground in the enlargement of our consciousness; they point the way toward the new dimensions of experience which we have, in any given period, been missing. This is why looking at a work of art gives us a sudden experience of self-recognition. Giotto, precursor to that remarkable birth of awareness known as the Renaissance, saw nature in a new perspective and for the first time painted rocks and trees in three-dimensional space. This space had been there all the time but was not seen because of medieval mortal’s preoccupation with their vertical relationship to eternity reflected in the two-dimensional mosaics. Giotto enlarged human consciousness because one’s perspective required an individual mortal standing at a certain point to see this perspective. The individual was now important; eternity was no longer the criterion, but the individual’s own experience and one’s own capacity to look. The art of Giotto was a prediction of the Renaissance individualism which was to flower a human years later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The new view of space pictures by Giotto was basic for the new geographical explorations of oceans and continents by Magellan and Columbus, which changed mortal’s relation to their World, and for the explorations in astronomy by Galileo and Copernicus, which changed mortal’s relations to the Heavens. These new discoveries in space resulted in a radical upheaval of mortal’s image of oneself. Ours is not the first age to be confronted with loneliness arising from mortal’s discovery of new dimensions of external space and similarly requiring new extensions of one’s own mind. The psychological upheaval and spiritual loneliness were shaped mainly by its consequence. On beholding the blindness and misery of mortals, on seeing all the Universe unknow, and mortals without light, left to themselves, as it were astray in this corner of the Universe, knowing not who has set one here, what one is here for, or will become of one when one dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will awake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. Just as mortals of the past were able to find the new planes of consciousness which did, to some extent, fill the new reservoirs of space, so in our day a similar shift is necessary. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have know these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
God Tolerates Us–We are What We are Devoted to and What We are Devoted to is What Motivates Our Conduct
Did I really not believe in those things which I saw? Or had I simply found that cosmos to be unendurable? I did not know. I wanted to be a saint! As we grow, we learn to adapt to stress, to cope with our World and to protect the fragile parts of our psyche. The ego is the center of our conscious life and is often at odds with the show, the forbidden, unwanted, unacknowledged, unconscious aspect of the psyche. Ego-strength is, first of all, a function simply of intelligence. Since comprehension of experience depends mostly on the degree of organization in the central nervous system, the scope of the ego will vary with the quality of the brain. Scope does not depend solely upon cognition, however. Psychodynamics enter chiefly in relation to the mechanism of repression. Repression—when I do not want to face a problem situation, I may choose to deal with it through repressions—pushing it out of my mind, pretending it does not exist. Repression can help us to cope with things that otherwise would be too difficult to face. Repression operates in the service of homeostasis, and so serves an economic function that is indispensable in maintaining the organism in an integral form in its environment. However, repression may be so extensive as to become a false economy; when broad areas of experience are lost to consciousness through repression, the ego may be said to be less strong (i.e., less able to adapt) as a consequence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
To state the mater absolutely, ego-strength requires a flexible repression mechanism, so that the person may be said to be optimally open to the experience, though capable of excluding phenomena that cannot be assimilated to the structure of the self. Physiological stability and regularity of physical functioning is the biological matrix in which the ego thrives, or attains maximum strength. Generally speaking, the ego is at its strongest in the years of physical maturity, granting good bodily health. Ego-strength is increasing as the organism grows towards maturity, levels off in the prime of life, and declines thereafter with increasing age. The crucial years in determining ego-strength are the first five years of life. Severe ego-dysfunction in those years is virtually irreversible. In the normal course of development a regular sequence of ego-crises and ego-achievement may be discerned. The first achievement of the ego in relation to experience is the attainment of a stable and facile distinction is the primary mark of functional psychosis, in which the introjection and projection no longer operate under the control of the ego. Paranoias and psychotic depressions and excitements are the diagnostic syndromes consequent upon such ego failure. A strong ego, on the other hand, consistently recognizes the independent and autonomous existence of objects other than itself, and also is able to take a reflective attitude toward its own existence and the laws of its being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Building upon this basic distinction of inner and outer sources of experience, the ego gradually attains mastery of bodily functions involving intake and output, which includes experiencing the erotic component is such functions. Such later character trains as the ability to get and to give good things, to hold on to what one wants and to let go when necessary, to be able to rise to the occasion, to make things go, to build and to conserve, to understand and to predicts, all have their beginnings in the early years when the most important ego-crises occur. The later achievements of the normal ego involve primarily the synthesis of these earlier acquisitions of mastery; the most important outcomes have to do with personal identity in work and in live, and finally with the individual’s participation in community experience, which would include some understanding of mortals in relation to nature, and of nature itself. The polarity which is shown ontologically in the process of nature is also shown in the human being. The paradox of love is that it is the highest degree of awareness of the self as a person and the highest degree of absorption in the other. The fact is that love is personal. It brings a heightened consciousness of relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Love contributes to the deepening of consciousness. The care which comes out of an awareness of the other’s needs and desires and the nuances of one’s feelings. The experience of concern emerges from the fact that people are able to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, are no longer isolated. Love creates a new field of magnetic force, a new being. Another aspect of the deepened consciousness comes from the affirmation of the self in love a it provides a sound and meaningful avenue to the sense of personal identity. When we know we are loved, we experience vigor and vitality which comes not from triumph or proof of one’s strength but from the expansion of awareness. However, even in our increased self-awareness it is possible to experience a poignant reminder that none of us ever overcomes our loneliness completely, but through acceptance of the spirit, the soul is replenished and a sense of our own personal significance is fortified, then the psyche is about to accept these limitations laid upon us by our human finiteness. That is why there is an enrichment and fulfillment—so far as this is possible—of personality. Beginning with the expansion of awareness of our own selves and our feelings, this consists of experiencing our capacity to give pleasure to others, and thereby achieving an expansion of meaning in the relationship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Love carries us beyond what we were at any given moment; I become literally more than what I was. Another aspect of new consciousness is possessed in the curious phenomenon that being able to give to others affirmation that they are worthy of life and essential to God’s plan. Some people feel that the one who loves us, will do many things necessary to show us that this is so; the actions are not the cause, however, but part of the total field. As we all know, the love experience is filled with pitfalls and disappointments and traumatic events for most of us. We have a great propensity for regulating life in minute detail and insofar as possible deciding in advance what is right and what is wrong or what is socially acceptable. And if we are successful in doing this, usually with the assistance of a religious or social class, then we can know in almost every situation what we should do. Then we no longer have to think or feel. We can rather automatically do what we know is right; or, failing that, we suffer the appropriate guilt for the sin or social blunder that we have committed. This makes for a safe, regulated kind of life. However, it also tends to be a joyless life from which most of the spontaneity and creativity has been removed. Although it is often maintained that a sense of responsibility demands a clear-cut view of right and wrong, it is more likely that such legalistic approaches actually undermine personal responsibility. For there are always areas of life, which are not always transparent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
When we ignore that fact that thing may not always be what they seem, arbitrarily seeing all factors in absolutes, we take ourselves off the hook of wrestling with the subtleties of the situation. We are in a position where we can uphold the right and denounce the evil. The relation between social character and social structure is never static, since both elements in this relationship are never-ending processes. A change in either factor means a change in both. Many political revolutionaries believe that one must first change the political and economic structure radically, and that then, as a second and almost necessary step, the human mind will also change: that the new society, once established, will quasiautomatically produce the new human being. They do not see that the new elite, being motivated by the same character as the old one, will tend to recreate the conditions of the old society in the new sociopolitical institutions the revolution has created; that the victory of the revolution will be its defeat as a revolution—although not as a historical phase that paved the way for the socioeconomic development that was hobbled in its fully development. On the other side are those who claim that first the nature of the human beings must change—their consciousness, their values, their character—and that only then can a truly human society be built. The history of the human race proves them wrong. Purely physical change has always remained in the private sphere and been restricted to small oases, or has been completely ineffective when preaching of spiritual values was combined with the practice of the opposite values. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The social character as a further and significant function beyond that of serving the needs of society for a certain type of character and satisfying the individual’s character-conditioned behavioral needs. Social character must fulfill any human being’s inherent religious needs. However, people’s religion may be conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love, of domination or of solidarity; it may further their power of reason or paralyze it. They may be aware of their system as being a religious one, different from those of the secular realm, or they may think that they have no religion, and interpret their devotion to certain allegedly secular sims, such as power, money, or success, as nothing but their concern for the practical and the expedient. The question is not one of religion or not? but of which kind of religion?—whether it is one that furthers human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyzes human growth. A specific religion, provided it is effective in motivating conduct, is not a sum total of doctrines and beliefs; it is rooted in a specific character structure of the individual and, inasmuch as it is the religion of a group, in the social character. Thus, our religious attitude may be considered an aspect of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our conduct. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their official beliefs for their real, though secret religion. If, for instance, a mortal worships power while professing a religion of love, the religion of power is one’s secret religion, while one’s so-called official religion, for example Christianity, in only an ideology. The religious need is rooted in the basic conditions of existence of the human species. Ours is a species by itself, just as is the species chimpanzee or horse or swallow. Each species can be and is defined by its specific physiological and anatomical characteristics. As being highly evolved, humans are no longer ruled by instincts alone. It is generally accepted that as higher beings human behavior is less determined by phylogenetically programmed instincts. The process of ever-decreasing determination of behavior by instinct can be contributed to a large and more complex brain structure; especially neocortex which is three times the size of that of primates, and a truly fantastic number of interneuronal connections. Considering these data, the human species can be defined as the beings who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination has reached the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brain a maximum. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
This combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal brain development has never occurred before in any living beings that we know of besides mortals. Lacking the full capacity to act by the command of instincts while possessing the capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination—new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primates—the human species needed a frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive. Without a map of our natural and social World—a picture of the World and of one’s place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion—human beings would be confused and unable to act purposeful and consistently, for there would be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that permits one to organize all the impressions that impinge upon each individual. Our World makes sense to us, and we feel certain about our ideas, through the consensus with those around us. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. However, the map has never been entirely wrong—nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living. Only to the degree that the practice of life is freed from its contradictions and its irrationality can the map correspond to reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The impressive fact is that no culture has been found in which such a frame of orientation does not exist. Neither has any individual. Often individuals may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that they respond to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as their judgment guides them. However, it can be easily demonstrated that they simply take their own philosophy for granted because to them it is only common sense, and they are unaware that all their concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference. When such persons are confronted with a fundamentally different total view of life, they judge it as crazy or irrational or juvenile, while they consider themselves as being only logical. The deep need for a frame of reference is particularly evident in youth. At a certain age, many youngsters will often make up their own frame of orientation in an ingenious way, using the few data available to them. However, a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective—not only our proclaimed—values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning to life. Socioeconomic structure, character structure, and religious structure are inseparable from each other. If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology. We have to look behind it for the real religious structures, even though we may not be conscious of it as such—unless the human energies inherent in the religious structure of character act as dynamite and tend to undermine the given socioeconomic conditions. However, as there are always individual expectations to dominant social character, there are also individual exceptions to the dominant religious character. They are often the leaders of religious revolutions and the founders of new religions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The religious orientation, as the experiential core of all high religions, has been mostly perverted in the development of these religions. The way individuals consciously conceive of their personal orientation does not matter; they may be religious without considering themselves to be so—or they may be nonreligious, although considering themselves Christian. We have no word to denote the experiential content of religion, aside from its conceptual and institutional aspect. Hence, we can never be sure what denotes religious in the experiential, subjective orientation, regardless of the conceptual structure in which the person’s religiosity is expressed. Rationalization is one of the more popular concepts of psychology and has found its way into everyday language. If I want very much to buy a very expensive stereo but cannot afford it, I might immediately begin listing all the stereo’s weaknesses and the reasons why it is just as well that I cannot buy it. And I may be told by a friend, “Stop rationalizing about the situation!” As long as we do our part, the Lord will bless us with prosperity and with the wisdom to keep our mind focused on what matters most in life. “However, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” reports Matthew 6.33. Those who seek riches to build up their own egos will find their treasure to be slippery and easily lost in unwise ways. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
God is not telling us that we should not be prosperous or the prosperity is a sin. On the contrary, he has always blessed his obedient children. However, God is telling us that we should seek prosperity only after we seek, find, and serve him. Then, because our hearts are right, because we love God first and foremost, we will choose to invest the riches we obtain in building his kingdom. If one choses to seek riches for the sake of riches, one will fall short. One will never be satisfied. One will be empty, never finding true happiness and lasting joy. The trial of your faith in the next few years will likely not be that you lack the material things of this World. Rather it will be in choosing what to do wit the temporal blessings one receives. To the extent that an adult person has achieved some freedom and identity as a self, one has a base from which to acquire wisdom in the past traditions of one’s society and to take it one’s own. However, if this freedom is missing, traditions block rather than enrich. They may become an internalized set of traffic rules, but they will have little or no fructifying influence on one’s inward development as a person. Whatever view we hold, it must be shown why every person has a wish to make some other kind of otherness one’s own: Perhaps, in fact, we are never alone. God has saved for the final inning some of his strongest souls, who will help bear off the kingdom triumphantly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Let them Render Grace for Grace and Let Love be their Common Will
In love every person starts from be beginning. This beginning is the relationship between people which we term care. Though it goes beyond feeling, it begins there. It is a feeling denoting a relationship of concern, when the other’s existence matters to you; a relationship of dedication, taking the ultimate form of being willing to get delight in or, in ultimate terms, to suffer for, the other. I have often notice, when I give an interpretation to a patient in a psychoanalytic session, that what impresses the individual most at the moment is not that the theoretical truth or falsehood of what I say, but the fact that my saying it shows my belief that one can change and one’s behavior has meaning. Despite death, there is meaning and nobility in the fact that we can admit together that we are not reconciled to the severing of our love. For our human love is even more precious when people cling to their loved ones. This is an affirmation of love for each other and a mutual stand against for life. We are able to face the future, and find ourselves better able to encounter it and less lonely because we encounter it together. Feeling is everything because all starts there. Feeling commits one, bonds one to the object, and ensures action. However, in modern times, feeling has become demoted and is disparaged as merely subjective. Reason or, accurately, technical reason is the guide to the way issues are to be settled. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Many say, “I feel” as a synonym for “I vaguely believe,” when we do not know—little realizing that we cannot know expect as we feel. However, it is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. We find ourselves rather as essentially a unity of emotions, of enjoyment, of hopes, of fears, of regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of these are our subjective reactions to our environment as we are active in our nature. Our unity is consistent in shaping these patterns of feelings. The romantic and ethical basis for love is not available to us any longer. We must seek to start from the beginning, psychologically speaking, with feelings. When there is an upsurgence of a genuine human feeling of sympathy, simple as it may be, is a critical point in psychotherapy. The awareness of our human significance forces us to look more deeply into our condition as beings. We find ourselves caring despite the apparent meaningless of the situation. In the waiting there is care and hope. It matters that we wait, wait in human relationship so the darkness shall be light. Some people are not interested in money and success. They seek an honesty, openness, a genuine of personal relationship; they are out to find a genuine feeling, a touch, a look in the eyes, a sharing of fantasy. The criterion becomes the intrinsic meaning and is to be judged by one’s authenticity, doing one’s own thing, and giving in the sense of making one’s self available for the other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
When we look for answers to the questions we have been discussing, we find, curiously enough, that every answer seems to somehow impoverish the problem. Every answer sells us short; it does not do justice to the depth of the question but transforms it from a dynamic human concern into a simplistic, lifeless, inert line of words. Sometimes it seems there probably are not any answers. The only way of resolving—in contrast to solving—the questions is to transform them by means of deeper and wider dimensions of consciousness. The problems must be embraced in their full meaning, the antinomies resolved even with their contradiction. They must be built upon; and out of this will arise a new level of consciousness. This is as close as we shall ever get to a resolution; and it is all we need to get. In psychotherapy, for example, we do not seek answers as such, or cut-and-dry solutions to the question—which would leave the patient worse off than one originally was in one’s struggling. However, we seek to help people take in, encompass, embrace, and integrate the problems. The serious problems of life are never solved, and if it seems that they have been solved, something important has been lost. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
The mode of being exists only in the here and now. The mode of having exists only in time: past, present, and future. In the having mode we are bound to what we have amassed in the past: money, land, fame, social status, knowledge, children, memories. We think about the past, and we feel by remembering feelings (or what appear to be feelings) of the past. (This is the essence of sentimentality.) We are the past; we can say: “I am what I was.” This elicits in us the capacity to reach out, to let ourselves be grasped, to preform and mold the future. It is the self-conscious capacity to be responsive to what might be. The future is the anticipation of what will become the past. It is experienced in the mode of having as is the past and is expressed when one says: “This person has a future,” indicating that the individual will have many tings even though one does not now have there. Truth, covenants, and ordinances enable us to overcome fear and face the future with faith. Obedience allows God’s blessings to flow without constraint. He will bless his obedient children with freedom from bondage and misery. And God will bless them with more light. For example, one keeps the Word of Wisdom knowing that obedience will not only bring freedom, but will also add blessings of wisdom and treasures of knowledge. God’s holy Angels are ever on call to help us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Unfailing faith is fortified through prayer. Our heartfelt pleadings are important to God. The fundamental experience of having is the same, whether we deal with past or future. The present is the point where past and future join, a frontier station in time, but not different in quality from the two realms it connects. Being is not necessarily outside of time, but time is not the dimension that governs being. The painter has to wrestle with color, canvas, and brushes, the sculptor with stone and chisel. Yet the creative act, their vision of what they are going to create, transcends time. It occurs in a flash, or in many flashes, but time is not experienced in the vision. The same holds true for the thinkers. Writing down their ideas occurs in time, but conceiving them is a creative event outside of time. It is the same for every manifestation of being. The experience of loving, of joy, of grasping truth does not occur in time, but in the here and now. The here and now is eternity, for instance, timelessness. However, eternity is not, as popularly misunderstood, indefinitely prolonged time. If we pray with an eternal perspective, we need not wonder if our most tearful and heartfelt pleadings are heard. Our prayer are heard by the Lord, and are recorded with this seal and testament—the Lord has sworn and decreed that they shall be granted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
One can also experience the future as if it were the here and now. This occurs when a future state is so fully anticipated in one’s own experience that it is only the future objectively, for instance, in external fact, but not in the subjective experience. This is the nature of genuine utopian thinking (in contrast to utopian daydreaming); it is the basis for genuine faith, which does not need the external realization in the future in order to make the experience of it real. How we deal with life’s trials is part of the development of our faith. Strength comes when we remember that we have a divine nature, an inheritance of infinite worth. The whole concept of past, present, and future, for instance, of time, enters into our lives due to our bodily existence: the limited duration of our life, the constant demand of our body to be taken care of, the nature of the physical World that we have to use in order to sustain ourselves. Indeed, we cannot live in eternity; being mortal, we cannot ignore or escape times. The rhythm of night and day, of sleep and wakefulness, of growing and aging, the need to sustain ourselves by work and to defend ourselves, all these factors force us to respect time if we want to live, and our bodies make us want to live. However, that we respect time is one thing; that we submit to it is another. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
In the mode of being, we respect time, but we do not submit to it. However, this respect for time becomes submission when the having mode predominates. In this mode not only things are things, but all that is alive becomes a thing. In the mode of having, time becomes our ruler. In the being mode, time is dethroned; it is no longer the idol that rules out life. In industrial society times rules supreme. The current mode of production demands that every action be exactly timed, that not only the endless assembly line conveyor belt but, in a less crude sense, most of our activities be ruled by time. In addition, time not only is time, time is money. The machine must be used maximally; therefore the machine forces its own rhythm upon the worker. Via the machine, time has become our ruler. Only in our free hours do we seem to have a certain choice. Yet we usually organize our leisure as we organize our work. Or we rebel against tyrant time by being absolutely lazy. By not doing anything except disobeying time’s demands, we have the illusion that we are free, when we are, in fact, only paroled from our being possessed by time. This points to the fact that there is a deeper dimension in human beings. Each requires a participation from us, an openness, a capacity to give ourselves and receive into ourselves. And each is an inseparable part of the basis of love and will. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The new age which knows upon the door is as yet unknown, seen only through beclouded windows. We get only hints of the new continent into which we are galloping: foolhardy are those who attempt to blueprint it, silly those who attempt to forecast it, and absurd those who irresponsibility try to toss it off by saying that the new person will like one’s new World just as we like ours. There is plenty of evidence that many people do not like ours and that demonstrations and speeches and negotiations are necessary to compel those in power to change it. However, whatever the new World will be, we do not choose to back into it. Our human responsibility is to find a place of consciousness which will be adequate to it and will fill the vast impersonal emptiness of our technology with human meaning. The urgent need for this consciousness is seen by sensitive persons in all fields and is especially made real by the new consciousness to the degree that trust is present, people are able to communicate with themselves and others to form consensual goals. To the degree that trust is present, people can be truly inter-dependent. Encountering requires open relating, self-awareness, and total unity of Self. This basis for human relationships can replace the present hypocritical stance as a necessary step before more civilized, meaningful, and rational solutions to social problems can be obtained. Let them render grace for grace, let love be their common will. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Love and will are both forms of communion of consciousness. Both are also affects—ways of affecting others and our World. This play on words is not accidental: for affect, meaning affection or emotion, is the same word as that for affecting change. An affect or affection is also the way of making, doing, forming something. Bot love and will are ways of creating consciousness in others. To be sure, each may be abused: love may be used as a way of clinging, and will as a way of manipulating others in order to enforce a compliance. Possibly always some traces of clinging love and manipulating will crop up in the behavior of all of us. However, the abuse of an affect should not be the basis for its definition. The lack of both love and will ends up in separation, putting a distance between us and the other person; and in the long run, this leads to apathy. However, our rewards come not only hereafter. Many blessings will be ours in this life, among our children and grandchildren. We, as faithful Saints, do not have to fight life’s battles alone. Think of that! God will contend with those who contend with us, and he will save us. God will fight our battles for us, and our children’s battles, and their children’s children’s, to the third and fourth generation. We are promised blessings that are beyond measures. Though time may be difficult, our knowledge of our love of our Heavenly Father and of our Savior will comfort and sustain us and bring joy to our hearts as we walk uprightly and keep the commandments. Be of good cheer, the future is as bright as our faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
A Poor Torn Heart, a Tattered Heart–Care is the Basic Constitutive Phenomenon of Human Existence!
Your innocence is so genuine. I am sorry. Forgive me. It is only the cycle of rejection and the need for escape from intolerable self-hatred is also the origin of our fear of love. Out of the experience of feeling rejected with subsequent feelings of worthlessness and self-hate, comes the individual’s feeling that love is risky. One probably never puts this feeling into words, even to oneself, but the individual’s emotional logic must run something like this: “Since I hate my real self and know it to be worthless, I dare not be myself with others. If I am open and direct with people, they will see me as I am and hate me. If I love, I will only be hurt in return. I have had enough of that already, so I will find some other way of dealing with people.” The escape hatches not only provide a way of avoiding full awareness of avoiding full awareness of self-hatred; they also help the person bypass the anticipated dangers of intimacy. And because one has feelings of worthlessness, the individual’s desire to avoid the risks of love are increased because one lacks confidence in one’s ability to cope with emotional hurt when one experiences it. When we look at other people’s ways of dealing with their feelings of inadequacy it is often not too difficult to see that the escape hatches they use are ultimately self-defeating and lead to increase feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
However, when we ourselves are caught in cycles of behavior that we have spent most our lives developing it is not so easy to see our predicament or desirability, much less the possibility of breaking out of the cycle. One male therapist once suffered acute anxiety which seemed to stem from his basic doubt as to his own sex role, and a fear of the passive desires that he experienced. This not uncommon conflict, while its effect was pervasive and influenced many of his personal relations, became especially intense in interactions involving other men with similar problems. This therapist, a quite intelligent and sensitive individual, experienced specifically genital homosexual desires, and was in an acute state of conflict because of them. His very complex system of defenses was organized around his fear of such impulses, which he was firmly resolved not to indulge. His personality score indicated that he was experiencing considerable stress. The therapist found one of his male patients attractive, both physically and intellectually. The therapist thought the man used words very effectively and was bright. However, the patient displayed confusion with relation to his own social role, for instance, ambivalence toward the working class and attempted, but unsuccessful, identification with the upper class was very apparent and created a note of insincerity to which shone through. It is apparent in the tendency—just perceptible—to obsequiousness with higher status people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The obsequiousness with higher status people may very well be an expression also of passivity toward the father, which probably has to do primarily with class identification for the patient. The therapist expressed some dynamic under-currents in remarking on the irregularity with which the patient kept appointments, he said, “Whenever I felt we were really getting close, then he would miss his appointment.” Again, “He was very obsequious to me at times, sort of putting me up there.” Other remarks of this sort were, “He just wants me to be a wedge for him,” and “He would like for me to be over him.” The interaction finally took on an extremely anxious and hostile character, and after a session in which for the first time there was considerable overt homosexual content, the therapist become openly angry and the patient dud not return for several weeks. When he finally did call to make another appointment, the therapist demanded to know why he had not called to break previous appointments if he did not intend to keep them. The therapist reported that he then asked, “Well, now have you decided whether you really want to come in?” The patient replied in an enraged tone, “Of course I do.” The therapist remarked to one of the staff psychologists later that this was the first expression of hostility toward him in the course of the therapy. He then added, “But the things that guy would say about me if he would only talk ought to be in print. I mean, would not be fit to print.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The uncertainty of both therapist and patient about the sex role of both himself and the other person finally generated so much anxiety that the situation became intolerable. The interaction simply could not go on. Eventually the patient was transferred to another therapist who reports that there has been considerable improvement and continuing progress. It should not be thought that the therapist was himself entirely unaware of these disturbing under-currents in the interaction. He sought consolation on the case with a number of skilled people, and during this period of time he also tried to make arrangements for a personal analysis. It was evident that the relationship was a significant as well as a disturbing one for him too, and perhaps ultimately it will prove to have been quite a beneficial one. He displayed a high degree of conscientiousness and personal integrity, and it is not to his discredit that his own needs and problems were at that particular moment in his life too pressing for him to carry out successfully his very difficult task. The cautious, the having persons enjoy security, yet by necessity they are very insecure. They depend on what they have: money, prestige, their ego—that is to say, on something outside themselves. However, what become of them if they lose what they have? For, indeed, whatever one has can be lost. Most obviously, one’s property can be lost—and with it usually one’s position, one’s friends—and at any moment one can, and sooner or later one is bound to lost one’s life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I? Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living. Because I can lose what I have, I am necessarily constantly worried that I shall lose what I have. I am afraid of thieves, of economic changes, of revolutions, of infirmary, of death, and I am afraid of love, of freedom, of growth, of change, of the unknow. Thus I am continuously worried, suffering from a chronic hypochondriasis, with regard not only to loss of health but to any other loss of what I have; I become defensive, hard, suspicious, lonely, driven by the need to have more in order to be better protected. The hero is filled only with oneself; in one’s extreme egoism one believes that one is oneself, because one is a bundle of desires. At the end of one’s life one recognizes that because of one’s property-structured existence, one has failed to be oneself, that one is like an onion without a kernel, an unfinished person, who was never oneself. The anxiety and insecurity engendered by the danger of losing what one has are absent in the being mode. If I am who I am not what I have, nobody can deprive me of or threaten my security and my sense of identity. My center is within myself; my capacity for being and for expressing my essential powers is part of my character structure and depends on me. This holds true for the normal process of living, not, of course, for such circumstances as incapacitating illness, torture, or other cases of external restrictions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
While having is bases on some thing that is diminished by use, being grows by practice. (The burning bush that is not consumed is the biblical symbol for this paradox.) The power of reason, of love, of artistic and intellectual creation, all essential powers grow through the process of being expressed. What is spent is not lost. The only threat to my security in being lies in myself: in lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness to have others take over my life. However, these dangers are not inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in having. The experience of loving, liking, enjoying something without want to have it is not easy for many modern people to experience. It is hard for people to experience enjoyment separate from having. Having-centered person want to have the person they like or admire. This can be seen in relations between therapist and patient, parents and their children, between teachers and students, and between friends. Neither partner is satisfied simply to enjoy the other person; each wishes to have the other person for him—or herself. Hence, each is jealous of those who also want to have the other. Each partner seeks the other like a shipwrecked sailor seeks a plank or mermaid—for survival. Predominantly having relationships are heavy, burdened, filled with conflicts and jealousies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Speaking more generally, the fundamental elements in the relation between individual in the having mode of existence are competition, antagonism, and fear. The antagonistic element in the having relationship stems from its nature. If having is the basis of my sense of identity because I am what I have, the wish to have must lead to the desire to have much, to have more, to have most. In other words, greed is the natural outcome of the having orientation. It can be the greed of the miser or the greed of the profit hunter or the greed of the womanizer or the man chaser. Whatever constitutes their greed, the greedy can never have enough, can never be satisfied. In contrast to physiological needs, such as hunger, that have definite satiation points due to the physiology of the body, mental greed—and all greed is mental, even if it is satisfied via the body—has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome. In addition, since what one has can be taken away in one form or another, once must have more, in order to fortify one’s existence against such danger. If everyone wants to have more, everyone must fear one’s neighbor’s aggressive intention to take away what one has. To prevent such attack, one must become more powerful and preventively aggressive oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Besides, since production, great as it may be, can never keep pace with unlimited desires, there must be competition and antagonism among individuals in the struggle for getting the most. And the strife would continue even if a state of absolute abundance could be reached; those who have less in physical health and in attractiveness, in gifts, in talents would bitterly envy those who have more. That the having mode and the resulting greed necessarily lead to impersonal antagonism and strife holds true for nations as it does for individuals. For as long as nations are composed of people whose main motivation is having and greed, they cannot help waging war. They necessarily covet what another nation has, and attempt to get what they want by war, economic pressure, or threats. They will use these procedures against weaker nations, first of all, and form alliances that are stronger than the nation that is to be attacked. Even if it has only a reasonable chance to win, a nation will wage war, not because it suffers economically, but because the desire to have more and to conquer is deeply ingrained in the social character. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Of course there are times of peace. However, one must distinguish between lasting peace and peace that is a transitory phenomenon, a period of gathering strength, rebuilding one’s industry and army—in other words, between peace that is a permanent state of harmony and peace that is essentially only a truce. While the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries had periods of truce, they are characterized by a state of chronic war among the main actors on the historical stage. Peace as a state of lasting harmonious relations between nations is only possible when the having structure is replaced by the being structure. The idea that one can build peace while encouraging the striving for possession and profit is an illusion, and a dangerous one, because it deprives people of recognizing that they are confronted with a clear alternative: either a radical change of their character or the perpetuity of war. This is indeed an old alternative; the leaders have chosen war and the people followed them. Today and tomorrow, with the incredible increase in the destructiveness of the new weapons, the alternative is no longer war—but mutual suicide. What hold true of international wars is equally true for class war. The war between the classes, essentially the exploiting and the exploited, has always existed in societies that were based on the principle of greed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
There was no class war where there was neither a need for or a possibility of exploitation nor a greedy social character. However, there are bound to be classes in any society, even the richest, in which the having more is dominant. As already noted, given unlimited desires, even the greatest production cannot keep pace with everybody’s fantasy of having more than their neighbors. Necessarily, those who are stronger, more cleaver, or more favored by other circumstances will try to establish a favored position for themselves and try to take advantage of those who are less powerful, either by force and violence or by suggestion. Oppressed classes will overthrow their rulers, and so on; the class struggle might perhaps become less violent, but it cannot disappear as long as greed dominates the human heart. The idea of a classless society in a so-called socialists World filled with the spirit of greed is as illusory—and dangerous—as the idea of permanent peace among greedy nations. In the being mode, private having (private property) has little affective importance, because I do not need to own something in order to enjoy it, or even in order to use it, but private property is a blessing. In the being mode, more than one person—in fact millions of people—can share in the enjoyment of the same object, since none need—or want—to have it, as a condition of enjoying it. This not only avoids strife; it creates one of the deepest forms of human happiness: shared enjoyment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Nothing unites people more (without restricting their individuality) than sharing their admiration and love for a person; sharing an idea, a piece of music, a painting, a symbol; sharing in a ritual—and sharing sorrow. The experience of sharing makes and keeps the relation between two individuals alive; it is the basis of all great religious, political, and philosophical movements. Of course, this holds true only as long as and to the extent that the individuals genuinely love or admire. When religious and political movements ossify, when bureaucracy manages the people by means of suggestions and threats, the sharing stops. While nature has devised, as it were, the prototype—or perhaps the symbol—of shared enjoyment in the pleasures of the flesh, empirically the pleasures of the flesh is not necessarily an enjoyment that is shared; the partners are frequently so narcissistic, self-involved, and possessive that one can speak only of simultaneous, but not of shared pleasure. In another respect, however, nature offers a less ambiguous symbol for the distinction between having and being. Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of the soul, the source of human tenderness. Care is given power by nature’s sense of pain; if we do not care for ourselves, we are hurt, burned, injured. This is the source identification: we can feel in our own bodies the pain of the child or the hurt of the adult. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
However, our responsibility is to cease letting care be solely a matter of nerve endings. I do not deny the biological phenomena, but care must become a conscious psychological fact. Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about. Care is the source of will. For will is not an independent faculty, or a department of the self, and we always get into trouble when we try to make it a special faculty. It is a function of the whole person. When fully conceived, the care structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. When we do not care, we lose our being; and care is the way back to being. If I care about being, I will shepherd it with some attention paid to its welfare, whereas if I d not care, my being disintegrates. One patient appeared rather sad, lackadaisical, and passive. His peak score on the personality inventory was on depression, with a secondary peak on psychasthenia. The profile of a depressive character, chronically pessimistic about things, a bit worrisome, generally seeing the World through blue-colored glasses. At the time of the first testing session, this patient was quite obviously depressed, speaking slowly and in a low tone. When he was seen again in a couple of week later, he still did not seem very energetic, but he was not nearly so depressed. One of the staff psychologists asked him what had caused him to feel better, and he replied, “Oh, I do not know—guess it just sort of wore off.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The patient was very passive rather castrate individual who was afraid of expressing hostility, or, for that matter, of feeling it. He is otherwise in excellent contact with reality and he responds well emotionally. He should be able to relate easily to people and to form normal emotional bonds with others. He has adequate inner resources. His chief problems seem to be in the area of dependency and great sensitivity to rejection, especially by father figures. The patient’s symptomatology seems to be expressed chiefly as a way of life, although some of his anxiety is probably somatized gastrointestinally. It is to be expected that successful psychotherapy with him would have to be a long process, and that it would continue only with a very accepting and tolerant therapist how would not arouse the patient’s strong castration anxiety. Ultimately it might be possible for the patient to assume a more phallic role, but the change could be expected to be very slow and gradual. Care is the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence. It is thus ontological in that is constitutes human as human. Will and wish cannot be the basis for care, but rather vice versa: they are founded on care. If we did not care to begin with, we could not will or wish; and if we do not authentically care, we cannot help wishing or willing. Willing is caring made free, and made active. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by care. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The therapist characterized the patient as, “Congenial—pleasant—not digging or probing. Accepts life—wants general happiness and security.” Care is the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence. It is thus ontological in that is constitutes human as human. Will and wish cannot be the basis for care, but rather vice versa: they are founded on care. If we did not care to begin with, we could not will or wish; and if we do not authentically care, we cannot help wishing or willing. Willing is caring made free, and made active. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by care. A few weeks later, the therapist found that the patient was taking such god care of himself that, “I can take it easy with him compared with most of the people around here.” Essentially what happened in the therapy was that the therapist made it clear that the patent had noting to fear from him. One of the patient’s chief symptoms was a “frightened feeling in my stomach when I am around the boss” at work. This seemed to be a repetition of his childhood fear of his very stern step-father, who in his drunken rages often threatened to cause great bodily hard and/or injury which would result in the loss of life to the wife’s children. The patient recalled that the step-father had a gun to do it with, too. The therapist, however, apparently did not have a gun and was anything but threatening. He was more encouraging than anything else. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Temporality is what makes care possible. The patient accepted the encouragement, and decided that maybe he would be better off if he were not working for any boss at all, but working for himself instead (a view in which the therapist heartily concurred). He finally decided to try to start his own doughnut business, and shortly thereafter brought in a dozen doughnuts for the therapist, who found them delicious. Will is the comprehensive, matured form of wish, matured form of wish, and is rooted with ontological necessity in care. In an individual’s conscious act, will and care go together, are in that sense identical. Care is always caring about something. We are caught up in our experience of the objective thing or event we care about. In care one must, by involvement with the objective fact, do something about the situation; one must make some decisions. This is where care brings love and will together. Compassion may connote to many a more sophistical form of care. It is an attribute of high intelligence, honesty of purpose, and a conceptual scheme of sufficient scope and subtlety to enable people to cognize their roles clearly as well as to feel them and be emotionally committed to them. Care tends to manifest itself both generally, toward all the people in one’s environment. This is important in the struggle for the existence of the human being in a World in which everything seems increasingly mechanical and computerized. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
When we care, it is the refusal to accept emptiness though it faces one on every side; the dogged insistence on human dignity, though it be violated on every side; and the stubborn assertion of the self to give content to our activities, routine as these activities may be. Care is a particular type of intentionality shown especially in psychotherapy. It means to wish someone well; and if the therapist does not experience this within oneself, or does not have the belief that what happens to the patient matters, woe unto the therapy. In addition to therapy, it is a great idea to understand that we are required to confide in God, to exercise faith, and to act so that we can receive help, step by step. Sometimes answers to prayer are not recognized because we are too intent on wanting confirmation of our own desires. We fail to see that the Lord would have us do something else. Be care to seek God’s will. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. And blessed are all the pure in heart, for they shall see God. And blessed are all the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. And blessed are all they who are persecuted for my name’s sake (God), for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven,” 3 Nephi 12.7-10. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Have You Got a Brook in Your Little Heart Where Bashful Flowers Grow?
The milk can work a cure in humans. Research must be objective, but to be objective may be simply the worst thing in the World from the point of view of psychotherapy, or of any creative activity. The artist has a perfect right to say to the critic, “Go away and leave me alone,” for in fact whatever the artist does one must do alone. You have got to cross that lonesome valley. You have got to cross it by yourself. There is no one going to cross it for you. You have got to cross it by yourself. What has emerged most clearly from my own research on creativity is the fact that the creative person is able to find in the developmentally more primitive and less reasonably new insight, even though at first this may be only intuitively and dimly grasped. One is willing to pay heed to vague feelings and intimations which on the grounds of good sense are put aside hastily by most of us. Characteristically, the creative individual refuses to be content with the most easily established perceptual schemata or perceptual constancies, even such obviously adaptive ones as the discrimination between what is inside the self versus what is outside the self, or the conviction that there are things in the World that are absolutely unmoving, or the notion that all effects have causes, or that time passes moment by moment in succession of states rather than in an unstoppable flux. You will recognize these of course as the basis of what we usually call a sane mind, a clear sensorium, a sense of reality, and so on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
However, creative people sometimes do without these and without many other basic constancies, leading them at times, as you might imagine, to give an impression of psychological imbalance. There is reason to believe that many creative individuals deliberately induce in themselves an altered state of consciousness in which the ordinary structures of experience are broken down. The ordinary World may thus be transcended: in mystical states, in feelings of being possessed, in prolonged trances of deep reveries, and even at times in psychosis. These deviations from perceptual constancies my permit a more inclusive and more valid perception, once the stress involved in extending the boundaries is relieved. In brief, a kind of transcendence of apparently adaptive but in some sense crippling limits may thus be achieved. Something of this sort is necessary if neurosis is to be cured, for the constancies there are properly called compulsive and imprisoning. When exposed to insensitivity, it is inevitable that a child would feel rejected. And these feelings undermine whatever feelings of value the child may have had and gradually feelings of worthlessness develop. Perhaps the emotional logic of the child is something like this: “The most significant people in my life—that is, my parents—do not appear to consider me to be of personal worth, therefore I must be worthless.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
As the child becomes older, he or she may or may not be aware of feelings of worthlessness. Some people are quite aware of such feelings. There is probably no counselor who has spent time working with people who has not had individuals say something like this: “All of my life I have never felt I really mattered to anyone. And I have always felt there must be something wrong with me.” There are others who have been somewhat successful in keeping their feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness out of their conscious thoughts by the means of various kinds of psychological defenses. However, it is a universal experience. All of us have some of these feelings within us. When the child begins to have these feelings of worthlessness as a result of feeling that one has been rejected, the next step in one’s emotional development seems to take the form of self-hate, as follows: feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness which turn into feelings of self-hate. Again we can imagine the emotional logic that takes place within the child. Probably it is something like this: “I seem to be worthless. I appear inferior to my parents and other people around me. I cannot respect myself, since they do not seem to respect me. Since I am worthless, I hate myself.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
These feelings of self-hate may be maintained on a largely unconscious level. In fact there is every reason to think that the child would do everything possible to avoid bringing these feelings into awareness, no matter how strong they might be. To really hate oneself is a repelling, frightening idea, so much so that it is almost intolerable. Perhaps the best example of extreme self-hatred that is at least partly conscious is the person in a suicidal depression. The self-hate is so strong and so intolerable that the only out for the person appears to one to be the murder of one’s self, an act of extreme self-hate. Because hate of one’s self is so intolerable and is so threatening to the very roots of the person’s being, most persons react with psychological defenses of one kind or another. We find some kind of escape hatch by which to avoid the full force of this terrible feeling that we are worthless and the object of our own hatred. A strong case can be made for believing that it is this feeling of hatred toward one’s self that lies at the root of most, if not all, personality difficulties and family problems that are not caused by a brain injury or some other physical malfunction. For the things that people do and say that result in their being described as having personality problems and that causes them difficulty in relationships with others can be seen as ways of escaping from self-hatred. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Before some of these ways of escape are examined in detail, it is well to note the principle that now comes in focus. As we shall see as we examine these escape hatches, each of them seems to have built into it the tendency to set up a negative reaction in other people that will lead to further feelings of rejection and therefore increase the individual’s feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. This cyclical process might be illustrated: Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape hatch, further feelings of rejection, and feelings of worthlessness. This rancorous cycle continues. And this is how some people become bullies. Because they feel rejected, usually because they have done something deviant, they will try to escape from feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred by bullying someone they know. Or perhaps an individual will switch to some other ways of avoiding one’s feelings about oneself. One might attempt to escape by becoming a show-off or braggart. “See that you do not boast in your own wisdom,” reports Alma 38.11. Here, too, sooner or later, even though it may seem cute at first, people will get tired of the boasting, and one will feel further feelings of rejection. One has been caught in a cycle of rejection. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
The question might be asked here, “Is not the person who is a bully or a braggart the one who loves oneself or things too highly of oneself, rather than the one who hates oneself?” Further thought makes it clear, however, that is the child had genuine feelings of worth and value as a person, it would not be necessary for one to try to prove oneself more powerful than others or better than others by bullying or boasting. One is attempting to escape from the nagging, haunting feeling that one is worthless by attempting to prove to others—and most of all to oneself—that one is an individual or worth. Unfortunately, because of one’s own feelings about the unsatisfactory ways in which one trues to prove one’s worth, one sinks more deeply into feeling self-worthlessness. Feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness, which spawn self-hate, then the escape is to bully or bragging, that creates further rejection (“Nobody likes a bully or a braggart”). Lest the picture appears too much darkness, it should be emphasized that every child from time to time goes through these experiences. It is not single isolated incidents that cripple personalities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
When trends are established in relationships with parents, and when there is little to mitigate these trends, then serious problems can develop. These situations are not unique to childhood nor children, we also see these same patterns in fully grown adults. It is important, however, to see that even minor incidents which cause feelings of rejection undermine to some degree a person’s feelings of self-worth. We are again reminded that we are all caught in this human dilemma. It is not a question of whether we have feelings of rejection. However, accepting a bully and allowing them to be part of the community without punishment for their bad behavior is a mistake because it is rewarding them for the bad things they have done and their deviant behavior will only get worse. The only question is, “How much self-hate do I have, and how much crippling effect does it have on my life?” Humans are generally ethical beings—ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. One’s capacity for ethical judgment—like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being—is based upon one’s consciousness of oneself. They form so-called revolutionary groups and expect to save the World by acts of terror and destruction, not seeing that they are only contributing to the general tendency to violence and inhumanity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
They have lost their capacity to love and have replaced it with the wish to sacrifice their lives. (Self-sacrifice is frequently the solution for individuals who ardently desire to love, but who have lost the capacity to love and see in the sacrifice of their own lives an experience of love in the highest degree). However, these self-sacrificing young people are very different from the loving martyrs, who want to live because they love life and who accept death only when they are forced to die in order not to betray themselves. Our present-day self-sacrificing young and mature people are the accused, but they are also the accusers, in demonstrating that in our social system some of the very best people become so isolated and hopeless that nothing but destruction and fanatism are left as a way out of their despair. The human desire to experience union with others is rooted in the specific conditions of existence that characterize the human species and is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior. By the combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal development of the capacity for reason, we human beings have lost our original oneness with nature. In order not to feel utterly isolated—which would, in fact, condemn us to insanity—we need to find a new unity: with our fellow beings and with nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
This human need for unity with others is experiences in many ways: in the symbiotic tie to mother, an idol, one’s tribe, one’s nation, one’s class, one’s religion, one’s fraternity, one’s professional organization. Often, of course, these ties overlap, and often they assume an ecstatic form, as among members of certain religious sects or of a political mob, or in the out bursts of national hysteria in the case of war. The outbreak of the First World War, for example, occasioned one of the most drastic of these ecstatic forms of union. Suddenly, from one day to the next, people gave up their lifelong convictions of pacifism, antimilitarism; scientist threw away their lifelong training in objectivity, critical thinking, and impartiality in order to join the big We. The desire to experience union with others manifests itself in the lowest kind of behavior, for instance, in acts of sadism and destruction, as well as in the highest: solidarity on the basis of an ideal or conviction. It is also the main cause of the need to adapt; human beings are more afraid of being outcasts than even of dying. Crucial to every society is the kind of union and solidarity it fosters and the kind it can further, under the given conditions of its socioeconomic structure. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
These considerations seem to indicate that both tendencies are present in human beings: the one, to have—to possess—that owes its strength in the last analysis to the biological factor of the desire for survival; the other, to be—to share, to give, to sacrifice—that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome one’s isolation by oneness with others. For these two contradictory strivings in every human being it follows that the social structure. These considerations seem to indicate that both tendencies are present in human beings: in one, to have—to possess—that owes its strength in the last analysis to the biological factor of the desire for survival; the other, to be—to share, to give, to sacrifice—that owes its strength to the specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need to overcome one’s isolation by oneness with others. From these two contradictory strivings in every human being it follows that the social structure, its values and norms, decides which of the two becomes dominant. Cultures that foster the greed for possession, and thus the having mode of existence, are rooted in one human potential; cultures that foster being and sharing are rooted in the other potential. We must decide which of these two potentials we want to cultivate, realizing, however, that out decision is largely determined by the socioeconomic structure of our given society that inclines us toward one of the other solution. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
From my observations in the field of group behavior my best guess is that the two extreme groups, respectively manifesting deeply ingrained and almost unalterable types of having and of being, form a small minority; that in the vast majority both possibilities are real, and which of the two becomes dominant and which is repressed depends on environmental factors. This assumption contradicts a widely held psychoanalytic rigid doctrine that environment produces essential changes in personality development in infancy and early childhood, but that after this period the character is fixed and hardly changed by external events. This psychoanalytic dogma has been able to gain acceptance because the basic conditions of their childhood continue into most people’s later life, since in general, the same social conditions continue to exist. However, numerous instances exist in which a drastic change in environment leads to a fundamental change in behavior, for instance, when the negative forces cease to be fed and the beneficial forces are nurtured and encouraged. The frequency of intensity of the desire to share, to give, and to sacrifice are not surprising if we consider the conditions of existence of the human species. What is surprising is that this need could be so repressed as to make acts of selfishness the rule in industrial (and many other) societies and acts of solidarity the exception. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
However, paradoxically, this very phenomenon is caused by the need for union. A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism. As a consequence of the dominant attitude of selfishness, the leaders of our society believe that people can be motivated only by the expectation of material advantages, for instance, by rewards, and that they will not react to appeals for solidarity and sacrifice. Hence, expect in times of war, these appears are rarely made, and the chances to observe the possible results of such appeals are lost. Only a radically different socioeconomic structure and a radically different picture of human nature could show that bribery is not the only way (or the best way) to influence people. Sometimes, like an immature person, we misbehave, act unwisely, and feel we cannot approach God with a problem. When we receive an impression in our heart, we can use our mind either to rationalize it away or to accomplish it. Be careful what you do with an impression from the Lord. Drink your spiritual milk and become cured. Remember that without faith you can do nothing; therefore ask in faith with confidence in our holy Father. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Freedom is Not Gained at a Single Bound, it Must be Achieved Each Day
Ahhhhh, gambling debts, millions, how does one do that, but it was only the tip of it, she had been in much deeper, flying back and forth to Europe, stashing the wealth for the wrong man. When she fired a gun, she emptied it. Making a living. Her partner had vanished. She knew she was next. Did not care anymore. All that money gone to waste. Lots of there there, but who cares? Sometimes dark dreams no doubt have many meanings, but certainly their chief mood and meaning are disillusion. Disillusions pass just as illusions do, and often both illusion and disillusion are necessary steps in our understanding of reality. The dream might tell sometimes one is feeling and that is reflected in an aspect of the current reality. Out of this feeling came a recognition of the urgent need for some research, with its own particular sort of siren song: “Let us get some facts to go on.” It has been discovered the people with a strong sense of pride in themselves and in their heritage, at the beginning of therapy, even thought obscured by the usual clinical overlay of anxiety and depression, are usually better off and are predicted to display improvement by the end of therapy. These same patients, however, even if they are just on the list and do not receive psychotherapy, will still show improvement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The reason being is it is predicted that they have a favorable reaction to stress and challenge in many different situations. Many behaviors that appear to change as a result of psychotherapy are actually influenced little or not at all by the therapy, and the observed changes are produced by endogenous processes of a counteractive sort which are set in motion within the reasonably strong individual after some trauma has produced a temporary regression. To say this, however, is by no means to say, as some psychologists have said in interpreting these results and others like them, that “psychotherapy is no blessed good,” or words to that effect. Science by its method limits itself to appearances of a public or potentially public sort, and in the interests of verification insists upon objectification. This works quite so well, yet well enough for many purposes—even when the objects do have feelings. However, if the questions I am asking myself is “Why was I ever born?” or “Why live?” there are no objective answers that can be satisfying to me within the realm of science. The “question” is a feeling which cannot be “answered,” but which can only give way to another feeling, “How good it is to be alive!” And the human transaction that enables the one feeling to give way to the other is a transaction between subjects, the objective indices of which are extremely subtle and highly valuable at best. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
One can make tape-recordings, take motion pictures, count heart beats, measure muscle potentials, note the number of minutes spent together, ask questions (True-False questions, open-ended questions, questions in disguise), get interpretations of inkblots, or do any number of those tricks of the trade with which we are all familiar. They avail little, for the vitalizing transaction is a matter of feeling, having an existence and known only in the subject, or, as I prefer to say, in the realm of my spirit. For instance, once, I told a therapist I want a really big house so I could spend all day cleaning it. She assumed my house was a mess. The actual reason is because have you notice how many miles you walk in a standard size 2,000 square foot house when you are cleaning it? Sometimes, by the time I was done cleaning I had walked between 3-7 miles inside the house. So, if I had a house three times that size, chances are I would get even more exercise in the safety of my home. And there is always something in a house that needs to be cleaned from the base boards, the walls, light switches, tile and wood floors, the carpets need to be vacuumed, laundry always needs to be done, closets and drawers need to be organized. In the cleanest houses in America, there is always work to do, but in a one bedroom apartment, most are so small there is not much room to walk around. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
People you talk to and vent to cannot always understand what you are saying because they have filters, and even though the privacy laws prevent therapist from sharing or disclosing your information, can you really trust anyone with details of your lives when you know nothing about them, their record and the professional standards? And there is no telling what they are compiling in their notes about you after you leave their office, and I would just hate from the information to land up in a newsroom or a police station when it is someone’s interpretation anyway. We are not really living in the most ethical times and everyone is looking to make money anyway they can. People are willing to sacrifice their careers, families, freedom and homes to become famous, even if it is through illegal means because they figure the payoff is much more worth what they are enduring at the time, which makes one wonder….how much do people really love their families, God, and having a good reputation is the allure of money is more appealing? One of the troubles of the sometimes scientist who is also sometime psychotherapist is that one’s sentiments are mixed, and are especially mixed when one undertakes to do research on psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
From the point of view of the subject, then, the essence of the beneficence that psychotherapy may bring is entirely of the spirit. The appearances that may accompany such spiritual beneficences are variable and elusive, and the superficies of adjustment to any given cultural norm may yield a rather bad fit to the behavior of the person who has benefited from psychotherapy. And to make matters even more difficult for thee research psychologist, the moment of genuine encounter, the vitalizing transaction, may pass almost unnoticed at the time. It is ephemeral, as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation, the fecundating act; it has its begin in the imagination and the spirit, while the dull machinery of routine thought chugs monotonously along and the inertia that makes us think the same thought in just the same way so many thousands of times over continues its hebetudinous reign. In almost all appearance we remain the same, even though we are different. To put the matter commonly, I have never known any case, no matter how successful, with treatment both thorough and inspired and with real movement felt by the patient and therapist, in which at the conclusion of the work the patient was not readily recognized by friends and neighbors, and in a million ways, some of them measured by the best psychological tests, just about the same. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day. The basic step in achieving inward freedom is choosing one’s self. This is the stage of affirming one’s responsibility for oneself and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence: it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes the one exists in one’s particular spot in the Universe, and one accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what is mean by the will to live—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is oneself, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make one’s basic choices oneself. We can see more clearly what choosing oneself and one’s existence means by looking at the opposite—choosing not to exist, that is to commit suicide. The significance of suicide lies not in the fact that people actually experience death by suicide in any large numbers. It is indeed a very rare occurrence except among those who are usually extremely distressed. However, psychologically and spiritually the thought of suicide has a much wider meaning. There is an such thing as psychological suicide in which one does not take one’s own life by a given act, but dies because one has chosen—perhaps without being entirely aware of it—not to live. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
There have been cases were people are going through so much hardship and they have been told that they are going to die and they make up their mind not to live and let go and shortly after they pass away. There have been other cases where the lives of persons who have dedicated themselves to certain tasks, such as taking care of a sick loved one or finishing an import film or work. They keep going under difficult circumstances as though they had determined they had to live; and then when the task is completed, when success is attained, they proceed to die as though by some inner decision. Soren Kierkegaard wrote twenty books in fourteen years, completed them at the early age of forty-two, and then—we almost say in conclusion—he took to his bed and died. Aaliyah did in interview at the age of 22, on MTV Diaries, talking about how she wanted to be remembered after she died, and a few months later her plane crashed and she died. These ways of choosing not to live show how crucial it can be to choose to live. I think that is why people do not like to think about death, talk about it, or speak ill of the dead. It makes them feel that they become more vulnerable and could be the next on the grim reaper’s list. It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose one’s own existence, until one has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that one could wipe out one’s existence but chooses not to. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Since one is free to die, one is also free to live. The mass patterns of routine are broken: one no longer exists as an accidental result of one’s parents having conceived one, of one’s growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, begetting new children, growing old and dying. Since one could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its special element of freedom. People often actually go through the experience of experiencing death by psychological suicide in some sector of their lives. For instance, a woman believes she cannot live unless a certain man loves her. When he marries someone else, she contemplates suicide. In the course of her meditating on the idea for some days, she fantasies, “Well, assume I do it.” However, then, she suddenly thinks, “After I have done it, it would still be good to be alive in other ways—the Sun still shines, water is still cool to the body, one can still make things,” and the suggestion creeps in that there may still be other people to love. So she decides to live. Assuming the decision is made for beneficial reasons rater than just the fear of dying or inertia, the conflict may actually have given her some new freedom. It is as though the part of her which clung to the man did not experience death by suicide, and as a result she can begin life anew. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Or a young man feels he can never be happy unless he gains some fame. He begins to realize that he is competent and valuable, let us say as an assistant professor; but the higher he gets on the ladder the clearer he sees that there are always persons above him, that many are called but few are chosen, that very few people gain fame anyway, and that he may end up just a good and competent teacher. He might then feel that he would be as insignificant as a grain of sand, his life meaningless, and he might as well not be alive. The idea of experiencing death by suicide creeps into his mind in his more despondent moods. Sooner or later he, too, thinks, “All right, assume I have done it—what then?” And it suddenly dawns on him that, if he came back after the death by suicide, there would be a lot left in life even if one were not famous. He then chooses to go on living, as it were, without the demand for fame. It is as though the part of him which could not live without fame does experience death by suicide. And in killing the demand for fame, he may also realize as a byproduct that the thing which yield lasting joy and inner security have very little to do with external and fickle standards of public opinion anyway. He may then appreciate the more then flippant wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s remark, “Who the hell wants fame over the week-end? I want to write well.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
And finally, as a result of the partial suicide, he may clarify his own goals and arrive at more of a feeling for the joy which comes from fulfilling his own potentialities, from finding and teaching the truth as he sees it and adding his own unique contribution arising from his own integrity. In contemporary society the having mode of existing is assumed to be rooted in human nature and, hence, virtually unchangeable. The same idea is expressed in the dogma that people are basically lazy, passive by nature, and that they do not want to work or to do anything else, unless they are driven by the incentive of material gain, or hunger, or the fear of punishment. This rigid doctrine is doubted by hardly anybody, and it determines our methods of education and work. However, it is little more than an expression of the wish to prove the value of our social arrangements by imputing to them that they follow the needs of human nature. To the members of many different societies of both past and present, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness would appear as fantastic as the reverse sound to us. The truth is that both the having and the being modes of existence are potentialities of human nature, that our biological urge for survival tends to further the having mode, but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities inhere in human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We human beings have an inherent and deeply rooted desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be related to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness. The truth of this statement is proven by so much evidence. We would emphasize again that the actual process of these partial psychological studies is much more complex than these illustrations imply. Actually some people—perhaps most people—move in the opposite direction when they have to renounce a demand: they retreat, constrict their lives and become less free. However, we wish only to make clear that there is a beneficial aspect to partial suicide, and that the dying of one attitude or need may be the other side of the birth of something new (which is a law of growth in nature not at all limited to human beings). One can choose to terminate a neurotic strategy, a dependency, a clinging, and then find that one can choose to live as a freer self. The woman in our example would no doubt find with clearer insight that her so-called live for the man for whom she would have experienced death by suicide was really not love at all, but clinging parasitism balanced by desire to have power over the man. A dying to part of oneself is often followed by a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, one’s responsibility for oneself takes on a new meaning. One accepts responsibility for one’s own life not as something with which one has been saddled, a burden forced upon one: but as a something one has chosen oneself. For this person, oneself, now exists as a result of a decision he or she, oneself, has made. To be sure, any thinking person realizes in theory that freedom and responsibility go together: if one is not free, one is an automaton and there is obviously no such thing as responsibility, and if one cannot be responsible for oneself, one cannot be trusted with freedom. However, when one has chosen oneself, this partnership of freedom and responsibility become more than a nice idea: one experiences it on one’s own pulse; in one’s choosing oneself, one becomes aware that one has chosen personal freedom and responsibility for oneself in the same breath. The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into self-discipline. One accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take one’s own life?—but because one has chosen with greater freedom what one wants to do with one’s own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values one wishes to achieve. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This self-discipline can be given fancy names—it is loving one’s fate and obedience to the laws of life. However, whether bedecked by fancy terms or not, it is, I believe, a lesson everyone progressively learns in one’s struggle toward maturity. We cannot will potency; we cannot will to love. However, we can will to open ourselves, participate in the experience, allow the possibility to become a reality. The belief that people do not want to make sacrifices is notoriously wrong. When Churchill announced at the beginning of the Second World War that what he had to demand from the British was blood, sweat, and tears, he did not deter them, but on the contrary, he appealed to their deep-seated human desire to make sacrifices, to give of themselves. The reaction of the British—and of the Germans and the Russians as well—toward the indiscriminate bombing of population centers by the belligerents proves that common suffering did not weaken their spirit; it strengthened their resistance and proved wrong those who believed terror bombing could break the morale of the enemy and help finish the war. It is a sad commentary on our civilization, however, that war and suffering rather than peacetime living can mobilize human readiness to make sacrifices, and that the times of peace seem mainly to encourage selfishness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Fortunately, there are situations in peacetime in which human striving for giving and solidarity manifest themselves in individual behavior. The workers’ strikes, especially up to the period of the First World War, are an example of such essentially nonviolent behavior. The workers sought higher wages, but at the same time, they risked and accepted severe hardships in order to fight for their own dignity and the satisfaction of experiencing human solidarity. The strike was as much a religious as an economic phenomenon. While such strikes still do occur even today, most present-day strikes are for economic reasons—although strikes for better working conditions have increased recently. The need to give and to share and the willingness to make sacrifices for others are still to be found among the members of certain professions, such as nurses, physicians, lawyers, fire fighters, law enforcement, ambulatory care. The goal of helping and sacrificing is given only lip service by many, if not most, of these professionals; yet the character of a goodly number corresponds to the values they profess. We find the same needs affirmed and expressed in many communities throughout the centuries, whether religious, capitalist, or humanist. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
We find the wish to give in the people who volunteer their blood (without payment), in the many situations in which people risk their lives to save another’s. We find the manifestation of the will to give in people who genuinely love. False love, for instance, shared mutual selfishness make people more selfish (and this is the case often enough). Genuine love increases the capacity to love and to give to others. The true lovers live the whole World, in his or her live for a specific person. Conversely, we find that not a few people, especially younger ones, cannot stand the luxury and selfishness that surround them in their affluent families. Quite against the expectations of their elders, who think that their children have everything they wish, they rebel against the deadness and isolation of their lives. For the fact is, they do not have everything they wish and they wish for what they do not have. Some people can no longer stand the life of idleness and injustice they have been born into, these young people leave their families and join the poor, living with them, and helped to lay one of the foundations to help them establish communities. However, out of the backlash to their luxury lives, some of these idealistic and sensitivity young, lacking in tradition, maturity, experience, and political wisdom, become desperate, narcissistically overestimate their own capacities and possibilities, and try to achieve the impossible by the use of force. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 