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One Blessing I had So Large to My Eyes is a Soul I Forgot!
A significant and vital movement occurring in our society, and in most societies the World over, it the emergence of the young. In the past, young people have merely been tolerated; now they are beginning to feel personal significance. Also in the past, young people were expected to patter themselves after their parents and come out much like those role models. However, a new mood has come on the young people. Though the old-timers will scoff and say that youth has always been in revolt, they have failed to consider the expanded mobility and the communication facilities that have produced not only quantitative differences but qualitative ones too. For instance, 40 percent of young adults, ages 18 to 29 year of age, motivated by social issues turned out to vote in the 2018 midterm elections. That is compared with 26 percent in 2014. And as of 2016, there are a record of nearly 11 millionaires nationwide. That is more than ever before and marks a 400,000 person increase from the previous year. Many of the youth no longer fit into stereotypical roles because there are too many individuals with too many different characteristics to make the kinds of generalization many people want. These people do not know what it is like to have only one TV in this house, or be without TV. They have the internet, have never suffered an economic depression, have mobile phones, and self-propelled skateboards. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
Most of the youth have never known real hardships, at least not economic ones. The young of today are in many ways putting their parents’teachings to the test. If parents and authorities are going to talk about freedom, equality, fair play, sharing, love, and peace, then many people are going to have to see to it that they can follow through on such teachings. Confusion reigns. Truth and honesty are at a premium. Certainly this is one of the most exciting periods of history, with all kinds of changes being the norm. None of us will ever be the same as we once were, nor should we wish it. None of us can ever return to a previous period of life or history. However, many people today, viewing the disorder in the streets and on the campuses, wish it were over and we could get back to business as usual. This is unrealistic. Change is the name of the game. Many of the youth today will join the Establishment; many will not. We have a lot of confidence in the sense of idealism and promise shown by many of the new youth. In each of us are many varied facets of our integrated, holistic self. Notice we do not say “varied selves.” One of our earnest goals is to get away from the analytic, pluralistic way of thinking that so many of us have developed. We are not many selves. We are human beings with emerging concepts of selfhood. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
In the selfhood of any one of us, multiple images or pictures or representations pop up. No one of them alone is all that we are. A whole diamond cannot be experienced by studying or seeing only one facet of that diamond; we must view the entire gem. Now, of course, we cannot. We cannot see all the facets of a diamond at one time, nor can we see or experience or know all aspects of selfhood at one time. Year or lifetimes many be required to experience all of the self of any one person. That includes our own self. None of us is completely aware of all that we are. None of us knows the complete answer to the question, Who am I? Part of the self is submerged beneath layers of time, experiences, feelings, and defenses, and even if some know-it-all machine or technique were devised, it is unlikely that everything could be uncovered. Furthermore, it may not be advisable to know the whole thing—if it were possible to encompass the whole thing in any one time sequence. We have buried some parts of ourselves for very good reasons. Considering all the complexities that have gone into our personalities, to know them all at once would be similar to perceiving all of history in one complete picture. How, then, are we to understand and actualize our fullest selfhood? What are the things that make it difficult? #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
A life process which shows balance and with it power of being has, in biological terms, vitality, i.e. life power. The right courage therefore must, like the right fear, be understood as the expression of perfect vitality. The courage to be is a function of vitality. Diminishing vitality consequently entails diminishing courage. To strengthen vitality means to strengthen the courage to be. Neurotic individual and neurotic periods are lacking in vitality. Their biological substance has disintegrated. They have lost the power of full self-affirmation, of the courage to be. Whether this happens or not is the result of biological processes, it is biological fate. The periods of a diminished courage to be are periods of biological weakness in the individual and in history. The three main periods of unbalance are periods of reduced vitality;they are ends of an era and could be overcome only by the rise of vitality powerful groups that replaced the vitally disintegrated groups. Biologically speaking, anxiety is more destructive than protective. While fear can lead to measures that deal with the objects of fear, anxiety cannot do so because it has no objects. The fact, already referred to, that life tries to transform anxiety into fear shows that anxiety is biologically useless and cannot be explained in terms of life protection. It produces self-defying forms of behavior. Anxiety therefore by its very nature transcends the biological argument. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Vitality, power of life, is correlated to the kind of life to which it gives power. Vitality is the power of creating beyond oneself without losing oneself. The more power of creating beyond itself a being has the more vitality it has. We have defined intentionality as being directed toward meaningful contents. Mortals live in meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, ethically, religiously. In the development of the human race the degree to which mortals are aware of oneself as a separate self depends on the extent to which one has emerged from the clan and the extend to which the process of individuation has developed. The development of Western culture went in the direction of creating the basis for the full experience of individuality. By making the individual free politically and economically, by teaching one to think for oneself and freeing one to feel “I” in the sense that one is the center and active subject of one’s powers and experienced oneself as such. For the majority, individualism was not much more than a façade behind which was hidden the failure to acquire an individual sense of identity. Many substitutes for a truly individual sense of identity were sought for, and found. Nation, religion, class and occupation serve to furnish a sense of identity. “I am an American,” “I am a Protestant,” “I am a business person,” are the formulae which help a person experience a sense of identity after the original clan identity has disappeared and before a truly individual sense of identity has been acquired. #RandolpHarris 5 of 10
These different identifications are, in contemporary society, usually employed together. They are in a broad sense status identifications,and they are more efficient if blended with older feudal remnants, as in European counties. In the United States, in which so little is left of feudal relics, and in which there is so much social mobility, these status identifications are naturally less efficient, and the sense of identity is shifted more and more to the experience of conformity. Inasmuch as I am not different, inasmuch as I am like the others, and recognized by them as a regular fellow, I can sense myself as “I.” I am—“as you desire me”—as of the pre-individualistic clan identity, a new herd identity develops, in which the sense of identity, a new herd identity develops, in which the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd. That this uniformity and conformity are often not recognized as such, and are covered by the illusions of individuality, does not alter the fact. The problem of the sense of identity is not, as it usually understood merely a philosophical problem, or problem only concerning our mind and thought. The need to feel a sense of identity stems from the very condition of human existence, and it is the source of the most intense strivings. Since I cannot remain sane without this sense of “I,” I am driven to do almost anything to acquire this sense. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
Behind the intense passion for status and conformity is this very need, and it is sometimes stronger than the need for physical survival. What could be more obvious than the fact that people are willing to risk their lives,to give up their love, to surrender their freedom to sacrifice their own thoughts, for the sake of being one of the herd, of conforming, and thus of acquiring a sense of identity, even though it is an illusory one. To be loved means to be alive, to be rooted, to be at home. Every adult is in need of help,of warmth, of protection, in many ways differing and yet in many ways similar to the needs of the child. It is surprising to find in the average adult a deep longing for the security and rootedness of a loving home? The person who does not belong to the same clan is considered as alien and dangerous—as not sharing in the same human qualities which only the clan can possess. We either approach or are attracted to those things we life, or we avoid or are repelled by those things we dislike. You are a child of your parents, the sibling of your sibling, the friend of so-and-so, the enemy of such-and-such, and you perceive yourself and your World in terms of these various people and experiences. You may have fond memories of an old house, the family homestead, or a broken-down shanty, in which you spent your younger days. That house, or your experience of it, has become part of you. If the memories are somewhat less than fond, they still have developed something in you. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The memories we have are the part of us that comes to life when we think or hear of houses, homes, or dwellings. We have pictures or images o these experiences and they have much to do with our present perceptions and thoughts and with how we will react to things. As a complex and highly variable individual we have a multiplicity of motivations, things that push or pull you to behave the ways you do. If someone insists he or she knows the things that makes all human begins tick, be charitable; that person is well-meaning, but misguided! No one experience or thing causes all behavior, nor is it even likely to be the most influential thing in the total life of large groups of people. Human’s behavior is multi-determined, caused by a whole smorgasbord off actors. First of all, of course, we have to look at the importance of our physiological motives. These needs, usually involving some kind of tissue lack or tension, are vital for physical survival or well-being. We develop attitudes and emotional reactions to these needs that become definite part of the composite self. We then have the acquired or secondary motives, usually social in nature, involving other people in some way. We develop feelings and attitudes about these as well, and another set of facets is added to the gem of selfhood. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
One might think that all we are doing is taking flat experiences or attitude and pasting them on a raw, blank personality, and in the end coming up wit a gem or mosaic of human selfhood. In fullest terms, the analogy is pitifully inadequate. Humans are much more than a surface covered with mosaic. These varying aspects of selfhood run throughout the person’s being, connecting and interconnecting with each other. There are organic as well as functional connections. Some go together structurally as part of the system or systems. Others go together functionally, meaning that they work together or on each other or as part of a larger and more complex system or process. The complexity can never be fully or meaningfully depicted in any graphic forms. Some people distort their own great discoveries because they may have some unsolved problems. Certainly courage is a function of vitality, but vitality is not something which can be separated from the totality of mortal’s being, language, creativity,spiritual life, and ultimate concern. One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of human’s spiritual life was that the word spirit was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in spirit was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Mortals were divided into bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality.#RandolphHarris 9 of 10
The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped. At the end of this development it was easy for a reductive naturalism to derive self-affirmation and courage from a merely biological vitality. However, in mortal nothing is merely biological as nothing is merely spiritual. Every cell of the mortal body participates in one’s freedom and spirituality, and every act of one’s spiritual creativity is nourished by one’s vital dynamics. Unity is a virtue that combines strength and value, the power of being and the fulfillment of meaning. Vitality and intentionality are united in this ideal of human perfection, which is equally removed from barbarism and moralism. Pure vitality in humans is never pure but always distorted, because human’s power of life is one’s freedom and the spirituality in which vitality and intentionality are united.The biological interpretation of courage is a matter of fate. It is the power of self-affirmation. One cannot command courage to be and one cannot gain it by obeying command. Religiously speaking, it is a matter of grace. Humans are in the likeness of God; hence all people are equal—equal in their common spiritual qualities, in their common reasons, and in their capacity of love for humanity. We have no other source of knowledge than that which the Lord himself feels it is important to give to us in our Earthly condition. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Stars Amid Profound Galaxies–Those Who Read the Revelations Must Not Criticize
We are all American by virtue of our location of birth, but our parents and language and food and lifestyle may differ. We want the right to life as full human beings, which means we will not be separated from our past and present. We can acknowledge only a fractional part of the time in which Black Americas have actually been shown any kind of equality of rights and opportunity. Many Black Americans are discovering a sense of appreciation for their heritage and they are attempting to identify with their American citizenship. There are many African Americans who are living fully in American society, and who are middle-class and upper-middle class and wealthy. There is an increasing tendency in the Black community to display cultural pluralism, which means to be as American as possible, but to identify and retain pride in the heritage of being African American. Many Blacks see their own identity is far more important than either accepting or rejecting somebody’s stereotyped identity. So, they are taking pride in their heritage, finding some satisfaction in greater acceptance of things labelled soul. Black is Beautiful means to honor your features and accept who you are as a person so that you can see how beautiful you are, and it does not mean that any other culture or race is less attractive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Black is beautiful also means of many: I am a human being, real and alive, and only recently aware of myself as a person with unlimited potential. I like who and what I am. I can be real now. I am a human being and my identity is something I can develop and feel good about. Self-acceptance and self-appreciation are definitely part of what self-actualization as a process is all about. Knowing your part inhumanity is a vital concept in self-actualization. This may mean coming to a fuller, deeper, more holistic appreciation of all that you are: body, color, heritage, intellect, and certainly emotions. This is also a current definition of together. Much like other Americans, Black want full acceptance of their status as human beings who happen to have a special ancestry and heritage. The drastic change or destruction of stereotypes upsets or upends our comfortable ways of handling our environment. We are challenged to react in ways in which we have little or no experience. However, it is an important transition stage for any person undergoing the emergence of one’s fullest identity. It is our hope that enough Americans can learn to accept and like and experience their own self-identities that they can also enjoy and appreciate this in people who may differ in pigmentation and heritage. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
Anxiety and courage have a psychosomatic character. They are biological as well as psychological. From the biological point of view one would say that fear and anxiety are the guardians, indicating the threat of nonbeing to a living being and producing movements of protection and resistance to this threat. Fear and anxiety must be considered as expressions of what one could call self-affirmation on its guard. Without the anticipating fear and the compelling anxiety no finite being would be able to exist. Courage, in this view, is the readiness to take upon oneself negatives, anticipated by fear, for the sake of a fuller positivity. Biological self-affirmation implies the acceptance of want, toil, insecurity, pain, possible destruction. Without this self-affirmation life could not be preserved or increased. The more vital strength a being has the more it is able to affirm itself in spite of the dangers announced by fear and anxiety. However, it would contradict their biological function if courage disregarded their warnings and prompted actions a directly self-destructive character. There is a right mean between cowardice and temerity.# RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Biological self-affirmation needs a balance between courage and fear. Such a balance is present in all living beings which are able to preserve and increase their being. If the warnings of fear no longer have an effect or if the dynamics of courage have lost their power, life vanishes. The drive for security, perfection, and certitude to which we have referred is biologically necessary. However, it becomes biologically destructive if the risk of insecurity, imperfection, and uncertainty is avoided. Conversely, a risk which has a realistic foundation in our self and our World is biologically demanded,while it is self-destructive without such a foundation. Life, in consequence, includes both fear and courage as elements of a life process in a changing but essentially established balance. As long as life has such a balance it is able to resist nonbeing. Unbalanced fear and unbalanced courage to destroy the life whose preservation and increase are the function of the balance of fear and courage. Humans are thrown into this World without their knowledge, consent, or will. Or they simply do not remember these things after soul amnesia. In respect, humans are not different from the animals, from the plants, or from inorganic matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
However, mortals are endowed with reason and imagination,and cannot be content with the passive role of a creature, with the role of dice cast out of cup. Mortals are driven by the urge to transcend the role ofthe creature, the accidentalness and passivity of their existence. Mortals can create life. This is the miraculous quality which they indeed share with all living beings, but with difference the one alone is aware of being created and of being a creator. Mortals can create life, or rather, women can create life, by giving birth to a child, and by caring for the child until it is sufficiently grown to take care of his or her own needs. Man—man and woman—can create by planting seeds, by producing material objects, by creating art, by creating ideas, by loving one another. In the act of creation mortals transcend themselves as a creature, raises oneself beyond the passivity and accidentalness of their existence into the realm of purposefulness and freedom. In human’s need for transcendence is possessed one of the foundations for love, as well as for art, religion and material production. “And they were also distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards mortals; for they were perfectly honest and upright in all things; and they were firm in the faith of Christ,” reports Alma 27.27. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
To create presupposes activity and care. It presupposes love for that which one creates. How then do mortals solve the problem of transcending oneself, if one is not capable of creating, if one cannot love? There is another answer to this need for transcendence: if I cannot create life, I can destroy it. To destroy life makes me also transcend it. Large sections of mortal’s civilization serve the purpose of giving one safety against the attack of fate and death. One realizes that life demands again and again the courage to surrender some or even all security for the sake of self-affirmation. Nevertheless, mortals try to reduce the power of fate and the threat of death as much as possible. Pathological anxiety about fate and death impels toward a security which is comparable to the security of a prison. One who lives in this prison is unable to leave the security given to one by one’s self-imposed limitations. However, these limitations are not based on a full awareness of reality. Therefore the security of the neurotic is unrealistic. The individual fears what is not to be feared and one feels to be safe what is not safe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Indeed, that mortals can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that mortals can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, mortals set themselves above life; they transcend oneself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for mortals, inasmuch as one is driven to transcend oneself is to create or destroy, to love or to hate. The anxiety which humans are not able to take upon themselves produces images of having no basis in reality, but it recedes in the face of things which should be feared. That is, one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppresses the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality. Misplaced fear is a consequence of the pathological form of the anxiety of fate and death. The same structure can be observed in the pathological forms of the anxiety of guilt drives the person towards attempts to avoid this anxiety (usually called the uneasy conscience) by avoiding guilt. Moral self-discipline and habits will produce moral perfection although one remains aware that one cannot remove the imperfection which is implied in human’s existential situation, one’s estrangement from one’s true being. Neurotic anxiety does the same thing but in a limited, fixed, and unrealistic way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
To say that mortals are capable of developing their primary potentiality for love and reason does not imply naïve belief in mortal’s goodness. Destructiveness is secondary potentiality, rooted in the very existence of mortals, and having the same intensity and power as any passion can have. However—and this is the essential point of my argument—it is only the alternative to creativeness. Creation and destruction, love and hate, are not two instincts which exist independently. They are both answers to the same need for transcendence, and the will to destroy must rise when the will to create cannot be satisfied. However, the satisfaction of the need to create leads to happiness; destructiveness to suffering, most of all, for the destroyer him or herself. The anxiety of becoming guilty, the horror of feeling condemned, are so strong that they make responsible decision and any kind of moral action almost impossible. However, since decision and actions cannot be avoided they are reduced to a minimum which, however, is considered absolutely perfect; and the sphere were they take place is defended against any provocation to transcend it. Here also the separation from reality has the consequence that the consciousness of guilt is misplaced. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The moralistic self-defense of the neurotic makes one see guilt where there is no guilt or where one is guilty only in a very indirect way. Yet the awareness of real guilt and the self-condemnation which is identical with mortal’s existential self-estrangement are repressed, because the courage which could take them into itself is lacking. The pathological forms of the anxiety of the emptiness and meaninglessness show similar characteristics.Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude in systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. In spite of the element of doubt which is implied in mortal’s finite spirituality, and in spite of the threat of meaninglessness implied in a mortal’s estrangement,anxiety is reduced by these ways of producing and preserving certitude.Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended and is defended with the utmost tenacity. Mortal’s power of asking is prevented from becoming actual in this sphere, and if there is a danger of its becoming actualized by questions asked from the outside one reacts with fanatical rejection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
However, the castle of undoubted certitude is not built on the rock of reality. The inability of the neurotic to have a full encounter with reality makes one’s doubts as well as one certitude unrealistic. One puts both in the wrong place. One doubts what is practically about doubt and one is certain where doubt is adequate. Above all, one does not admit the question of meaning in its universal and radical sense. The question is in the individual, as it is in every person as mortal under the conditions of existential estrangement. However, one cannot admit it because one is without the courage to take the anxiety of emptiness or doubt and meaninglessness upon oneself. Existential anxiety has an ontological character and cannot be removed but must be taken into the courage to be. Pathological anxiety is the consequence of the failure to take the anxiety upon itself. Pathological anxiety leads to self-affirmation on a limited, fixed, and unrealistic basis and to a compulsory defense of this basis. Pathological anxiety, in relation to the anxiety of fate and death, produces an unrealistic security; in relation to the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, an unrealistic perfection; in relation to the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness, an unrealistic certitude. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Pathological anxiety, once established, is an object of medical healing. Existential anxiety is an object of priestly help. Neither the medical nor the priestly function is bound to its vocational representatives: the minister may be a healer and the psychotherapist a priest, and each human being may be both in relation to the neighbor. However, the function should not be confused and the representatives should not try to replace each other. The goal of both of them is helping mortal to reach full-self affirmation, to attain the courage to be. We want to realize and appreciate the position we occupy before God and the great blessings and privileges that are within our reach. We have just commenced, as it were, it the great work. We do not always comprehend these things, and hence we labor under difficulties pertaining to this matter, because we do not see, we do not comprehend the position and relationship that subsists between us and our God. God is our Father; we are his children. God has brought us into his covenant, and it is our privilege to go on from wisdom to wisdom, from intelligence to intelligence, from understanding of one principle to that of another, to go forward and progress in the development of truth until we can completely comprehend God. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” reports Matthew 6.9-10. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
At Such a Curious Earth Love is Supposed to be for the Souls of Sanity—I am Glad they Did Believe it!
Success without integrity is nothing. Productive love always implies a syndrome of attitude that care of, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If love, I care—that is, I am actively concerned with the other person’s growth and happiness; I am not a spectator. I am responsible, that is, I respond to the other individual’s needs, to those this person can express and more so to those one cannot or does not express. I respect the other individual, that is (according to the original meaning of re-spicere) I look at this person as if one is, objectively and not distorted by my wishes and fears. I know this individual, I have penetrated through this person’s surface to the more of this individual’s being and related myself to this being from my core, from the center, as against the periphery, of my being. Care of the soul asks us to observe its needs continually, to give them our wholehearted attention. Imagine advising someone with many signs of neglect of soul to build an annex on one’s house for soul work. It may seem strange or even unusual to do something so expensive and so external to deal with our psychological complaints. Yet it is obvious that soul is not going to be healed solely by means of one hour of interior retreat in the midst of an active modern life. Our retreat from the World may have to be more serious and more constantly present in out lives than a weekly counseling visit or an occasional day spa and massage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Today we find a radical situation occurring as women beg into discover that they are much more than they or the men in their lives have known or been willing to admit. Women’s role in life, in this country, has been drastically limited to a few portrayals or dimensions. However, in the past few years, a developing, revolutionary, self-emergence program is shaking the foundations of society and is certainly giving a lot of people reason to lose sleep. This country has been the inheritor of an Antiquated World attitude toward women. Even in the Bible, women were portrayed as having the very important roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, rarely anything else. Oh, there were always spots for dancing girls, servants, comfort women, slaves, and craftswomen. However, the life of the typical woman in the Old World was very clearly marked out for her. If she were fortunate, attractive, and/or from a wealthy family, a girl could look forward to getting married, raising children, building a household, and gaining respect by doing a creditable job in these limited areas. One of the classical descriptions of the ideal wife comes from the Old Testament of the Bible and has been used to shape the life of women ever since: A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and she will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm all the days of her life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A productive wife seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She like the ships of the merchant, she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and tasks for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise he in the gates. God does not make us holy in the sense that he makes our character holy. He makes us holy in the sense that he has made us innocent before him. And then we have to turn that innocence into holy character through the moral choices we make. These choices are continually opposed and hostile to the things of our natural life which we have become so deeply entrenched. We can either turn back, making ourselves if no value to the kingdom of God, or we can determinedly demolish things that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
That is a full-time and not unimportant job, living up to those expectations! In the Old World, it was probably all a woman could handle. However, in those times, there must have been occasions when the woman could have participated in decision-making and some of the other ongoing life of the town or country. Yet, there was no opportunity for her. Medicine, above all psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, often claims that healing anxiety is its task because all anxiety altogether, for anxiety is sickness, mostly in a psychosomatic, sometimes only in a psychological sense. All forms of anxiety can be healed, and since there is no ontological root of anxiety there is no existential anxiety. Medical insight and medical help—this is the conclusion—are the way to the courage to be; the medical profession is the only healing profession. Although this extreme position is taken by an ever-decreasing number of physicians and psychotherapists it remains important from the theoretical point of view. It includes a decision about the nature of mortals which must be made explicit, in spite of the positivistic resistance to ontology. The psychiatrist who asserts that anxiety is always pathological cannot deny the potentiality of illness in human nature, and one must account for the facts of finitude, doubt, and guilt in every human being; one must, in terms of one’s own presupposition, account for the universality of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
One cannot avoid the question of the human nature since in practicing one’s profession one cannot avoid the distinction between health and illness, existential and pathological anxiety. This is why more and more representatives of medicine generally and psychotherapy specifically ask for the cooperation with the philosophers and theologians. And it is why through this cooperation a practice of counseling has developed which is, like every attempted synthesis, dangerous as well as significant for the future. The medical faculty needs a doctrine of mortals in order to fulfill its theoretical task; and it cannot have a doctrine of mortal without the permanent cooperation of all those faculties whose central object is human beings. The medical profession has the purpose of helping mortal in some of their existential problems, those which usually are called diseases. However, it cannot help a person without the permanent cooperation of all other professions whose purpose is to help mortals as mortals. Both the doctrines about mortals and the help given to mortal are a matter of cooperation from many points of view. Only in this way is it possible to understand and to actualize mortal’s power of being, one’s essential self-affirmation, one’s courage to be. In our present day, women have been relieved of much of the drudgery of homemaking. It is still a very hard job and one filled with great responsibility, especially the role of mothering. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Productive love when directed toward equals may be called brotherly love. In motherly love the relationship between the two persons involved is one of inequality; the child is helpless and dependent on the mother. In order to grow, the baby must become more and ore independent, until the child does not need all of its support from the mother. Thus the mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, and yet this very love must help the child to grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. It is easy for any mother to love her child before this process of separation has begun—but it is the task in which most fail, to love the child and at the same time to let it go—and to want to let it go. Many men, not understanding the intricacies of home economics, grumble and growl about their workaday World and tell their wives that homemaking is a snap! Yet, if they have to take over the chores fora day when their wives are sick or out of town, they frequently find out just how difficult it all is. However, what with modern appliances and good planning,many women are finding time left over after housework and child-care is done. Keeping busy and out of mischief by devotion to creative or domestic chores was the Old World solution to free hours. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and t work with your hands, just as you were told,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Women began discovering the fuller nature of their beings along time ago, but were more or less resigned to their limited existence until,with dramatic results, men began to put them to work outside of the home. The tragic story of labor’s abuses and the subsequent involvement of women in there form movements is but a short chapter in the history of womankind’s growing awareness of its greater potentials. In erotic love, another drive is involved:that for fusion and union with another person. While brotherly love refers to all mortals and motherly love to the child and all those who are in need of our help, erotic love is directed to one person, normally of the opposite gender, with whom fusion and oneness is desired. Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness. If the need for fusion were realized in motherly love, it would mean destruction of the child as an independent being, since the child needs to emerge from one’smother, rather than remained dependent on her. If erotic love lacks brotherly love and is only motivated by the wish for fusion, it is sexual desire without love, or the perversion of love as we find it in the sadistic and masochistic forms of love. “People that had been wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and had been healed; and they did show forth signs also and did some miracles among the people,” reports 3 Nephi 7.22. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Critics of women’s rights should remember that women have been very instrumental in bringing about social changes. Women played a significant part in protecting the abuses of drinking, and had much pressure brought to bear on the legislation for Prohibition. Not that this was necessarily the best legislation we could have had! Nevertheless, the economic and political power of women was felt. Then, in their insistence on equal treatment, women demanded the right to vote and today are very instrumental in legislation and their force is felt all across the World today. Also, in recent years, mothers have become an important force for peace. Women have demonstrated abilities in every field of endeavor formerly thought to be beyond their talents and capabilities.They can run congress, lathes, computer, the senate, be presidents of corporations and of countries; they write, edit, and publish books; they paint prize-winning paintings, drives buses and trucks, repair TV’s and telephone lines, perform surgery, pull teeth, preach, teach, practice law, and administer educational institutions. Without doubt, the high degree of skills demonstrated by many of them is destroying old concepts as effectively as it is damaging the egos of some males. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, do not be offended by this, but I do not think anyone can run a house as well as a woman. It takes a certainly kind of womanly love to cook, clean, do laundry, iron, organize, look good, sew, deal with business people and keep the house peaceful while standing sane. Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Tea Cup is a New York Times Best Seller and one of the most influential books to come to public attention in recent times. Without putting down the important dimensions of wife, mother, actress, business woman, singer, model and homemaker, Mrs. Witherspoon urges women to actualize their natural fourth dimensions: creative and productive talents. She also shares some personal stories, wives tales, recipes, and lets other women that the career can be just as important as her housewifely roles, which gives many women the incentive to declare themselves as full-fledged human beings. One understands fully mortal’s need to be related only if one considers the outcome of the failure of any kind of relatedness, if one appreciates the meaning of narcissism. The only reality the infant can experience is one’s own body and affection. The baby has not yet the experience of “I” as separate from “thou.” The precocious darling is still in a state of oneness with the World, but a oneness before the awakening of his or her sense of individual reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The World outside, for the baby, exists only as so much food, or so much warmth to be used for the satisfaction of one’s own needs, but not as something or somebody who is recognized realistically and objectively. This orientation has been named primary narcissism, and it is not a bad thing. In normal development, children are often treated as the are deities or prized possession, and this is important for their safety, security, and confidence. This state of narcissism is slowly overcome by a growing awareness of reality outside, and by a correspondingly growing sense of “I” as differentiated from “thou.”This change occurs at first on the level of sensory perception, when things and people are perceived as different and specific entities, a recognition which lays the foundation for the possibility of speech; to name things pre-supposes recognizing them as individual and separate entities. It takes much longer until the narcissistic state is overcome emotionally; for the child up to the age of seven or eight years, other people still exist mainly as means for the satisfaction of one’s needs. They are exchangeable inasmuch as they fulfill the function of satisfying these needs, and it is only around the ages between eight and nine years that another person is experienced in such a way that the child can begin to love, that is to say, to feel that the needs of another person are as important as their own. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
However, that may not necessarily be the full story. Babies smile at only a few weeks old to bond with their parents and make them happy, as they know how powerful being cute is because it will compel people to want to take care of them and love them. Many parents also have their pleasure of knowing that they are their child’s first real love, in a platonic sense, of course. The fact that utter failure to relate oneself to the World is insanity, points to the other fact: that some form of relatedness is the condition for any kind of sane living. However, among the various forms of relatedness, only the productive one, freedom and integrity while being, at the same time, untied with one’s fellow mortals. “Therefore, go ye unto your homes, and ponder upon the things which I have said, and ask of the Father, in my name, that ye may understand and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again,” reports 3 Nephi 17.3. In the interpretation of human existence theology and medicine unavoidably joined philosophy, whether they were conscious of it our not. And in joining philosophy they joined each other even if their understanding of mortals went toward opposite directions. This is why theologians and ministers eagerly seek collaboration with medical professional, and many forms of occasional institutionalized cooperation result. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
One of the very first patients monitored was a woman 72 years of age who was in the coronary care unit because she had what is known as 2:1 heart block; that is, the upper portion of her heart (called the atrium) would begin the beat, but only every other beat would cause the remainder of her heart (the ventricles) to beat. During the pulse taking, a patient’s heart rate began to vary from its pattern of 2:1 block, changing back and forth from 2 degrees to 1 degree block. In essence, her heart began to change from 30 up to 60 beats per minute. During two other episodes of pulse taking and one episode of blood pressure measurement, very similar cardiac reactions occurred. While this patient was still in heart block, however, there was one other episode of pulse taking during which there were no heart rate or hearty rhythm changes. For three minutes prior to a sequence in which a nurse came to this patient’s bedside simply to give her a pill, the patient’s heart rate had been a regular 2:1 heart block rate of 35 beats per minute. However, during the entire one minute the nurse was at her bedside, the patient’s heart rate abruptly changed to a different mode of conduction and her heart rate was 70-75 beats per minute, only to change back abruptly to a rate of 35 beats per minute and 2:1 heart block for the three minutes after the nurse left the patient’s bedside. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
A similar reaction occurred when the nurse brought this patient lunch. Later that same day, the medicine (atropine) the cardiologist had prescribed took effect, and the patient was no longer in continuous 2:1 block. During this period we again monitored an episode of pulse taking. This time the beat-to-beat heart rate both before and after pulse taking was approximately 70-75 beats per minute, with only periodic episodes of heart block occurring. However, when the nurse took the patient’s pulse, the heart rate was slightly elevated, the beat became quite rhythmic,and the periodic pattern of heart block was completely abolished. In the light of the type of cardiac problems experienced by this patient and the medication she was given, it was not difficult for us to deduce the changes in the patient’s nervous system that were producing these reactions. Understanding those physiological mechanisms suggests that bedside matter of human compassion, medication and religious could be an effective three-fold method to help heal patients and keep them alive. Research indicates the prayer can extend a person’s life by four years. Evidence is causing more and more people to believe that there is metaphysical forces beyond science at work in the World and human beings are conduits of this spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Religious doctrines typically include prescriptions for taking care of one’s own body (e.g., your body is a temple), and support psychological traits that are associated with self-control, such as humility, patience, mindfulness, and compassion. In addition, religious doctrines offer behavioral techniques, including mediation and prayer, that can help people regulate their emotions and actions. When people are exposed to religious themes or call to mind their religious beliefs, they are better able to endure discomfort, delay gratification, and follow through on challenging tasks. Religious people learn through training to control their emotions, particularly the negative emotions of fear, anger, and hatred, as these can push them towards a darkness they do not want to access. These beings are mindful of their thoughts and intentions and meditate and pray about their choices. However, the physician must be fully aware of the treatment to make sure the patient is receiving adequate medical care. And as a minister, one may radiate healing power for mind and body and help to remove symptoms and neurotic anxiety. The anxiety of fate and death produces nonpathological strivings for security. Large sections of mortal’s civilization serve the purpose of giving people safety against the attacks of fate and death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Mortals realize that no absolute and no final security is possible; mortals also realize that life demands again and again the courage to surrender some or even all security for the sake of full self-affirmation. Nevertheless,mortal reduce the power of fate and the threat of death as much as possible. Pathological anxiety about fate and death impels toward a security which is comparable to the security of a prison. One who lives in this prison is unable to leave the security given to one by one’s self-imposed limitations. However, these limitations are not based on a full awareness of reality. Therefore, they security of the neurotic is unrealistic. One fears what is not to be feared and one feels to be safe what is not safe. The anxiety which one is not able to take upon oneself produces images having no basis in reality, but it recedes in the face of things which should be feared. That is, one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppress the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality. Misplaced fear is a consequence of the pathological form of the anxiety of fate and death. “And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. And they arose from the Earth, and he said unto them: Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, my joy is full,” reports 3 Nephi 17.19-20. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In the last two years, the Women’s Liberation Movement, Time’s Up, and the Daughters of Sappho have been actively promoting a campaign for women’s full rights. Many of their tactics are alarming to men, to say the least! Men refuse women their full rights for a number of reasons. Tradition is an important obstacle, and the simple fact that women have always played a more or less passive, subservient role to men still looms large in the forefront of the conflict. Some men do not know how to relate to a woman who does not conform to what they think is a man’s inherent right of dominance and leadership. Nearly all of our social custom and a large percentage of our speech phrases contain an unconscious assumption that women are secondary in importance to men—are subservient to them, are to be protected by them, are pitifully incapable of matching their mental powers. The man is always the head of the household, even though today it is the women who actually manages and cares for the ongoing activities of the typical American home. Interestingly enough, the history of the word man means human being and mind; the word woman is a combination of two words meaning wife of a human being. And in Mandarin Chinese woman means we. Little wonder that males and females raised by the same mental set: a woman is a being that evolves with times and culture and becomes fully accepted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Except for the definitely generic roles of fathering and mothering, the physical structure of men’s and women’s roles of fathering and mothering, the physical structure of men’s and women’s bodies plays very little part in determining fitness and aptitude for most jobs. There is nothing biologically determining in the roles of physician, surgeon, teacher, therapist, preacher, bookkeeper, computer programmer, or the thousands of other jobs in the nation today. Furthermore, biologist tell us that in terms of real endurance women are superior to men! Typically, men have larger skeletal and muscular structures, but that is really unimportant in terms of the stresses of modern living. Ananalogy can be drawn in terms of Sequoia sempervirens and a Syagrus romanzoffiana. Men are taught in most of the World, but especially America, to be strong and rugged, to use all stresses as building blocks against other stresses—as when an athlete strains and exercises one’s muscles in order to build stronger ones. Men are taught to compress their emotions into rigid anti-emotional-stress walls. Thus, internally and externally, men build themselves to withstand pressures, much like a Sequoia sempervirens. Women are typically taught to experience their emotions, to display them, to let them out, and even to utilize them to advantage. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Without pressure build-ups on the inside, they remain supple, and when tensions arise from outside come at them, women are able to be more flexible with stress and life situations, much like the Syagrus romanzoffiana. It is not the unyielding Sequoia sempervirens that stands after the hurricane has blown past; it is the flexible and resilient Syagrus romanzoffiana. However, you also notice, although men and women are similar, their brains are different. Men and women usually attack different types of attention. You do not usually have a bunch of females jealous of a man, and you do not usually have a bunch of men jealous of a woman, but with gender bending and confusion growing larger in society, men and women are going to have to learn how to deal with different kinds of stressors to weather the storms. Another factor that interfere with acceptance by men of the equal rights and qualities of women is fear, but most men will neither accept nor acknowledge this reason. Also a product of the conditioning process is men’s unwillingness to understand their own needs for competence and ego integrity. Yet it is a false competence and a phony integrity that cannot stand up to testing, and the real test in this case is the ability and willingness to share a place in the Sun with other. Not your place or his place or my place or her place, but our place. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The concept of sharing obviates the concept of competition between the genders and all of its conceits and manifestations. Yet, became we have grown up with the myth of male dominance, most of us (women included) are unprepared or unequipped to have it challenged. Women have demonstrated their capabilities in far too many ways for them to not be fully accepted as human beings; yet, as we have said many times, there are real lags between our intellectual understanding of reality and the changes in our institutions ordinary behavior that show our understanding. “If all pathways just led to now, then all I have been through was worth it somehow. For every treasure that is lost and found,through open doorways, when the lights have burned out, all I want is to be with you and feel like I am someone new. I could breathe if we just play down here tonight. All I want is to be with you. I feel you close in all I do. I can see; you light my way so clear tonight,” reports Tonight by Emma Hewitt and Cosmic Gate. And instead of being subject to death, when that last enemy shall be destroyed, and death be swallowed up in victory, through that atonement they can become the fathers and mothers of lives, and be capable of perpetual and eternal progression. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
A Precious Mouldering Pleasure it is to for the Soul to Select its Own Society
If they take you into their trust, tell you things that even most people do not know, there will be a bond, and maybe a bond that can somehow save us all. Many of us do not wish to settle for knowing just a little bit of other people, especially those we care about. So, we must find ways of opening up avenues of approach. By experimenting, we can invite these people to come out into the Sunlight and experience as much of life as possible. Why should we? If a person is happy being a Bluffer or an Expert or a Life of the Party, is it our business to take on the role of disturbing that individual? A fair question. First of all, it is not for anybody to say whether a person is truly happy or not. However, it is a peculiar and interesting fact that a self-actualizing person often attracts people who are only living partially. They may see the individual as a happy, effective, comfortable human being and come to that individual, associate with the person, in an effort to discover one’s secrets. Without ever admitting they want to be more than they are, they may show it or hint at it through their valuing or seeking after associations with certain people. Complementary and supplementary relationships are as common as male-female liaisons. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Often the more fully functioning partner blazes the trail.They shy and fumbling English person was often invited by the confident Zorbato jump in and play, or dance, or go after the woman: “Boss,” he said, “this is where I count on you. Now, don’t dishonor the male species! The god-devil sends you this choice morsel [a beautiful widow]. You’ve got teeth. All right, get ‘em into it. Stretch out your arm and take her! What did the Creator give us hands for?” “I don’t want any trouble!” I replied angrily. It is clear to see that the actualizer suggests, not to taunt or torment but to dare the other person to become more fully what he or she is. Often the half-person will come out and ask about oneself. Then the actualizer has some decisions to make. Will what he or she says make the person feel better or worse? If what must be said is hurtful, can the person take it? Will this interchange drastically affect the kind of relationship they have? Does one really want reality of is one asking for reassurance that one is likeable? If a person with insights into happier more effective living can communicate, the other person may be able to get the factual information one needs to begin working on oneself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, some people may not want to hear the truth about themselves, especially if it is painful. Anybody who has ever been asked to judge a friend’s work knows well the implication of that statement: If friendship or business relations are important to you, do not be negative. It is the rare individual who can objectively take criticism without some twinge of self-righteousness or resentment. Even well-meant, constructive criticism will wound creative people, who live with it and often because of it all their productive lives. A self-actualizing person generally has the peculiar knack of presenting criticism indirectly and one’s suggestions take on the nature of gifts, which tot he partially functioning individual they are. Some people like their coworkers,in the work place, to loosen up and play around sometimes to show that they are fully human. Yet, there are people who want to go to work, excel at their jobs and keep their person lives and business to themselves. It can make people uncomfortable when one of their employees or coworkers seems like a well adjusted superhuman. “I am not shrink, but I get the feeling you are embarrassed to let people see the…oh, the human side of you. Everybody sees Bud Jones, the super-efficient worker. No mistakes, no sloppiness, no margin for error.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Some people keep their human side to themselves because they have been taught people knowing too much about you and your family life can get you into trouble. “Bud, you are a guy who only let us see the perfect side. We are all human, Bud. It would make some of the newer people feel better about their chances if they could see that you really are flesh and blood. You are a nice and friendly guy, but it does not always show in public. More important than what it did for them, it would do them a lot of good. You do not always need to be person. Nobody expects as much as you do out of yourself. I would like to have you find out that being a human being can be enjoyable, too!” Some self-actualizing people have a trait called the older brother attitude. That is a healthy personality, which includes a high social interest. The older brother type cares about other people and want them to be fully human and to enjoy living rather than merely existing. Self-actualizing people are not running about with signs proclaiming their “Care for Sale,” but they are usually concerned about people and situations. They have enough good will in their beings to let it spill over and help people who really need it. And there are a lot more people living blindly, ignoring human needs, than there are those who care and can share that concern meaningfully and helpfully. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Though it is idealistic, one of the goals we have is the people,though discovering their own person significance, may want to help others discover theirs. Should this happen, a chain-reaction of fuller and more effective humanness might happen, too. If people got more out of living and took an interest in seeing to it that others got a chance to live more fully as well, we cannot help but feel that things might be a lot easier. The forward-going life instinct is stronger and increases in relative strength the more it grows. As it stands, human’s life is determined by the inescapable alternative between regression and progression, between return to a primal existence and arrival at human existence. Any attempt to return is painful, it inevitably leads to suffering and mental sickness, to death either physiologically or mentally (insanity). Every step forward is frightening and painful too, until a certain point has been reaches where fear and doubt have only minor proportions. Aside from the physiological nourished cravings (hunger, thirst, intimacy), all essential human cravings are determined by this polarity of the forward-going and the retrogressive impulse, which do not have the same biological strength. Humans have to solve a problem, one can never rest in the given situation of a passive adaption to nature. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Even the most complete satisfaction of all one’s instinctive needs does not solve one’s human problem; one’s most intensive passions and needs are not those rooted in one’s body, but those rooted in the very peculiarity of one’s existence. There lies also the key to humanistic psychoanalysis. As it turns out, the basic force which motivates human passions and desires are not the libido. As powerful as the sexual drive and all its derivations are, they are by no means the most powerful forces within humans and their frustration is not the cause of mental disturbance. The most powerful forces motivating human’s behavior stem from the condition of one’s existence, the human situation. Human cannot like statically because of their inner contradictions drive them to seek for an equilibrium, for a new harmony instead of the lost soul harmony with nature. After one has satisfied their basic needs, one is drive by the human needs. Human behavior is governed by a large number of types of motives, some that are physiological, but many more that are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experience, and growth experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
While our bodies tell humans what to eat and what to avoid—one conscious ought to tell one which needs to cultivate and satisfy, and which needs to let wither and starve out. However, hunger and appetite are functions of the body with which people are born—conscience, while potentially present,requires the guidance of people and principles which develop only during the growth of culture. All passions and strivings of humans are attempts to find an answer to one’s existence or, as we may also say, they are an attempt to avoid insanity. (It may be said in passing that the real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity.) Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer, the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of humans, and hence is more conducive to the unfolding of one’s powers and to one’s happiness than the other. All cultures provide for a patterned system in which certain solutions are predominant, hence certain strivings and satisfactions. Whether we deal with primitive religions, with theistic or non-theistic religions, they are all attempts to give an answer to human’s existential problem. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The finest, as well as the most barbaric cultures have the same function and that is to answer the human existential problem—the difference is only whether the answer given is better or worse. The deviate from the cultural pattern is just as much in search of an answer as one’s more well-adjusted brother. One’s answer may be better or worse than the one given by one’s culture—it is always another answer to the same fundamental question raised by human existence. In this sense all cultures are religious and every neurosis is a private form of religion, provided we mean religion an attempt to answer the problem of human existence. Indeed, the tremendous energy in the forces producing mental illness, as well as those behind art and religion, could never be understood as an outcome of frustrated or sublimated physiological needs; they are attempts to solve the problem of being born human. All people are idealist and cannot help being idealists, provided we mean by idealism the striving for the satisfaction of needs which are specifically human and transcend the physiological needs of the organism. The difference is only that one idealism is a good and adequate solution, the other a bad and destructive one. The decision as to what is good and bad has to be made on the basis of our knowledge of human’s nature and the laws which govern its growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The distinction of the three types of anxiety is supported by the history of Western civilization. We find that at the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety. However, in spite of the predominance of one type the others are also present and effective. Enough has been said about the end of the ancient period and its anxiety of fate and death in connection with an analysis of Stoic courage. As Stoics, we learn to focus on what is in our power. We ask ourselves what can we do to create a good life,no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in and what is required of us as human beings and what prevents us from living out to our full potential? Consistent stoic practice increasing our resilience, contentment, joy, and gives us the boldness necessary to tackle the tasks presented to us in life. We believe that we all have the ability to live artfully, and that requires effort. Living naturally means to take actions that we allow us to flourish. We are looking for our best possible selves. Humans are rational, social being. Therefore, there nature is to use their rational mind for the benefit of oneself and their society. Virtuous life is fully sufficient for happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The sociological background is well known: the conflict of the imperial powers, Alexander’s conquest of the East, the war between his follower, the conquest of West and East by republic Rome, the transformation of republican into imperial Rome through Caesar and Augusts, the tyranny of the post-Augustan emperors, the destruction of the independent city and nation states,the eradication of the former bearers of the aristocratic-democratic structure of society, the individual’s feeling of being in the hands of powers, natural as well as political, which are completely beyond his control and calculation—all this produced a tremendous anxiety and the quest for courage to meet the threat of fate and death. At the same time the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness made it impossible for many people, especially of the educated classes, to find a basis for such courage. Ancient Skepticism from its very beginning in the Sophists united scholarly and existential elements. Skepticism in its late ancient form was despair about the possibility of right acting as well as right thinking. It drove people into the desert where the necessity for decisions, theoretical and practical, is reduced to a minimum. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, most of those who experienced the anxiety of emptiness and the despair of meaninglessness tried to meet them with a cynical contempt of spiritual self-affirmation. Yet they could not hide the anxiety under skeptical arrogance. The anxiety of guilt and condemnation was effective in the groups who gathered in the mystery of cult with their rites of expiation and purification. Sociologically these circles of the initiated were rather indefinite. In most of them even slaves were admitted.In them, however, as in the whole non-Jewish ancient World more the tragic than the personal guilt was experiences. Guilt is the pollution of the soul by the material realm or by demonic powers. Therefore the anxiety of emptiness, within the dominating anxiety of fate and death. Only the impact of the Jewish-Christian message changed this situation, and so radically that toward the end of the Middle Ages the anxiety of guilt and condemnation was decisive.If one period deserves the name of the age of anxiety it is the pre-Reformation and Reformation. The anxiety of condemnation symbolized as the wrath of God and intensified by the imagery of hell and purgatory drove people of the late Middle Ages to try various means of assuaging their anxiety. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
To escape anxiety, people took pilgrimages to holy places,of possible to Rome; ascetic exercises, sometimes of an extreme character; devotion to relics, often brought together in mass collections; acceptance of ecclesiastical punishments and the desire for indulgences; exaggerated participation in masses and penance, increase in prayers and alms. In short they asked ceaselessly: How can I appease the wrath of God, how can I attain divine mercy, the forgives of sin? This predominant form of anxiety embraces the other two forms. The personified figure of death appeared in painting, poetry, and preaching. However, it was death and guilt together. Death and the devil were allied in the anxious imagination of the period. The anxiety of fate returned with the invasion of late antiquity. Fortuna became a preferred symbol in the art of the Renaissance, and even the Reformers were not free from astrological beliefs and fears. And the anxiety of fate was intensified by fear of demonic powers acting directly or through other human beings to cause illness, death, and all kinds of destruction. At the same time, fate was extended beyond death into the pre-ultimate state of purgatory and the ultimate state of Hell of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The darkness of destiny could not be removed; not even the Reformers were able to remove it, as their doctrine of predestination shows. In all these expressions the anxiety of fate appears as an element within the all-embracing anxiety of guilt and in the permanent awareness of the threat of condemnation. The late Middle Ages was not a period of doubt; and the anxiety of emptiness and loss of meaning appeared only twice, both remarkable occasions,however, and important for the future. One was the Renaissance, when theoretical skepticism was renewed and the question of meaning haunted some of the most sensitive minds. In Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls and in Shakespeare’s Hamlet there are indications of a potential anxiety of meaninglessness. The other was in the demonic assaults that Martin Luther experienced, which were neither temptations in the moral sense nor moments of despair about threatening condemnation, but moments when belief in his work and message disappeared and no meaning remained. Similar experiences of the desert or the night of the soul are frequent among mystics. It must be emphasized however that in all these cases the anxiety of guilt remained predominant, and that only after the victory of humanism and Enlightenment as the religious foundation of Western society could anxiety about spiritual nonbeing become dominant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The sociological cause of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation that arose at the end of the Middle Ages is not difficult to identify. In general one can say it was the dissolution of the protective unit of the religiously guided medieval culture. More specifically there must be emphasized the rise of an educated middle class in the larger cities, people who tried to have as their own experience what had been merely an objective, hierarchically controlled system of doctrines and sacraments. In this attempt, however, they were driven to hidden or open conflict with the Church, whose authority they still acknowledged. There must be emphasized the concentration of political power in the princes and their bureaucratic-military administration, which eliminated the independence of those lower in the feudal system. There must be emphasized the state absolutism which transformed the masses in city and country into subjects whose only duty was to work and obey, without any power to resist the arbitrariness of the absolute rulers. There must be emphasized the economic catastrophes connected with early capitalism, such as the importation of gold from the New World, expropriation of the less affluent and so on. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In all these often described changes it is the conflict between the appearance of independent tendencies in all groups of society, on the one and,and the rise of an absolutist concentration of power on the other that is largely responsible for the predominance of the anxiety of guilt. Their rational, commanding, absolute God of nominalism and the Reformation is partly shaped by the social, political, and spiritual absolutism of the period;and the anxiety created in turn by one’s image is partly an expression of the anxiety produced by the basic social conflict of the disintegrating Middle Ages. The breakdown of absolutism, the development of liberalism and democracy, the rise of a technical civilization with its victory over all enemies and its own beginning disintegration—these are the sociological presupposition for the third main period of anxiety. In this anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness is dominant. We are under the threat of spiritual nonbeing. The threats of moral and ontic nonbeing are, of course, present, but they are not independent and not controlling. This situation is so fundamental to the question raised in this book that it requires fuller analysis than the two earlier periods, and the analysis must be correlated with the constructive solution. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrate. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from one’s personal anxieties but one has means of overcoming them with well known methods no longer work. Conflict between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite, formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Social situation like those described have the character both of a trap without exist and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do not look at them. “And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. And we, ourselves, also, though the infinite goodness of God, and the manifestations of his Spirit, have great views of that which is to come; and were it expedient, we could prophesy of all things. And it is the faith which we have had on the things which our king has spoken unto us that has brought us to this great knowledge, whereby we do rejoice with such exceedingly great joy,” Mosiah 5.2-4. Keep your eyes on God, not on people. “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you,” reports Acts 1.7. Spiritual programs are filled with concerns for individual progress, acceptance by authorities, and the wish for sainthood or some other high position. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Some Rainbow Coming from the Fair with a Vision of the World Before the Judgment-Seat of God
We are cast of Heaven and bound to Earth like it is an intense dream. Our goal is rediscover the love of Heaven so we can return. Humans, in respect to their bodies and their physiological functions, belong to the kingdom of God. One of the most common images in Western and Eastern religions alike is of God as a parent and of human beings as God’s children. The functioning of the human being is determined by instincts, by specific action patterns which are in turn determined by inherited neurological structures. Billions pray to God as their parent, invoke the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people to promote peace, and reach out to the weary and troubled out of deep conviction that each of God’s children has great worth. The higher the mental and spiritual level of the individual is in the scale of development, the more guidance they might accept from our Heavenly Father. In many people we even find considerable intelligence; that is, use of thought for the accomplishment of desired goals,thus enabling the being to go far beyond the instinctively prescribed action pattern. However, great as the development with the in Earthly kingdom, certain basic elements of existence remain the same. Latter-day saints see all people as children of God in a full and complete sense; they consider every person divine in origin, nature and potential. “And they were healed by the power of the lamb of God; and the Devil and unclean spirits were cast out,” reports 1 Nephi 11.31. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Self-awareness, reason and imagination disrupt the harmony which in nature because humans are an anomaly, when compared to other beings on the planet. They are part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet humans transcend the rest of nature. They are set apart while being a part; humans are homeless yet chained to the home they share with all creatures.Cast into this World at an accidental place and time, humans are forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of oneself, people realize their powerlessness and the limitation of their existence. They visualize their own end: death. Never is the human being free from the dichotomy of their existence: one cannot rid oneself of one’s mind, even if one should want to; one cannot rid oneself of one’s body as long as one is alive—and one’s body makes the individual want to be alive. All people are thought to be progressing towards perfection and ideally want to realize their divine destiny. Just as a child can develop the attributes of his or her parents over times, the divine nature that human inherit can be developed to become like their Heavenly Father’s. God’s loving parentage and guidance can help each person willing, obedient child of God receive the Heavenly Father’s fulness and glory. This knowledge transforms the way we see our fellow human beings. We see them as being lovable and valuable.#RandolphHarris 2 of 12
However, nonbeing threatens human’s moral self-affirmation. Human beings, ontic (physical, real, or factual existence) as well as spiritual, is not only given to one but also demanded of all individuals. Humans are responsible for it; literally, one is required to answer, if one is asked, what one has made of oneself. One who asks an individual is that persons judge, namely the individual, who, at the same time, stand against the person. This situation produces the anxiety which, in relative terms, is the anxiety of guilt; in absolute terms, the anxiety of self-rejection or condemnation. Human beings are essentially finite freedom; freedom not in the sense of indeterminacy but in the sense of being able to determine oneself through decisions in the center of one’s being. Humans, as finite freedom, are free within the contingencies of one’s finitude. However, within these limits one is asked to makes of oneself what one is supposed to become, to fulfill one’s destiny. There are many roles one’s takes on as an inherited sense of this manifest destiny. Big Daddy or Big Momma is a person who displays all the parental virtues. They are hard to find fault with because they usually do it very well. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Big Daddy or Big Momma lavish great care and affection on others and find these people owing them great debts of gratitude. Often this is their ulterior motive. Some of these people are frustrated parents. They have never had children of their own and use other people to fill out their parenting needs. They usually do a lot of good, by the way, since so many of us seem to like or need a parenting person. However, they are partial actualizers because they are not giving affection and concern of their Being (B-love), but out of their Deficiency (D-love). Be warned that D-Lovers usually end up taking more than they ever give. They are users, exploiters, and, putting in harshly, they are like vampires, sucking the life and love out of other people. Some people play parental roles even thought they have had children, because they did not do a particularly good job raising their own. Their children went astray somehow. Usually it is because this type of parent does not really give love to his or her children. Or he or she is too possessive or too indulgent or too over solicitous. Either way, these parents are not respecters of their children as persons. So, when their own children move away, these Big Daddies and Big Mommas go out and find other people to love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
A few of this type actually dislike other people, and they play parental figures as a cover-up. “If I smother you with parental love and concern, you will never find out how much I really detest you.” “I resent your independence because I have none of my own, so I will destroy yours by putting you into a dependent relationship with me.” Thus, we find the parent type crippling other people with love. Of course there are millions of honestly loving and caring people who are often sought out as substitute parents. They are actualizing people who have more than enough caring to go around and are able to share it. Usually they do not play a parent, no matter how much the other person demands it of them. Self-actualizers are respecters of all selfhoods and do not wish to delimit other people. Then, too, helplessness or awkwardness often bring out the parent in many of us. Telling the difference between honestly loving people and those who play the parent games with others sometimes takes a great deal of experience. In ever act of moral-self affirmation humans contributes to the fulfillment of one’s destiny, to the actualization of what one potentially is. It is the task of ethics to describe the nature of this fulfillment, in philosophical or theological terms. However the norm is formulated humans have the power of acting against it, of contradicting one’s essential being, of losing one’s destiny. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Reason, human’s blessing, is also one’s curse; it forces an individual to cope everlastingly with the task of solving an insoluble dichotomy. Human existence is different in this respect from that of all other organisms; it is a state of constant and unavoidable disequilibrium. Human’s life cannot be lived by repeating the pattern of his or her species; one must live. Humans are the only beings that can be bored, that can feel evicted from paradise. Humans are the only beings who find their own existence a problem which one has to solve and form which one cannot escape. And under the conditions of human’s estrangement from oneself this is an actuality. One cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature; one must proceed to develop one’s reason until one becomes the master of nature, and of oneself. Even in what a person considers his or her best deed nonbeing is present and prevents it from being perfect. A profound ambiguity between good and evil permeates everything a person does, because it permeates one’s personal being as such. Nonbeing is mixed with being in a person’s moral self-affirmation as it is in his or her spiritual and ontic self-affirmation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The awareness of this ambiguity is the feeling of guilt. The judge who is oneself and who stand stands against oneself, one who know with (conscience) everything we do and are gives a negative judgment, experienced by us as guilt. The anxiety of guilt shows the same complex characteristics as the anxiety about ontic and spiritual nonbeing. It is present in every moment of moral self-awareness and can drive us toward complete self-rejection, to the feeling of being condemned—not to an external punishment but to the despair of having lost our dignity. To avoid this extreme situation humans try to transform the anxiety of guilt into moral action regardless of its imperfection and ambiguity. Courageously one takes nonbeing into one’s moral self-affirmation. can happen in two ways, according to the duality of the tragic and the personal in human’s situation, the first based on the contingencies of fate,the second on the responsibility of freedom. The first way can lead to a defiance of negative judgments and the moral demand of which they are based; the second way can lead to moral rigor and the self-satisfaction derived from it. In both of them—usually called anomism and legalism—the anxiety of guilt lies in the background and breaks again and again into the open, producing the extreme situation of moral despair. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
Nonbeing in a moral respect must be distinguished but cannot be separated from ontic and spiritual nonbeing. The anxiety of the one type is immanent in the anxieties of the other types. Sin as a sting of death points to the immanence of the anxiety of guilt within the fear of death. And the threat of fate and death has always awakened and increased the consciousness of guilt. The threat of moral nonbeing was experienced in and through the threat of ontic nonbeing. The contingencies of fate received moral interpretation: fate excuses the negative moral judgment by attacking and perhaps destroying the ontic foundation of the morally rejected personality. The two forms of anxiety provoke and augment each other. In the same way spiritual and moral nonbeing are interdependent. Obedience to the moral norm, i.e. to one’s own essential being, excludes emptiness and meaninglessness in their radical forms. If the spiritual contents have lost their power the self-affirmation of the moral personality is a way in which meaning can be rediscovered. The simple call to duty can save from emptiness, while the disintegration of the moral consciousness is an almost irresistible basis for the attack of spiritual nonbeing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
On the other hand, existential doubt can undermine moral self-affirmation by throwing into the abyss of skepticism not only every moral principle but the meaning of moral self-affirmation as such. In this case the doubt is felt as guilt, while at the same time guilt is undermined by doubt. Member of one group of masked players profess expertise in any number of different areas, all for the purpose of drawing attention away from their faults, limitations, and points of vulnerability. The Collector is one expert who gets our interest by showing us his or her Art, Book, Coin, Gun, Car, House, or Trophy collection. This individual wants only this part of oneself to be known. One can unreel one’s facts and tales for hours, and before you have a chance to inquire about anything in one’s personal life, the evening’s over and the host is seeing you to the door. The Collector may derive genuine satisfaction out of the things he or she collect, but one’s ulterior motivation is to provide an illusion behind which the Real Person can effectively hide. “You are a light of the World. A city on a hill cannot be hidden,” reports Mathew 5.13. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
The Historian of The Political Strategist is able to tell you all about the mistake of Caesar of General Robert E. Lee made in battle, or how to run the country more effectively, but he or she is unable to tell you anything about his or her own self. These types of people are usually well-read, intelligent people, but like The Intellectual, they hide their feelings and inn self being this respectable or awesome façade. The Museum Guide shows you around his or her home babbling about all the exciting things that were done in securing or decorating or remodeling the place. The house is a showpiece—of those sterile places one does not like to visit because it is not really a home. Look, but do not touch anything. Sit down gently on the French Proventil sofa, walk delicately down the hallways, and whatever you do, do not disturb the garden. These people wear their homes as badges of distinction. They cannot experience the house as a dwelling, as a place where friends can come, relax, and enjoy the fellowship of the Real Person who resides (we cannot say lives) within its four walls. These people are unable or unwilling to experience or exhibit any more of themselves than the surface mask or uniform of good taste. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
God has organized the World out of preexisting material (which he also created and reformed), emphasizing the goodness of God in shaping such a life of sustaining order. The Fix-it Man has this same passion, as he is one who can take apart and repair anything that is made. He is handy with tools, but terribly unhandy with people. Although one will display an immense knowledge of technical and mechanical matters, he is still ills at ease when dealing with human and interpersonal concerns. Indeed, some men amass their knowledge by escaping into technical hobbies to avoid interaction with other people. Human’s birth ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically is essentially a negative even. Humans lack the instinctive adaptation to nature, they lack physical strength, humans are also helpless at birth, and need protection much longer a period of time than any other being on this planet. While humans have lost the unity with nature, they have not been given the means to lead a new existence outside of nature. The reason is most rudimentary, humans have no knowledge of nature’s processes, nor tools to replace the lost instincts; they live divided into small grounds, with no knowledge of oneself or of others; indeed, the biblical Paradise legend expresses the situation with perfect clarity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Humans, who live in the Garden of Eden, in complete harmony with nature but without awareness of oneself, begins one’s history by the first act of freedom, disobedience to a command. Concomitantly, one becomes aware of oneself, of one separateness, of one’s helplessness; man and woman are expelled from Paradise, and two Angels with fiery swords prevent their return. Human’s evolution is based on the fact that they have lost their original home, nature—and that one can never return to it, can never become a being at home with nature again. There is only one way one can take: to emerge fully from one’s natural home, to find a new home—one which one creates, by making the World a human one and by becoming truly human oneself. When humans are born, the human race as well as the individual, one is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainly only about the past, and the future as far as it is death—which is actually return to the past, the inorganic state of matter. God found himself in the midst of these beings and saw proper to institute laws where by the rest could have privilege to advance like and himself and be exalted with him, and we must not let anyone murder our souls. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
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Are Any Human Eyes Near to Whom One Could Entrust with Love and Meet at the Junction of Eternity?
We notice smallest things—things overlooked before, by this great light upon our minds. Today we come across a person who acts and feels like an automation; who never experiences anything which is really their own; who experiences oneself entirely as the person he or she think he or she is supposed to be; whose artificial smile has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech; whose dulled despair has taken place of genuine pain. Two statements can be made about this person. One is that the individual suffers from a defect of spontaneity and individuality which may seem incurable. At the same time, it may be said that one does not differ essentially from millions of others who are in the same position. For most of them, the culture provides patterns which enable them to live with a defect without becoming ill. It is as if each culture provided the remedy against the outbreak of manifest neurotic symptoms which would result from the defect produced by it. Suppose that in our Western culture movies, radios, television, sports events and newspapers ceased to function for only four weeks. With these main avenues of escape closed, what would be the consequences for people thrown back upon their own resources? “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but this Worldly sorrow brings death,” reports 2 Corinthians 7.10. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
I have no doubt that even in this short time, without any form of media, thousands of nervous breakdowns would occur, and many more thousands of people would be thrown into a state of anxiety, not different from the picture which is diagnosed clinically as neurosis. If the opiate against the socially patterned defect were withdrawn, the manifest illness would make its appearance. For some people, the pattern provided by the culture does notwork. Many are often those whose individual defect is more severe than that of the average person, so that the culturally offered remedies are not sufficient to prevent the outbreak of manifest illness. (A case in point is the person whose aim in life is to attain power and fame. While this aim is, in itself, a pathological one, there is nevertheless a difference between the person who uses his or her powers to attain this aim realistically, and the more severely sick one who has so little emerged from one’s infantile grandiosity that one does not do anything toward the attainment of one’s goal but waits for a miracle to happen and, thus feeling more and more powerless, ends up in a feeling of futility and bitterness.) However, there are also those whose character structure, and hence whose conflicts, differ from those of the majority, so that the remedies which are effective for most of their fellow people are of no help to them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Among the group of people whose conflicts differ from those of the majority, we sometimes find people of greater integrity and sensitivity than the majority, who for this very reason are incapable of acing the cultural opiate, while at the same time they are not strong and healthy enough to live soundly against the stream. The foregoing discussion on the difference between neurosis and the socially patterned defect many give the impression that if society only provides the remedies against the outbreak of manifest symptoms, all goes well, and it can continue to function smoothly, however great the defect created by it. History shows us, however, that this is not the case. It is not always personal doubt that undermines and empties a system of idea and values. It can be the fact that they are no longer understood in their original power of expressing the human situation and of answering existential human questions. (This is largely the case with the doctrinal symbols of Christianity.) Or they lose their meaning because the actual conditions of the present period are so different from those in which the spiritual contents were created that new creations are needed. (This was largely the case with artistic expression before the industrial revolution.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
In such circumstances a slow process of waste of the spiritual contents occurs, unnoticeable in the beginning, realized with a shocks it progresses, producing the anxiety of meaninglessness at its end. Ontic and spiritual self-affirmation must be distinguished but they cannot be separated. Human’s being includes one’s relation to meanings. One is human only by understanding and shaping reality, both their World and oneself, according to meanings and values. One’s being is spiritual even in the most primitive expressions of the most primitive human being. In the first meaningful sentence all the richness of human’s spiritual life is potentially present. Therefore the threat to one’s spiritual being is a threat to one’s whole being. The most revealing expression of this fact is the desire to throw away one’s ontic existence rather than stand the despair of emptiness and meaninglessness. The death instinct is not an ontic but a spiritual phenomenon. Dr. Freud identified this reaction to the meaninglessness of the never-ceasing and never-satisfied libido with human’s essential nature. However, it is only an expression of one’s existential self-estrangement and of the disintegration of one’s spiritual life into meaninglessness. If, on the other hand, the ontic self-affirmation is weakened by nonbeing, spiritual indifference and emptiness can be the consequence, producing a circle of ontic and spiritual negativity. #RandolphHarris4 of 12
Nonbeing threatens from both sides, the ontic and the spiritual; if it threatens the one side it also threatens the other. It is true indeed, that human beings, in contrast to other living beings, shows an almost infinite malleability; just as one can eat almost anything, live under practically any kind of climate and adjust oneself to it, there is hardly any psychic condition which one cannot endure, and under which one cannot carry on. One can live free, and as a slave. Rich and in luxury, and under conditions of half-starvation. One can live as a warrior, and peaceably; as an exploiter and robber, and as a member of co-operating and loving fellowship. There is hardly a psychic state in which a person cannot live, and hardly anything which cannot be done with one, and for which one cannot be used. All these considerations seem to justify the assumption that there is no such thing a nature common to all humans, and that would mean in fact that there is no such thing as a species of humans, expect in a physiological and anatomical sense. Yet, in spite of all this evidence, the history of humans shows that we have omitted one fact, Despots and ruling cliques can succeed in dominating and exploiting their fellow humans, but they cannot prevent reactions to this inhuman treatment. Their subjects become frightened, suspicious, lonely and, if not due to external reasons, their systems collapse at some point because of fears,suspicious and loneliness eventually incapacitate the majority to function effectively and intelligently. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Whole nations, or special groups within ruling cliques, can be subjugated and exploited for a long time, but they react. They react with apathy or such impairment of intelligence, initiative and skills that they gradually fail to perform the functions which should serve their rulers. Or they react by the accumulations of such hate and destructiveness as to bring about an end to themselves, their rulers and their system. Again their reaction may create such independence and longing for freedom that a better society is built upon their creative impulses. Which reaction occurs, depends on many factors: on economic and political ones, and on the spiritual climate in which people live. However, whatever the reactions are, the statement that people can live under almost any condition is only half true; it must be supplemented by the other statement, that if one lives under conditions which are contrary to one’s nature and to the basic requirements for human growth and sanity, one cannot help reacting; one must either deteriorate and perish, or bring about conditions which are more in accordance with one’s needs. Human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence a while society can be sick. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
Human nature is common to the human race, throughout all cultures and ages, and of certain ascertainable needs and strivings inherent in that nature. Radoslav Hvorostovsky is 29 years of age and an insurance producer. He has a bright and sparkling personality, at least in the superficial sense of that word. He has a quick wit and an enormous memory for humor. He knows more stories than any ten people around him. Radoslav had had twelve different jobs since he got out of the Army at 21. His training was in business management, but some how Radoslav never got into a management slot. It was not his clowning around; that won him a lot of friends and made his dismissal or by-passing difficult for his superiors. They had agonized over the decision to give a promotion to Radoslav. Even when the evidence showed that he could not handle administrative decisions or control his subordinates, the superiors would shake their heads at the thought of telling Radoslav that he was not going to get the advancement. However, Radoslav did not really want the job. It entailed far more responsibility than he felt he could handle. He could not give orders and back them up. He did not like firing people or hurting them, because he did not like not being liked. So, he presented himself as jovial, easy-going, lovable, Radoslav Hvorostovsky. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
At parties Radoslav had people cracking up and rolling on the floor. He got a lot of satisfaction from his audiences’ applause, but he got much more satisfaction from knowing that nobody really took him seriously, and none of them would give him any kind of real responsibility. Radoslav was a Life of the Party because it protected him from having to look at any other aspect of himself. He knew, but hid from, the fears he had about decision-making and being responsible. In a sense, his self-acknowledgment makes him a more actualizing person than the one who, perhaps, is not away of why he plays certain games. However, Radoslav also felt a dull, nagging sense of dissatisfaction in one’s own life. He had more ability than he exhibited but was afraid that showing it would put him on the spot, make him come through with more than he cared to do. The Croupier is a person who literally rakes money across tables in a gambling casino. The person who in everyday life portrays oneself as The Croupier is one who not only talks about how much money he or she makes, very often one actually makes it. Whether this person is a talker about money-making or tycoon, this person’s whole portrayal of oneself is that of being economically wise. One describes oneself as a money person and tends to evaluate everything and everyone in dollars and cents: “That shack of mine really sets me back a bundle,” or “He or she is a 3 million-dollars-a-year type, a really fine person!” #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
The economic type of individual has allowed his or her economic interest to dominate one’s life and success is equated with monetary gain for oneself as well as for others. One spends much time taking about the big deals one is involved with, the bonus one just got or is going to get, the fantastic sums that have been lost become someone (not the individual) lacked foresight, the difference between what one makes and what another person makes, or did make at a similar age. This economic mask is much more common than we might at first thing. Somewhere in one’s life, The Croupier has come to place money far above any other values in human existence. Perhaps one had an impoverished childhood or was seduced by seeing somebody get rich quick. Whatever the motivation, one limits one’s life-expression to that which can be shown on an accounting ledger. Big Spender (B.S.) is another, fairly similar, economic type of mask wearer.B.S., as we will call this person, has found that if one throws money around, buys enough gifts and trinkets, one has a steady supply of friends. These friends are, of course, as constant as one’s supply of cash. Gold-digger often associates with B.S. Gold-digger is not always a female, incidentally. If male, he is person who allows his friendship, patronage, support, or laughter to be bought. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
For a dollar, a drink, a dinner, Gold-digger will provideB.S. with all the love and all the companionship one might require. Thesepeople will sell themselves to the highest bidder. Whatever type of personality in demand, that is what Gold-digger will be. Women who wear the Gold-digger mask are usually people who have never learned that they can be valuable as full-fledged persons. They are only learned to seek out the Big Spenders in life. If aperson will take care of them economically, that is what they will settle for. Culture and civilization develop an ever-increasing contrast to the needs of humans,and creates a social neurosis. If the evolution of civilization has such a far-reachingsimilarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods areemployed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems ofcivilization—or epochs of it—possibly even the whole of humanity—have becomeneurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends? To analytic dissection of these neuroses, therapeutic recommendations might follow which could claim agreat practical interest. I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. However, it behooves us to be very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with people butalso with concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and have matured. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The diagnosis of collective neurosis of an individual we canuse as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and one’s environment which we assumed to be normal. No such background as this wouldbe available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of ourknowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses the power to compel the community to adopt in therapy? Inspite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities. A sane society is one that which corresponds to the needs of human—not necessarily to what one feels to be one’s needs, because even the most pathological aims can be felt subjectively as that which the person wants most; but to what one’s needs are objectively, as they can be ascertained by the study of humanity. It is our first task then, to ascertain what is the nature of human beings, and what are the needs which stem from this nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
We then must proceed to examine the role of society in the evolution of humans and to study the recurrent conflicts between human nature and society—and the consequences of these conflict, particularly as modern society is concerned. In addition to conscious minds and material objects, there are at work in the Universe spiritual plastic powers, which are capable, like minds, of acting and of having purposes but not of being conscious. They operate even in the human soul, as is particularly clear in our dreams; the activities of organisms derive wholly from our dreams; the activities of organisms derive wholly from them. God works through such powers, although he does not directly govern their day-to-day activities, and it is by virtue of their presence in nature that nature can properly be described as spiritual. “God shall give unto you knowledge by His Holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been revealed since the World was until now; which our forefathers have awaited with anxious expectations to be revealed in the last times, which their minds were pointed to by the Angels, as held in reserve for the fulness of their glory; a time to come in the which nothing shall be withheld, whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be manifest,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 121.26-28. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Why, God Would be Content with but a Fraction of the Love Poured thee Without a Stint
Thousands of people in our World are wearing masks. Since a mask is usually a part of an identity, these mask-wearers are not necessarily phonies. However, some wear masks that pass off only one part of themselves as their entire identity. Those who show only a limited bit of themselves are not particularly sick or disturbed. They may or may not need psychotherapy; nevertheless they are living only partially. To speak of a whole society as lacking in mental health implies a controversial assumption contrary to the position of sociological relativism held by most social scientist today. They postulate that each society is normal inasmuch as it functions, and that pathology can be defined only in terms of the individual’s lack of adjustment to the ways of life in his or her society. To speak if a sane society implies a premise different from sociological relativism. It makes sense only if we assume that there can be a society which is not sane, and this assumption, in turn, implies that there are universal criteria for mental health which are valid for the human race as such, and according to which the state of health of each society can be judged. This position of normative humanism is based on a few fundamental premises. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The species of human can be defined not only in anatomical and physiological terms; its members share basic psychic qualities, the laws which govern their mental and emotional functioning, and the aims for a satisfactory solution of the problem of human existence. It is true that our knowledge of human beings is still so incomplete that we cannot yet give a satisfactory definition of human beings in a psychological sense. It is the task of the science of humans to arrive eventually at a correct description of what deserves to be called human nature. What has often been called human nature is but one of its many manifestations—and often a pathological one—and the function of such mistake definition usually has been to defend a particular type of society as being the necessary outcome of human’s mental constitution. Nonebing threatens humans as a whole, and therefore threatens one’s spiritual as well as one’s ontic self-affirmation. Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which a person lives creatively in the various sphere of meaning. Creative, in this context, has the sense not of original creativity as performed by the genius but of living spontaneously, in action and reaction, with the contents of one’s cultural life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
In order to be spiritually creative one need not be what is called a creative artist or scientist or statesperson, but one must be able to participate meaningfully in their original creations. Such a participation is creative insofar as it changes that in which one participates, even if in very small ways. Some people wear the mask of Autocracy. They adopt a face and posture that say: “I want you to know m only as the leader, the boss, the one who runs the show.” They toss their weight around, give orders, interfere with the ongoing operations of things, veto group decision, or boast of their own single-handed accomplishments. These people who we have dubbed The Power People, are unwilling to acknowledge or display any other part of their personality. They deny any tenderness, concern, agreeableness, or sympathy. They consider the role of powerful, influential person to be adequate for them. It meets all their needs, or at least all those that concern them. It gets for them a certain amount of respect or fear, or even dislike; and for some, being disliked is a very important motivation. Why? Is it because they are full of guilt and seek out dislike as a form of punishment or penance? Possibly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Or do people like to be disliked because people are so full of dislike for others that they perceive dislike as the only acceptable emotion? Possibly. Or is it because they project their own dislike onto others and are justifying their negativisms by calling it protection against the hostility they find all about? Again, possibly. These are some of the motivation we find in the power people. Are some people born power-seeking? Is there an innate drive or gene for power-lust? The best evidence still supports the hypothesis that leaders and rulers and executives and despots are made, not born. Certainly, any careful study of the history of monarchies will show that some kings’ children have not been kingly material. Our conclusions are that for a variety of motives, some people ignore or eliminate all other sides to their personalities and present themselves to the World as powerful, born leaders, influential. Often, because of what sociologist call self-fulfilling prophecy, these people cause their wishes to come true. They play their roles so well that everyone, including themselves, believes the power exists—and gradually, it does. Against such reactionary use of the concept of human nature the Liberals, since the eighteenth century, have stressed the malleability of human nature and the decisive influence of environmental factors. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
True and important as such emphasis is, it has led many social scientists to an assumption that human’s mental constitution is a black piece of paper, on which society and culture write their test, and which has no intrinsic quality of its own. This assumption is just as untenable and just as destructive of social progress as the opposite view was. The real problem is to infer the core common to the whole human race from the innumerable manifestation of human nature, the normal as well as the pathological ones, as we can observe them in different individuals and cultures. The task is furthermore to recognize the laws inherent in human nature and the inherent goals for its development and unfolding. This concept of human nature is different from the way the term human nature is used conventionally. Just as humans transforms the World around them, so they transform themselves in the process of history. One is one’s own creation, as it were. However, just as one can only transform and modify the natural materials around one according to their nature, so one can only transform and modify oneself according to one’s own nature. “I know that it shall come to pass; and they sell themselves for naught; for, for the reward of their pride and their foolishness they shall reap destruction; for because they yield unto the devil and choose works of darkness rather than light, therefore they must go down to hell,” reports 2 Nephi 26.10. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The point of view taken here is neither a biological nor sociological one if that would mean separating these two aspects from each other. It is rather one transcending such dichotomy by the assumption that the main passions and drives in humans result from the total existence of human beings, that they are definite and ascertainable, some of them conducive to health and happiness, others to sickness and unhappiness. Any given social order does not create these fundamental strivings but it determines which of the limited number of potential passions are to become manifest or dominant. Humans as they appear in any given culture are always a manifestation of human nature, a manifestation, however which in its specific outcome is determined by the social arrangements under which one lives. Just as the infant is born with all human potentialities which are to develop under favorable social and cultural conditions, so the human race, in the process of history, develops into what it potentially is. The creative transformation of language by the interdependence of the creative poet or writer and the many who are influenced by these individuals directly or indirectly and react spontaneously to one is an outstanding example. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Everyone who lives creatively in meanings affirms oneself as a participant in these meanings. One affirms oneself as receiving and transforming reality creatively. One loves oneself as participating in the spiritual life and as loving its contents. One loves them because they are one’s own fulfillment and because they are actualized through the individual. The scientist loves both the truth one discovers and oneself insofar as one discovers it. One is held by the content of discovery. This is what one can call spiritual self-affirmation. And if one has not discovered but only participates in the discovery, it is equally spiritual self-affirmation. Such an experience presupposed that the spiritual life is taken seriously, that it is a matter of ultimate concern. “And there are many churches built up which cause envyings, and strifes, and malice. And there are also secret combinations, even as in times of old, according to combinations of the devil, for he is the founder of all these things; yea, the founder of murder, and works of darkness; yea, and he leadeth them by the neck with a flaxen cord, until he bindeth them with his strong cords forever. However, the Lord God worketh not in darkness. He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the World; for he loveth the World, even that he may draw all people unto him. Wherefore, he commandeth none that they shall not partake of his salvation,” reports 2 Nephi 26.21-24. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
A spiritual life in which this is not experienced is threatened by nonbeing in the two forms in which it attacks spiritual self-affirmation: emptiness and meaninglessness. We use the term meaninglessness for the absolute threat of nonbeing to spiritual self-affirmation,and the term emptiness for the relative threat to it. They are no more identical than are the threat of death and fate. However, in the background of emptiness lies meaninglessness as death lies in the background of vicissitudes of fate.The anxiety of meaninglessness is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings. This anxiety is aroused by the loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however, symbolic and indirect, to the question of the meaning of existence. The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut off from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to one object to devotion to another and again on to another, because the meaning of each of them vanishes and the creative eros is transformed into indifference of aversion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Everything is tried and nothing satisfies. The contents of the tradition, however, excellent, however praised, however loved once, lose their power to give content today. And present culture is even less able to provide the content. Anxiously one turns away from all the concrete contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to discover that is was precisely the loss of a spiritual center which took away the meaning from the special contents of the spiritual life. However, a spiritual center cannot be produced intentionally, and the attempt to produce it only producer deeper anxiety. The anxiety of emptiness drives us to the abyss of meaninglessness. Some people refuse to display any part of themselves except their intellect. In a college environment, The Intellectual often snows or frighten one’s opponents with one’s intellectual power. One is a master of rhetoric and backs one’s opponents into a corner without lifting a finger. When attacked for one’s aggressiveness, The Intellectual may shrug and say, “The illogic of one’s own argument defeated him or her,” or “That person does not have the capacity to follow my train of thought.” Thus, The Intellectual exhibits one’s superiority without every falling into the position of being labeled the aggressor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Some people play Intellectual because they find too many defects in portraying other aspects of themselves. They may not be adequate to compete athletically or in interpersonal effectiveness, so they razzle and dazzle ‘em with their footwork, only it is intellectual footwork. This is partly a mechanism identified as Compensation. Often a fragile, puny, undersized boy cannot play sports, cannot attract a female, and cannot make it socially or interpersonally. So, he buckles down to come the all-time Honors Student who wins admiration for his brainpower, if not for his musclepower or drinking skills. This is an important role for many people and is not to be interpreted as always unhealthy. Some people simply need one area to excel in and they pick the academic or intellectual arena. The unself-actualizing aspects consist of their unwillingness or inability to admit that this is what they are doing. The approach of normative humanism is based on the assumption that, as in any other problem, there are right and wrong, satisfactory and unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of human existence. Mental health is achieved if a person develops into full maturity according to the characteristics and laws of human nature. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Mental illness consists in the failure of such development. From this premise the criterion of mental health is not one of individual adjustment to a given social order, but a universal one, valid for all people, of giving a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the consensual validation of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Noting is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a folie a deux there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. There is, however, an important difference between individual and social mental illness, which suggests a differentiation between two concepts: that of defect, and that of neurosis. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
If a person fails to attain freedom, spontaneity, a genuine expression of self, one may be considered to have a severe defect, provided we assume that freedom and spontaneity are the objective goals to be attained by every human being. If such a goal is not attained by the majority of member of any given society, we deal with the phenomenon of socially patterned defect. The individual shares it with many others; one is not ware of it as a defect, and one’s security is not threatened by the experience of being different, of being an outcast, as it were. What one may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness, is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of humankind—as one knows them. As a matter of fact, one’s very defect may have been raised to a virtue by one’s culture, and thus may give one an enhanced feeling of achievement. Emptiness and loss of meaning are expressions of the threat of nonbeing to the spiritual life. This threat is implied in a person’s finitude and actualized by an individual’s estrangement. It can be described in terms of doubt, its creative and its destructive function in a person’s spiritual life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
People are able to as because one is separated from, while participating in, what one is asking about. In every question an element of doubt, the awareness of not having, is implied. In systematic questioning systematic doubt is effective. This element of doubt is a condition of all spiritual life. The threat to spiritual life is not doubt as an element but the total doubt. If awareness of not having has swallowed the awareness of having, doubt has ceased to be methodological asking and has become existential despair. One the way to this satiation the spiritual life tries to maintain itself as long as possible by clinging to affirmation which are not yet undercut, be they traditions, autonomous conviction, or emotional preferences. And if it is impossible to remove the doubt, one courageously accepts it without surrendering one’s convictions. One takes the risk of going astray and the anxiety of this risk upon oneself. In this way one avoids the extreme situation—till it becomes unavoidable and the despair of truth becomes complete. Then people try another way out: Doubt is based on human’s separation from the whole of reality, on one’s lack of universal participation, on the isolation of one’s individual self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
So one tries to break out of this situation, to identify oneself with something transindividual, to surrender one’s separation and self-relatedness. One flees from one’s freedom of asking and answering for oneself to a situation in which no further questions can be asked and the answers to previous questions are imposed on one authoritatively. In order to avoid the risk of asking and doubting one surrenders the right to ask and to doubt. One surrenders oneself in order to save one’s spiritual life. One escapes from one’s freedom in order to escape the anxiety of meaninglessness. Now one is no longer lonely, not in existential doubt, not in despair. One participates and affirms by participation the contents of one’s spiritual life. Meaning is saved, but the self is sacrificed. And since the conquest of doubt was a matter of sacrifice, the sacrifice of the freedom of the self, it leaves a mark on the regained certitude: a fanatical self-assertiveness. Fanaticism is the correlate to spiritual self-surrender: it shows the anxiety which it was supposed to conquer, by attacking with discorporate violence those who disagree and who demonstrate by their disagreement elements in the spiritual life of the fanatic which one must suppress in oneself. Because one must suppress them in oneself one must suppress them in others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
One’s anxiety forces one to persecute dissenters. The weakness of the fanatic is that those who one fights have a secret hold upon one; and to this weakness one and one’s group finally succumb. It may be said that the person who is overwhelmed by a feeling of one’s own powerlessness and unworthiness, by unceasing doubt as to whether one is saved or condemned to eternal punishment, who is hardly capable of genuine joy, suffers from a severe defect. Yet this very defect was culturally patterned; it was looked upon us particularly valuable, and the individual was thus protected from the neurosis which one would have acquired in a culture where the same defect gave one a feeling of profound inadequacy and isolation. Many people are seized by one and the same affect by one object that one believes this object to be present even if it is not. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. However, if the greedy person think only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but as people who avoid human interaction by acting superior; generally one has contempt for them. However, factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as illness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
God Permits Industrious Angels Afternoons to Play and Calls the Angels Home Promptly at the Setting Sun
No matter how urgent our social needs are, all of us have needs for solitude, for times alone with ourselves. Again, the optimum selfhood experiences includes a balance of solitariness, sociality, and peripheral interaction (spectatorship). There is in each of us a need for privacy and time alone. It is not so much a need to reject or repudiate others it is a need to go within, to get acquainted or re-acquainted with our selfhood. We like to roam about or own house with no one to disturb us. We can get to our own Within sleep or in church or in solitary walks in the country. Or we can attempt to commune with the Universe. “And the Lord will remember the prayers of the righteous, which have been put up unto him for them,” reports Mormon 5.21. This experience is like a periodic need to get back to natural roots. Sitting and enjoying a forest, watching the Sun change angles in the sky as it becomes visible, or disappears, is a commonly favored method. Watching the sea from the beach, wading in a swimming pool are other ways. What is behind this need?Maybe at times we do get tired of other people—their opinions, their conversations, their directives. Or perhaps we tire of the necessity of relating to others. When this happens, we need to move out of the other-directed circle into the area of solitary or inner-directed thinking, feeling, and doing and reassure ourselves that we have something or someone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Those who are able to move Within know themselves to be significant and feel that they have a right to solitary experiences. They do not feel lonely when they actually enjoy very congenial company! In early childhood, our first play experiences are solitary. We discover the pleasures of fingers and toes, of blocks and dolls and we enjoy using our new found coordination to manipulate toys or the physical environment. We are engrossed with the involvement and seldom experience loneliness of those times. Next comes parallel play,where we still play by ourselves but alongside others, with minimal social interaction. Then we learn to play cooperatively, and sharing and exchanging and bargaining become important parts of our social experience. This evolution from solitary to parallel to cooperative play is not a matter of discarding one form for another. The entire history of an evolution is invariably present in the optimum development. We all retain the Child as well as the Adult and the Part,the need to play or be solitary is present along with the needs for parallel and cooperative experiences. We have reduced the average working hours to about half what they were one hundred and sixty-three years ago. We today have more free time available than our forefathers dared to dream of. However, what has happened? We do not know how to use the newly gained free time; we try to eliminate the time we have saved, and are glad when another day is over. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Why should I continue with a picture which is known to everybody? Certainly, if an individual acted in this fashion, serious doubts would be raised as to one’s sanity; should one, however, claim that there is nothing wrong, and that one is acting perfectly reasonably, then the diagnosis would not even be doubtful any more. Yet many psychiatrists and psychologist refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of unadjusted individuals, and not that of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself. What is the incidence of mental illness in the various countries in the Western World? It is a most amazing fact that there are no data which answer this question. While there are exact comparative statistical data on material resources, employment, birth and death rates, there is no adequate information about mental illness. At the most we have some exact data for a number of countries, like the United States and Sweden, but they only refer to admissions of patients to mental institutions, and they are not helpful in making estimates of comparative frequency of mental illness. These figures tell us just as much about improved psychiatric care and institutional facilities as they tell us about increase in incidence of mental illness. #RandolpHarris 3 of 16
The fact that more than half of all hospital beds in the United States are used for mental patients on whom we spend an annual sum of over a billion dollars many not be an indication of any increase in mental illness, but only of an increase in care. Some other figures, however, are more indicative of the occurrence of the more severe mental disturbances. If 17.7 percent of all rejected enlistees in the last war were for reason of mental illness, this fact certainly bespeaks a high degree of mental disturbance, even if we have no comparative figures referring to the past, or to other countries.The only comparative data which can give us a rough indication of mental health,are those for suicide, homicide and alcoholism. No doubt the problem of suicide is a most complex one, and no single factor can be assumed to be the cause. However, even without entering at this point into a discussion of suicide, I consider it a safe assumption that a high suicide rate in a given population is expressive of a lack of mental stability and mental health. That it is not a consequence of material poverty is clearly evidence by all figures. The most least affluent countries have the lowest incidence of suicide, and the increasing material prosperity in Europe was accompanied by an increasing number of suicides. As alcoholism, there is no doubt that it, too, can be a symptom of mental and emotional instability. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The motives for homicide are probably less indicative of pathology than those for suicide. However,though countries with a high homicide rate show a low suicide rate, their combined rates bring us to an interesting conclusion. If we classify both homicide and suicide as destructive acts, our tables demonstrate that their combined rate is not constant, but fluctuating between the extremes of 35.76 and 4.24 (per 100,000 of adult population). This contradicts Dr. Freud’s assumption of the comparative constancy of destructiveness which underlies his theory of the death instinct. It disproves the implication that destructiveness maintains an invariable rate, differing only in directions toward the self or the outside World. Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden and the United States of America are the counties with the highest suicide rates,and the highest combined suicide and homicide rate, while Spain, Italy, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are those with the lowest suicide and homicide rate. The figures for alcoholism show that the same countries—the United States, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark—which have the highest suicide rate, have also the highest alcoholism rate, with the main difference that the United States of America are leading in this group, and that France has the second place, instead of the sixth place it has with regard to death by suicide. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This evidence is startling and challenging indeed. Even if we should doubt whether the high frequency of suicide alone indicates a lack of mental health in a population, the fact that suicide and alcoholism figure largely coincide, seems to make it plain that we deal here with symptoms of mental unbalance. We find then that the countries in Europe which are among the most democratic, peaceful and prosperous ones, and the United State of America,the most prosperous country in the World, show the most severe symptoms of mental disturbance. The aim of the whole socioeconomic development of the Western World is that of the materially comfortable life, relatively equal distribution of wealth, stable democracy and peace, and the very countries which have come closet to this aim show the most severe signs of mental unbalance! It is true that these figures in themselves do not prove anything, but at least they are startling. Even before we enter into a more thorough discussion of the whole problem, these fundamentally wrong with our way of life and with the aims toward which we are striving. Could it be that the middle-class life of property, while satisfying our material needs leaves us with a feeling of intense boredom, and that suicide and alcoholism are pathological ways of escape from this boredom? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Could it be that these figures are a drastic illustration for the truth of the statement that people live not by bread alone, and that they show that modern civilization fails to satisfy profound needs in humans? If so,what are these needs? Fate and death are the way in which our ontic self-affirmation is threatened by nonbeing. Ontic, from the Greek on, being,means here the basic self-affirmation of a being in its simple existence. (Onto-logical designates the philosophical analysis of the nature of being.) The anxiety of fate and death is more basic, most universal, and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile. Even if the so-called arguments for the immortality of the soul has argumentative power (which they do not have)they would not convince existentially. For existentially everybody is aware of the complete loss of self which biological extinction implies. The unsophisticated mind knows instinctively what sophisticated ontology formulates: that reality has the basic structure of self-World correlation and that correlation and that with the disappearance of the one side the World, the other side, the self,also disappears, and what remains is their common ground but not their structural correlation. It has been observed that the anxiety of death increases with the increase of individualization and that people in collectivistic cultures are open to this type of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The observation is correct yet the explanation that there is no basic anxiety about death in collectivist cultures is wrong. The reason for the difference from more individualized civilization is that the special type of courage which characterizes collectivism, as long as it is unshaken, allays the anxiety of death. However, the very fact that courage has to be created through many internal and external (psychological and ritual) activities and symbols shows that basic anxiety has to be overcome even in collectivism.Without its at least potential presence neither war nor criminal law in these societies would be understandable. If there were no fear of death, the threat of the law or of a superior enemy would be without effect—which it obviously is not. Humans as in every civilization is anxiously aware of the threat of nonbeing and needs the courage to affirm oneself in spite of it. The anxiety of death is permanent horizon within which the anxiety of fate is work. For the threat against human’s ontic self-affirmation is not only the absolute threat of death but also the relative threat of fate. Certainly the anxiety of death overshadows all concrete anxieties and gives them the ultimate seriousness. They have,however, a certain independence and, ordinarily, a more immediate impact than the anxiety of death. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
The term fate for this whole group of anxieties stresses one element which is common to all of them: their contingent character, their unpredictability, the impossibility of showing their meaning and purpose. One can describe this in terms of the categorical structure of our experience. One can show the contingency of our temporal being, the fact that we exist in this and no other period of time, beginning in a contingent moment, ending in a contingent moment, filled with experiences which are contingent themselves with respect to quality and quantity. One can show the contingency of our spatial being (our finding ourselves in this and no other place, and the strangeness of this place in spite of its familiarity); the contingent character of ourselves and the place from which we look at our World; and the contingent character of the reality at which we look, that is, our World. Both could be different: this is their contingency and this produces the anxiety about our spatial existence.One can show the contingency of the causal interdependence of which one is apart, both with respect to the past and to the present, the vicissitudes coming from our World and the hidden forces in the depths of our own self. Contingent does not mean causally undetermined but it means that the determining causes of our existence have no ultimate necessity. They are given, and they cannot be logically derived. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Contingently we are put into the whole web of casual relations. Contingently we are determined by them in every moment and thrown out by them in the last moment. Fate is the rule of contingency, and the anxiety about fate is based on the finite being’s awareness of being contingent in every respect, of having no ultimate necessity. Fate is usually identified with necessity in the sense of an inescapable causal determination. Yet it is not causal necessity that makes fate a matter of anxiety but the lack of ultimate necessity, the irrationality, the impenetrable darkness of fate. The threat f nonbeing to human’s ontic self-affirmation is absolute in the threat of death, relative in the threat of fate. However, the relative is a threat only because in its background stands the absolute threat. Fate would not produce inescapable anxiety without death behind it. And death stands behind fate and its contingencies not only in the last moment when one is thrown out of existence but in every moment within existence. Nonbeing is omnipresent and produces anxiety even where an immediate threat of death is absent. It stands behind the experience that we are driven, together with everything else, from the past toward the future without a moment of time which does not vanish immediately. It stands behind the insecurity and homelessness of our social and individual existence. It stands behind the attacks on our power of being in body and soul by weakness, infirmary, accident. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In all these forms fate actualizes itself, and through them the anxiety of nonbeing takes hold of us. We try to transform the anxiety into fear and to meet courageously the objects with which we struggle that produce the anxiety but the human situation as such. Out of this the question arises: Is there a courage to be, a courage to affirm oneself in spite of the threat against human’s ontic self-affirmation? Many people cannot be alone. For them, to be alone is to be lonely, isolated, exiled. They have no inner resources upon which to draw or which they can enjoy. When they are alone, they are literally alone: no one is there! This is a tragedy. These are the people who are compulsive about their social activity: they must be around others, they must have the opinions and the regard of others. These same people have no ideas or suggestion or direction of their own. Ask them what they are going to do for fun that night and they are just as likely to ask you what you are going to do and say, “I think that is a good idea. Mind if I join you?” Unable to count on themselves, they are exceedingly empty or devoid of ego strength or beneficial self-esteem. #RandolpHarris 11 of 16
A psychiatric designation for many of these people who need to be around people all the time is Inadequate Personality. They have trouble getting or holding jobs, making and keeping friends, giving or accepting love. However, for the self-actualizing person, there are many times in one’s varied life experience that one enjoys getting of by oneself, to explore one’s root-relationships with nature or to find out more about oneself. One is able to experience newness and refreshment from these times. They re-create in one a sense of personal appreciation. These times of solitary experiencing can do other re-creative things for us. We can experience our own physical being. Most of us have grown away from the sheer enjoyment of our physical bodies, and solitary self-experiencing puts us into direct communion with our physical nature. Whether we are sailing alone over the ocean or walking through the park, we become increasingly conscious of our bodies. Sailing, for instance, demands continual vigilance and the body becomes attuned to the slightest change in wind or the tension of the sheet or tiller. At a time like this we are dramatically reminded that the body is more than a container for vital organs. “And a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God,” Alma 18.35. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The body-consciousness experience helps us to regain the understanding of just how deeply rooted we are in nature. It also helps us to see how important body functioning is to the functioning of everything else we do. We become aware that the body is capable of communicating its needs and desires to our mental consciousness and that we should learn how to pay more attention to this communication. How many times, when we are with others, do we get the message that we are tired, and yet ignore it. We feel it is rude to yawn or excuse ourselves to go to bed, though this is precisely what our bodies and our knowledge are telling us to do. In times of solitary experiencing, we get back to holistic experiencing and sleep when we are sleepy, eat when we are hungry, walk when we are restless, rest when we are tired, and do things more unnaturally. Afterward, our entire being is refreshed and more in tune. Why we do not take these clues more often to heat is one of the mysteries of cognitive life. “Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts,” reports Amos 5.14-15. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Another thing that solitude does for us is to give us more experience with the unconscious. We can enjoy our fantasies, our daydreams, our night dreams. In our imagination we can do or be anything we wish. And again,exploring our imaginations and the nature of our wishes and fantasies is an excellent way of discovering the reality that is our own being. Super-realists to the contrary, the dividing wall between reality and fantasy is not essential and impenetrable as they would have us believe. Many psychologist know that a self-actualizing,mentally healthy individual is often one who is highly skilled at leaping back and forth over the wall. However, make no mistake: one knows the wall is there,which side is one’s on, and how to get to the other side. Fantasy has a definite self-syntonic or beneficial aspect to it, just as dreams apparently have. We know too that much creativity is fostered by the imagination. Giving the fantasy life free rein at times may be a very healthy, even fun, experience for everyone; for the creative artist, it is a prime requisite for continued existence.#RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Humans are the most social beings—out of desperate need and exuberant play. As they grow up, other mammals unlearn to play—humans never do. In this, one is ever an infantilized being—and one capable of a maturity of such richness, depth, and complexity as no other mammals can attain. Play, even in its most complex and esoteric manifestations—the brilliant leas of the scientist reconstructing the Universe, the soaring poetry of the creative artist, the fabulous beguilements of the master confidence humans—draw every from and every renew the great and inexhaustible forces of the unconscious, liking humans to their evolutionary past, projecting them into a future ever changing yet ever the same, also lifting one beneficently out of the stream of time altogether into the joy of an unbound now of total absorption. Play can be found in, and thus, confound, all of its supposed antitheses. It is not work? However, work can be the highest play, for the scientist we have seen through Roe, the artists through Schneider, the shaman through Roheim, the comic through Lenny Bruce, and any person who love the task of that daily bread. “Wherefore, if a person has faith one must need to have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope,” reports Moroni 7.42. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Re-creation and play, whether solitary or social, are essential and natural aspects of human experience. They have been de-emphasized or ignored in the past because we have never been too certain that they were right, partly because of the Work-Sin Ethic and partly because we could not put their benefits down on a balance sheet or productivity chart. From recent literature, clinical and laboratory studies, and our own personal experiences, we have been able to infer the existence of some survival value in these lighter experiences, like humor, pleasure, play, and laughter, because they have counterparts in every culture. In addition to mere survival value, they play a vital part in enhancing and enriching human experience. A healthy personality is one that is capable of experiencing the full range of human emotions and seeking out a full range of human experiences. Play, laughter, humor, and leisure-time activities are re-creational: they enable us to re-create and replenish the exhausted store of human strength and self-respect. “I will pour out my Spirit in those day. I will show wonders in the Heavens and on the Earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The Sun will be turned to darkness and the Moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD. And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved,” Joel 2.29-32. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
I Years Had Been from Home and Now Before the Door I Dared Not Open—Lest a Face I Never Saw Before!
The gentlemen had risen to see me off. I murmured my superficial farewells, and only then did the secret grip release me. Nonebeingis dependent on the being it negates. Dependent means two things. It points first of all to the ontological priority of being over nonbeing. The term nonbeing itself indicates this, and it is logically necessary. There could be no negation if there were no preceding affirmation to be negated. Certainly one can describe being in terms of non-nonbeing; and one can justify such a description by pointing to the astonishing prerational fact that there is something and not nothing. One could say that being is the negation of the primordial night of nothingness. However, in doing so one must realize that such an aboriginal nothing would be neither nothing nor something, that it becomes nothing only in contrast to something; in other words, that the ontological status of nonbeing as nonbeing is dependent on being. Secondly, nonbeing is dependent on the special qualities of being. In itself nonbeing has no quality and no difference of qualities. However, it gets them in relation to being. The character of the negation of being is determined by that in being which is negated. This makes it possible to speak of qualities of nonbeing and, consequently,of types of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Up to now we have used the term nonbeing without differentiation, while in the discussion of courage several forms of self-affirmation were mentioned. They correspond to different forms of anxiety and are understandable only in correlation with them. I suggest that we distinguish three types of anxiety according to the three directions in which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens human’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens human’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, absolutely in terms of condemnation. The awareness of this threefold threat is anxiety appearing in three forms, that of fate and death (briefly, the anxiety of death), that of emptiness and loss of meaning (briefly, the anxiety of meaninglessness), that of guilt and condemnation (briefly, the anxiety of condemnation). In all three forms anxiety is existential in the sense that it belongs to existence as such and not to an abnormal state of mind as in neurotic (and psychotic) anxiety. The nature of neurotic anxiety and its relation to existential anxiety will be discussed in another chapter. We shall deal now with the three forms of existential anxiety, first their reality in the life of the individual, then with their social manifestations in special periods of Western history. However, it must be stated that the differences of types does not mean mutual exclusion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
We have seen for instance that the courage to be as it appears in the ancient times conquers not only the fear of death but also the threat of meaninglessness. Sometimes we find that in spite of the predominance of threat of meaninglessness, the anxiety of death and condemnation is passionately challenged. In all representatives of classical Christianity death and sin are seen as the allied adversaries against which the courage of faith has to fight. The three forms of anxiety (and of courage) are immanent in each other but normally under the dominance of one of them. However, nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western World of the twenty first century,are eminently sane. Even the fact that a great number of individuals in our midst suffer from more or less severe forms of mental illness produces little doubt with respect to the general standard of our mental health. We are sure that by introducing better methods of mental hygiene we shall improve still further the state of mental health, and as far as individual mental disturbances are concerned, we look at them as strictly individual incidents,perhaps with some amazement that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture which is supposedly so sane. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except oneself. Many a severe neurotic believes that one’s compulsive rituals or hysterical outbursts are normal reaction to somewhat abnormal circumstances. What about ourselves? Let us, in good psychiatric fashion, look at the facts. In the last one hundred and sixty-three years, in the Western World, have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Everyone is looking with a mixture of confidence and apprehension to the World leaders of the various people, ready to heap all praise on them if the succeed in avoiding a war, and ignoring the fact that it is only these very World leaders who ever cause a war, usually not even through their bad intentions, but their unreasonable mismanagement of the affairs entrusted to them. In the last 3,000 years of history, no less than about eight thousand peace treaties were signed,each one supposed to secure permanent peace, and each one lasting on an average two years. Our direction of economic affairs is scarcely more encouraging. We live in an economic system in which a particularly good crop is often an economic disaster, and we restrict some of our agricultural productivity in order to stabilize the market, although there are millions of people who do not have the very things we restrict, and who need them badly. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Right now our economic system is function very well, because, among other reasons, we spend billions of dollars per year to produce armaments. Economists look with some apprehension to the time when we stop producing armaments, and the idea that the state should produce houses and other useful and needed things instead of weapons, easily provokes accusations of endangering freedom and individual initiative. We have a literacy above 90 percent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. However, instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of people with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in while. However, the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no immortality occurs on the screen. Any suggestion that the government should finance the production of movies and radio programs which would enlighten and improve the minds of our people would be met again with indignation and accusations in the name of freedom and idealism. “And now my children, see that ye take care of these sacred things, yea see that ye look to God and live. Go unto this people and declare the word, and be sober. My children, farewell,” reports Alma 37.44. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
I Cannot Tell You, but You Feel it—Who Ponders this Tremendous Faith which is the Experiment of Our Lord!
It is tempting to try to live without an underworld, without soul, and without concern for the mysterious elements that touch on the spiritual and the religious. Anxiety and fear have the same ontological root but they are not the same actuality. This is common knowledge, but it has been emphasized and overemphasized to such a degree that a reason against it may occur and wipe out not only the exaggerations but also the truth of the distinction. Fear, as opposed to anxiety has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it—even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one’s self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it maybe, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear, love in the sense of participation,can conquer fear. However, this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible.One who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Helplessness in the state of anxiety can be observed in animals and humans alike. It expresses itself in loss of direction, inadequate actions, lack of intentionality (the being related to meaningful contents of knowledge or will). The reason for this sometimes striking behavior is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate.The only object is the threat is nothingness. Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Everyone experiences it. It is part of the opposition in all things,without which there would be no happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. As such, this emotion serves us well. It is part of our emotional alarm system.It motivates us to prepare for important events. It causes us to protect ourselves when we feel threatened. It enhances performance. Anxiety can always help us make thoughtful decisions, solve problems, and prepare for challenges.It reveals what we care about. However, one might ask whether this threatening nothing is not the unknown, the indefinite possibility of an actual threat? Does not anxiety cease in the moment in which a known object of fear appears? Anxiety then would be fear of the unknown. However, this is an insufficient explanation of anxiety. For there are innumerable realms of the unknown, different for each subject, and faced without any anxiety. It is the unknown of a special type which is met with anxiety. It is the unknown which by its very nature cannot be known, because it is nonbeing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. They are immanent within each other: The sting of fear is anxiety, and anxiety strives toward fear. Fear is being afraid of something, a pain, the rejection by a person or a group, the loss of something or somebody, the moment of dying.However, in the anticipation of the threat originating in these things, it is not the negativity itself which they will bring upon the subject that is frightening but the anxiety about the possible implications of this negativity.The outstanding example—and more than an example—is the fear of dying. Insofar as it is fear its object is the anticipated event of being killed by sickness or an accident and thereby suffering agony and the loss of everything. Insofar as it is anxiety its object is the absolutely unknown after death, the nonbeing which remains nonbeing even if it is filled with images of our present experience. The dreams in Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” which we may have after death and which make cowards of us all are frightful not because of their manifest content but because of their power to symbolize the threat of nothingness, in religious terms of eternal death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The symbols of hell created by Dante produce anxiety not because of their objective imagery but because they express the nothingness whose power is experienced in the Inferno could be met by courage on the basis of participation and love. However, of course the meaning is that this is impossible; in other words they are not real situations but symbols of the objectless, of nonbeing. The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate nonbeing. Immediately seen, anxiety is the painful feeling of not being able to deal with the threat of a special situation. However, a more exact analysis sows that in the anxiety about any special situation anxiety about the human situation as is implied. It is the anxiety of not being able to preserve one’s own being which underlies every fear and is the frightening element in it. In the moment, therefore, in which naked anxiety lays hold of the mind, the previous object of fear cease to be definite objects. They appear as what they always were in part, symptoms of human’s basic anxiety. As such they are beyond the reach of even the most courageous attack upon them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
This situation drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. It is impossible for a finite being to stand naked anxiety for more than a flash of time. People who have experienced these moments, as for instance some mystics in their visions of the night soul, or Luther under the despair of the demonic assaults have told of the unimaginable horror of it. This horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God who is really God means facing also the absolute of nonbeing. The naked absolute produces naked anxiety; for it is the extinction of every finite self-affirmation, and not a possible object of fear and courage. However, ultimately,the attempts to transform anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing,cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself. If we do not resolve the distorted thinking common to adulthood, we become the slaves rather than the masters of our high standards, and we become vulnerable to extreme anxiety.#RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Since we are social beings, we need other people for sheer survival from the beginning of life. Once the physiological needs are met, we cultivate needs that still involve other people. These social needs are secondary motives in the sense that they are learned, not inborn. However, secondary is not equivalent to unimportant or peripheral. Most of us are heavily involved in meeting our social needs. We need others for love experiences. Solitary people usually do not even love themselves. People who love themselves in a healthy fashion are people who also love others. In fact they are people who love widely and deeply because they have been loved—by others and then by themselves—and are in continual cycle of re-experiencing. True self-love is self-respect,self-appreciation, and self-knowledge. The self-love that grasps and demands and exploits others is a false love called narcissism. Real self-love enables us to involve ourselves with others, fully, deeply, real-ly, and satisfyingly for all concerned. We do not possess al the resources necessary to satisfy ourselves. For supplementation we have to go to another person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
It is the realization that we need other people for supplementation that makes social intercourse, and intimacy, possible. We often find ourselves in the situation of experiencing emptiness or shallowness. We may have been too long alone with our own thoughts or feelings. We may have had too limited a social situation, knowing and experiencing a too limited or small group of others. At times we find it necessary to replenish our supply of social feeling or social interest. It is at these times that we are strongly pushed or pulled toward other people, new people, or familiar people in differing or new circumstances. “Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endures forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last say, it shall be well with him,” reports Moroni 7.47. At times professional people find the company of colleagues to be tiring or uninspiring and are refreshed or stimulated by enjoying a meal or conversation with persons from other disciplines and academic levels. For those who may view this as using otherpeople, we would clarify. We all use other people: we pick their minds, we ask their opinions, we ask them to appraise our work, our looks, our ideas; we curry their favor. They, in turn, use us for the same kinds of things. This is simply wholesome, cooperative interaction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
There is also abuse of other people. A synonym for it is exploitation: to take advantage, uncaringly, of another person. Slavery is an obvious example, but far more subtle examples occur every day whenever someone takes something for another and does not give much back. Think of the adulation a movie star may take from a fan, without really giving much back. Psychotherapists often take from their patients the good feelings they have to give, and often do not give the patient something in return. This does not happen often, but there are good cases in point. Many therapists feel pleasure at the Godlike role into which their patents put them, and a few succumb to this and allow the patients to literally worship their every word, their very being. Then the patient gets very little that is real in return. When the healthy, self-actualizing person goes to another person, it is because there is a strong need for the presence and fellowship of that person. If one gets something from the involvement, one usually gives as much as one gets back. No contract is signed, no concern that the dividends will be absolutely equal to the investment! Between two people in the love that friends or lovers have there is no worry or greed. It is a continual round of sharing. When this happens, re-creation of each person takes place. It is again like two complementary halves making up an integrated whole.#RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Love is a re-freshment. It is a time and opportunity for newness and re-birth. There is so much to be gained from giving in the shared love relationships, not the least of which is growth of selfhood and of social feeling. One good turn deserves another way of saying that when one has experienced the growth of wholeness that comes from the being deeply involved with another human being, one wants to repeat the experience, time and time again. This feeling has been reported by many people as a phenomenon of any wholesome,satisfying social interaction and certainly seems to demonstrate the necessity of frequent and rewarding social contacts. Simple contacts, like casual conversation with strangers, apparently have beneficial and growth-producing effect. How many people get deeply involved in conversations wit perfect strangers!Taxi drivers, fellow drinkers at bars, bartenders, waiters, newsstand dealers,door-to-door salespeople, are literally invited into the lives of lonely people. It appears that there is greater hunger for human companionship or listeners.A few years ago, a group of New York City bartenders asked a psychotherapist to give them lessons in simple counseling because they were so often put into the role of counselor by their customers. The therapist reasoned that there might be some therapeutic advantage in helping these people to be effective listeners. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
The social experience is rewarding and regenerating because we know—whether we fully acknowledge it or not—that there is a strong bond among all human beings. Rugged individualist, cynical loners, bitter hermits may deny it, but most of us are more than willing to acknowledge that we feel a sense of kinship with other people, a fellow-feeling with all humankind, which is more like saying that all Homo sapiens are in the same boat. Some individuals identify so strongly with others that they emphatically experience sorrow with those in dire circumstances and joy with their happier fellows. All of these experiences of empathy are growth-producing. Cultivating a strong feeling of kinship adds to a personal sense of fulfillment and worth. In German, the word is Gemeinschaftsgefuhl. It means feeling-sense of community,in a meager literal translation. Social interest or sense of community with others is based on feelings of worth and is assisted by growth-producing interactions with other people. It is a very productive and satisfying circle:From satisfying self-feeling to satisfying group-feeling back to satisfaction with one’s selfhood. Humans are a creature and creator of humans. Come into the World a mewling helpless little creature, driven by diffuse strivings of a peculiar body one is totally dependent on human warmth and care to survive and be. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
At once humans are enmeshed in social life, at once begins to learn and share in culture. Dualities and paradox pervade one’s life:instincts and culture, the separate being and the vital social bones, the truly felt and the way to be, uniqueness of oneself and the sameness with all humankind. We are vastly various and laughably alike. Helpless yet vastly powerful,driven by irrational passions yet open to gigantic rationality, able at Olympian detachment and prone as well to boundaryless immersion in depths of oceanic feeling, of oneness with the heard or with ineffable mysteries of the Universe—all of these are human. Bodily female or bodily male, a part of oneself is the other gender, or no gender at all. The World of others, one’s bonds with them, are ordered and chaotic both. Human beings become a human personality only through the joys and pains of human contact, care and giving and taking, and only through learning the ways of that small portion of humankind that is one’s tribe or community or nation at a particular time in history. Our need for others may at times be compulsive (where we are driven by needs or motives we can hardly control) or impulsive (as when a spur of the moment sensation allows or unleashed certain behaviors). #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We may plan our social involvements or we may just enjoy them as happenings. The very fact that every culture ever studied has had to make a place for social intercourse give us some appreciation for just how universal this behavior must be. The hermit, the lone wolf, the isolate, the alienated: these are deviant humans. We must assume that some painful interaction has caused their solitary behavior to become a way of life. So we go out from our own centers of being to touch the beings of others, partly to reassure ourselves of our sameness, our bonds of likeness, and partly to restore some of the social feelings we lose in our work or play or states of fear. It takes a drastic or traumatic series of events to convince us that it is unsafe or unwise to seek out others. It seems unlikely that any one event could sever our bonds with the rest of humankind. No single trauma or hurt can drive us away from each other. It must require dozens of intensely painful and frightening experiences of rejection to develop a hermit or a social isolate.#RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In our social interaction, then, is a play element. We use the social experiences to re-create aspects of our selfhood that we have lost,or that have become fatigued, or which we doubt. We go to another person to gain validation of our own selfhood, whether in conversation, love, affection, argumentation, nurturance, punishment, or competition. We play games with these people, not just to structure our time or keep them away from intimate knowledge of us, but to get them to declare something about us. In challenging someone to a game of chess or tag or political discussion, we hope that they will see in us some element of worth or challenge to which they can respond. Their response is a statement that we are worthy of their rime and effort. It is a form of stroking, or social response. Stroking may be used as a general term for intimate physical contact; in practice it may take various forms. Some people literally stroke an infant others hug or pat it, while some pinch it playfully or flip it with a fingertip. These all have their analogue sin conversation, so that it seems one might predict how an individual would handle a baby by listening to the infant talk. By extension of meaning,stroking may be employed colloquially to denote any act implying recognition of another’s presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Each time we are acknowledged or recognized by another person it is as though we are being patted or told “Yes, I know you are there and I acknowledge your being.” You may think this is overdrawn, but them you might recall times when some people literally looked right through you and how you felt then. You may have felt the eerie sensation of doubting that you were visible. You may have felt diminished as a person, no matter who the other person was. If person is ignored or looked through, it has the effect, whatever his ego strength, of making one feel smaller, less important, insignificant. That show important other people are to us. You know how effective silence or non-hearing of a person’s words can be in putting one down. If you agree or disagree with him, you have given him a stroke. You have at least acknowledged his presence. However, by not hearing him, you say, in effect, you are not even there! On the more optimistic side, we find that other people add to our dimensions of selfhood and in wholesome social intercourse this is a mutual, reciprocal event. We validate each other’s existences. Though this is not necessary all of the time, it seems to be important for all of us at some time. Healing best begins with sincere prayer asking our Father in Heaven for help. That use of our agency allows divine intervention. When we permit it, the love of the Savior will soften our hearts and break the cycle of abuse that can transform a victim into an aggressor. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Randolph Harris II International Institute 