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How Long is it Since You were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
The Soul is Still the Activity of thinking, the Emotion of Joy, and the Discrimination Between X and Y
And as we Angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point…souls and nothing but souls…we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on Earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process. And just as with Angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to Hudegrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among the mystics and for the different kinds of Glimpse among aspirants. All illumination and all Glimpses free the soul from its negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. One is able, as a result, to see into one’s higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden. One can symbolically look down and see flowers of the World enjoy the petal and the center colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated one may be unsure that our spectrum is even involved. I mean, it is as if out spectrum of color is not the limit! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I Would Gladly Give My Life if it Would Advance the Cause of Truth!
Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!
Wake Up, Humanity! Be Alive! Look at this World in Front of You! I Will Make Up for Everything the World Has Done Wrong to You!
The anguish inside her defeated her anger. She drew close to me. No admissions and explanations. Just an image. I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one lese was present. Unconscious blocks to associational ability are many. For some people there is a fear of letting one’s mind go uncontrolled and saying anything that occurs, because of a feeling that there is something in the unconscious which is frightening. Such an individual, therefore, cannot allow the free play of association, but must keep them logical and controlled. Restriction of the ability to explore relations among various experiential elements is a serious limitation to producing unusual and interesting new combinations and, therefore, limits one’s ability to develop full potential. There are many acts of omission or commission which enhance the development of the associative abilities. Since the essence of this ability is making connections between events which are not obviously related, development depends upon the opportunity to explore freely the thoughts and feelings that the person experiences and to relate them to each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Emphasis on imaginative games lays the groundwork for more specific training in developing the skill of associating. However, when we are aware of anger, what then? It would appear that the most natural and spontaneous thing to do would be to express it. However, many of us find it difficult to be spontaneous at such moments. It may be desirable for us to examine some of the reasons we give ourselves for not expressing anger. Here are some of them. “I may say a lot of things I do not mean, and then I will feel terrible about it afterward.” What seem more likely is that we will say things we really do mean and do not accept in ourselves. If we say in anger, “I wish I had never met you,” or even, “I wish you never existed,” we may at that moment really feel that way—or at least part of us feels that way. It does not mean that five minutes or five hours later we may not be holding each other and intensely feeling our love for each other. For some people, humming the song that spontaneously comes into their head, and then reflecting on it, or associating to the words, can lead to a better understanding of the original puzzling situation. Either the title of the song, or the lines that the person has chosen to sing or hum, or the mood of the song, may contain the meaning of the association. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Humming is an enjoyable and simple method for uncovering hidden feelings that are not easily accessible to conscious thought. However, often we use fear of getting angry as an excuse because we dread the close involvement of anger. It this fear persists and the person finds one cannot loosen up and gradually express more of one’s anger, one should seek professional help, for suppressing anger increases, rather than decreases, the danger of violence. Everyone has the capacity to associate, most to a remarkable degree. However, the full use of this valuable ability requires realizing its presence, removing emotional blocks to letting it go without controls, practicing it, and gaining confidence that it works and can be a highly valuable assistant to thinking, creativity, and increased internal awareness. Internal thoughts and feelings must be expressed in some fashion. Scientific discoveries are written in technical language; music is written and played; other creative feelings are painted, sung, danced, spoken, acted. In some way a person must communicate one’s experience through the use or posture of one’s body or some part of it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If they get mad at them, some people are afraid that they will damage their children’s lives. When you are angry at them the only alternative to expressing it is some form of phoniness. They can be trusted to handle your genuine feelings more than you think they can. If you are afraid that your anger is not justified that is a valid concern. Perhaps you are under some mistaken impression, but how are you going to find out if you stew in silence and do not talk about your feelings? And so we come to the knotty question, “How can we be creative in the expression of anger? Perhaps it can be stated as a general principle that anger is creative when a maximum of communication occurs with a minimum of destructiveness toward oneself and others. Like most other values, this ideal is one we will never achieve completely. However, the ideas that follow may help us grow toward it. Perhaps scientific and artistic creation differ in their relative emphasis on the expressive aspect of the creative process. In scientific creativity, the primary focus is on the first three phases of the creative process—acquisition, association, and expression. The great discoveries of Dr. Freud came through his sensitivity to and integration of the material of human personality. His writing about these discoveries was only in a minor way an integral part of his creativity. It served primarily as a vehicle for communicating these ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A writer, poet, artist, or dancer, on the other hand, must concentrate more on the form in which one’s discoveries are expressed. We honor Browning, not simply for the conceptions behind is poetry, but for the very form of expression itself. When Katherine Dunham, Aaliyah Haughton, or Margot Fonteyn dance, the artistry is largely in the superb movement of their bodies, the mode through which their feelings are conveyed. Conscious, logical factors that enhance a person’s ability to express oneself involve a traditional educational area, the learning of skills. Learning to dance, or sing, or paint, or write is part of one’s ability to express oneself. Further, the development of skill in the use of symbolism, of expressing feelings derived form one medium in terms of another, is very central. A good example of this occurs in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which musical composition are represented in visual form. Unconscious factors that inhibit the expressive ability often derive form cultural or interpersonal censure. The belief that ballet dancing is not masculine, or that singing in public is uncouth, or that artists are irresponsible, or the actors are immoral, are all factors that may operate both consciously and unconsciously to inhibit the full expression of feelings in these areas. Also, the unwillingness to display oneself in front of others, as in public singing, is a major deterrent to free expression. To the degree that these inhibitions exist, self-realization is curtailed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
When an atmosphere of mutual exploration of creative expression can be established, wherein the whole group is attempting to support the creative efforts of each, remarkable progress can be made. Frequently, expressing the unexpressible provides such a boost in self-confidence that an individual may permanently increase one’s repertoire of modes of expression. Many of us have developed long fuses to or anger. We have learned to wait until later, probably wen we are no longer with the person, to be aware that we are angry. However, as we become more able to accept these feelings and more confident about expressing them, the fuse becomes shorter. Dealing with anger right aware will save us the wear and tear of carrying it around and will give both parties a chance to react while the situation is fresh. If married couple, for example, could follow the biblical suggestion not to let the Sun set on their anger, it would be a good thing. On the other hand, if, for example, bedtime became a time to search through their experiences of the day looking for outstanding irritations, it might quickly become a ritual to help them avoid intimacy. There are probably more fun ways of ending most days. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
It is tricky to suggest that we express anger without being condemning, for there is a subtlety here that also defies description. Word used do not always seem to be a safe criteria. Some couples, for example, can in moments of anger call each other all kinds of names and come out of it feeling refreshed and neither condemned nor unloved. Others can be much more controlled in their choice of words and yet carry the feeling that they are condemning each other as worthless. And all of us have probably seen unsophisticated, but affectionate, mothers who in a moment of exasperation could give a child a swat on the rear and say, “Get out of here, you stupid no-goodnik, and let me get my work down,” without raising any question in the child’s mind about being loved. Sarcasm is a frequently used, indirect expression of anger that carries the feeling of condemnation since it implies contempt for the other person. Suppose, for example, that wife Anne replies sarcastically when her husband Stan says to her, “I am just so tired of the way things are between us that I sometimes feel like packing up and moving out.” Her reply is, “That is just fine. You pack your precious belongings and get out, because I just could not care less!” Anne’s response would be difficult for stand to deal with creatively even if he did not become very upset by the contempt in Anne’s comment. For by being sarcastic Anne managed to protect herself by concealing all of her feelings except the hostility. She has not allowed him to see that it does matter very much to her, as it undoubtedly does, whether he stays with her or leaves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
One principle which arises in our discussion of form is the transforming of one’s self which occurs in the creation of beauty. In all our creativity, we destroy and rebuild the World, and at the same time we inevitably rebuild and reform ourselves. We do this not at all in the sense of the tragedy of The Great Gatsby, who only changed the externals, such as his wardrobe, his accent, his bank account. We do it rather by grasping a deeper level of the form in the Universe which is also in our own selves. We see the scene before us in our imagination, and that means to some extent we see our own selves. This is a very curious paradox but it is present in all creative persons. Often the creative persons in their work see the perspective of a lifetime endeavor, are themselves creating a cosmos of their own. It is as though each mind is progressively unfolding itself as one goes through life. The creative individual is the one who not only attempts to make some order out of one’s music or art but to make some order in one’s own life. A continual searching for one’s forms occurs in art, and this can be automatically a search for one’s own integrity. A clear example is the life of Beethoven. He has a horrendous childhood, but his biographers relate that his creative genius was related to precisely these ordeals he suffered. His father was constantly inebriated, his mother returned to Heaven when he was young, and he had to take charge of the whole family at the age of eighteen. He never married though he passionately wanted to. However, he could create fantastic music! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
There is no point in Beethoven’s life, where a marked development or transformation in musical styles takes place which is also not the point where an equal spiritual development and musical style go hand in hand. The transformation of the other is also the transformation of ourselves. Sometimes this transformation may not be good in the eyes of the artists’ contemporary World. Such was the situation with Rembrandt. When he was a young man his paintings were sold on all sides; he was then what we call an outstanding success. However, as he grew older and more profound, the tragic experiences in his life—the death of his children, the death of his wife—caused his paintings to take on a more somber and profound quality and made them less saleable to his fellow Hollanders. His self-portraits reflect this: each one looks more tragic than the one before it. His popularity as a painter waned, for he would not toady to the younger generation that was coming into vogue with the glossier and more readily saleable productions. He followed undeviatingly the path of his own genius. These later creative contributions make him now recognized as the greatest painter of his age. He died in sorrow and in poverty. The people in that day considered Rembrandt a failure. We now recognize him as one of the greatest painters of all time precisely because the transformation of himself and his art went hand and hand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
There is another question the relation between creativity and values. Certainly values have a great deal to do with psychotherapy, but they may seem to have very little to do with art or beauty. The studies of creative people indicate that the creative persons, so far as values go, are amoral, not immoral. They are not concerned with the generally conformist mortal rules that most of us are brought up with. At the same time—and perhaps because of this freedom from conventional morality—creative persons reveal another kind of ethics. It is not rules learned by rote but rather it is integrity itself. It is not marriage licenses on paper but authenticity of the relationship. It is not rules of health but reverence for nature and reverence for the human body. The artist seeks to overthrow existing values…to sow strife and ferment, so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life. Then I run wit joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. As part of an art exhibit in New York, a wrecked car was dragged to the corner of a park in front of the building which housed my office. This still life was an entry in a show going on inside the building, but was obviously too large to drag indoors. The artist had draped a cow’s intestines over the seats. The conservative people living in the neighborhood were incensed and called the police, and in a couple of hours the wreck was hauled away. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
However, the artists were simply trying to cry out, in as forceful a language as they could find, “This is what your technology is doing to you—take in our message!” A great deal of modern art could be captioned under the cry, “Wake up, humanity! Be alive! Look at this World in front of you!” This is restoring the emotionally dead, resuscitating the feelingless robot, the mechanical condition into which we have been forced by adjusting to a hyper-technological civilization. There is, on a deeper level, a very powerful relationship between beauty and ethical values. Beauty is that form in which everything is in harmony; and is that not also a definition of ethics? A final consideration, and perhaps the most important, is that art can dispense grace. Art is part of mortal’s quest for grace. Art and the beauty which it reflects enable us to integrate ourselves. We can make a synthesis between what Dr. Freud called primary and the secondary processes. The function of art can also be described by the term revelation. Art is a constant revealing of beauty as well as truth in a sense parallel to science but in the quite different form. Art produces new knowledge, new forms, often catastrophic in its endeavor to awaken people. The revelation in art comes as an immediate and unique experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We look at a picture and it immediately reveals a new Universe, a new form of experience. This is even true of a picture we have seen hundred of times. The Miro lithograph hanging in my living room brings me a new experience almost every time I look at it. The World is something different from what I had assumed. There is a grace that comes in such moments; a new depth of experience in ourselves is awakened. When persons say a particular piece of music carries them into another World, they are testifying to the revelation that is in this music. Beethoven himself once remarked, “Whoever understand my music will henceforth be free of the misery of the World.” Grace comes as a gift. It is something we do not ask for and cannot command. Indeed, we do not know the new revelation even exists until it opens itself to us. We were living in a narrow World; now, with the grace that comes in art, we suddenly find ourselves in a new World we did not know was there. I recall once, on leaving an exhibit of Hans Hofmann’s work, with the words singing in my mind like a Hallelujah chorus, “If a human being has the courage to paint such paintings, life surely has meaning!” It is the reverse of Dostoyevsky’s sentence in the Brothers Karamazou, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” If such beauty exists and gives us it grace, then life must be ultimately good. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Creativity gives us a grace in the sense that it is a balm for our anxiety and a relief from our alienation. It is grace by virtue of its power to reconcile us to our deepest selves, to lead us to our own depths where primary and secondary functions are unified. Here is the right brain and the left brain working together in seeing the wholeness of our World. And thus my painting and the creative sketching—indeed, everyone’s creative acts, whatever they may be—make constructive form out of the apparent formlessness of our lives. Since the commandment “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” is laid upon us so imperatively, it is to be inferred that the love in question is not only the love a soul can give or refuse when God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride, but also a love preceding this visit, for a permanent obligation is implied. This previous love cannot have God for its object, since God is not present to the soul and has never yet been so. It must then have another object. Yet it is destined to become the love of God. We can call it the indirect or implicit love of God. This holds good even when the object of such love bears the name of God, for we can then say either that the name is wrongly applied or that the use of it is permissible only on account of the development bound to follow later. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The implicit love of God can have only three immediate objects, the only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are religious ceremonies, the beauty of the World, and our neighbor. Accordingly there are three loves. To these three loves friendship should perhaps be added; strictly speaking it is distinct from the love of our neighbor. These indirect loves have a virtue that is exactly and rigorously equivalent. It depends on circumstances, temperament, and vocation which is the first to enter the soul; one or other of them is dominant during the period of preparation. It is not necessarily the same one for the whole of this period. It is probably that in most cases the period of preparation does not draw toward its end, the soul is not ready to receive the personal visit of its Master, unless it has in it all three indirect loves to a high degree. The combination of these loves constitutes the love of God in the form best suited to the preparatory period, that is to say a veiled form. When the love of God in the full sense of the word wells up in the soul, they do not disappear; they become infinitely stronger and all loves taken together make only a single love. The veiled form of love necessarily come first however and often reigns alone in the soul for a very long time. Perhaps, with a great many people, it may continue to do so till death. Veiled love can reach a very high degree of purity and power. At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Splendor comes into the City of the World in the Truth and Love Which Finally Will Conquer Even the Sword
This secret has to be kept by you from anyone else. If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Reese know everyone at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. I have always loved that place. Let us talk in the garden. When one deals with values and with action in the realm of values is a question that has been with us throughout this series, whether one can really separate psychology from philosophy. If we place the philosophic positions of other people in the context of objectively discernible fact and consider philosophy of life as a psychological attribute of the persons whom we study, what we have been trying to say is that scientific inquiry is possible. This skating on thin ice, let us admit again, and the ice gets thinner and thinner as we get closer to the great issues. Towards the end of his life (in 1932), Dr. Freud responded to a letter from Albert Einstein, in a correspondence initiated by the ill-destined League of Nations, in which Einstein asked him to state his views as to the possibility of the mitigation of human aggression to a degree sufficient to allow Homo sapiens to survive the immediate crisis and to evolve towards a World community in which peace on Earth would be secured. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Dr. Freud refers here to the evolution of culture, whose most characteristic features are, in his view, the strengthening of the intellect and the internalization of aggressive impulses. Individuals at the forefront of the cultural evolution exhibit these traits to the highest degree, ergo, we pacifists. Looking at history, it is apparent that the cultural process working within the individual will avail us little unless the culture is able to produce supra-individual institutions that will be decisive in institutionalizing human violence and curbing it by law. The most substantial finding is that sane attitudes are related in the character structure of egalitarian values, interest, and behavior patterns, in males as well as in females. They are also related negatively to Extraversion (traits that indicate how outgoing, energetic, and social people are) and positively to Psychasthenia (psychological disorder characterized by phobias, obsession, compulsions, or excessive anxiety). All three characteristics suggest a lessening of aggression directed outward and more control over its external expression through sublimation and a turning inward. At the same time, sane attitudes go along with curiosity, a higher level of self-development, independence, vitality, originality, creativity, motivation to achieve, and visual ability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Higher scorers on the scale show greater preference for complexity, are more original in the responses to the consequences of life, produce better poetic metaphors, are more esthetically sensitive, and score higher on a scale designed to measure the disposition towards originality. All in all, then, it does seem that pacifistic tendencies are related to personality development and are found most prominently in persons whose inner life and creativity are more highly developed and who reflect the general direction of evolution of culture. To be sure, every individual’s private problems and anxiety play into this concern about the clock running out in our World. As everyone knows it is easy enough to use the insecurity of the age as an excuse for one’s own neurosis. We can sigh, “The times are out of joint,” and then excuse ourselves from inquiring whether something may not well be severely out of joint within ourselves. However, quite apart from the fact that our neurotic tendencies love to masquerade behind the imposing phase, “catastrophic World situation,” there remains a wide margin in which the issue raised by the questioners is entirely realistic and sound. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Our World will continue in its stage of anxiety for some time to come: and everyone who does not choose to play ostrich must confront that fact and learn to live with insecurity. However, it does no good to avoid such questions by some stoical answers like, “We were born in this age and we would better make the most of it.” Let us, rather, inquire into mortal’s relation to time—actually a very curious relation—to see whether we may gain insights which help us to make our time rather than our enemy. We have seen that one of the unique characteristic of mortals is that they can stand outside their present time and imagine themselves ahead in the future or back in the past. This power to look before and after is part of mortal’s ability to be conscious of themselves. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. However, it is a quite different thing for human beings: mortals are the time-surmounting mammal. The key characteristic which distinguishes mortals from all other living things is their time-binding capacity. The capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. The capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom. The capacity in virtue of which mortals are at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Psychologically and spiritually, mortals do not live by the clock alone. Their time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively fascinating job, ten minutes after work talking to a young lady he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an advance placement adult career education class. Today he remembers noting of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him, as it was mostly routine assignments that day; of the evening class he can recall a little more. However, the ten minutes with the young lady occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the young lady. That is to say, ten minutes with the young lady takes up more room space than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year he was five, thousands of events happened to him. However, now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and their grandmother took them to get two scoops each of rainbow sherbet at Lucky, and his ice cream fell as soon as they walked outside the store, or the instant when he saw his new diamond back bicycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father come home with a cheese cake and he thought it was a pie. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine percent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitive significance of our experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Mortals are always part-and-parcel of the natural World, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over one hundred and fifty years, at this point in life, no matter what we think about it. We age, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Mortals die like every other form of life. However, they are the being who knows it and can foresee their death. By being aware of time, we can control and use it in certain ways. The free will-determinism problem has the quality of a paradox because it opposes a poignant and universal human experience (freedom of choice) to a most impelling assumption (that there is a reason for everything), and a choice must be made between them. It appears, of course, that is one admits that all events are absolutely predictable, then one must admit that what one is about to do a moment from now can be stated with certainty; but if this is so, then one cannot do otherwise. And if there is some possible action that one cannot do, then one is not free. One is, in fact, compelled. To deny such compulsion, it appears, one must assert that in principle not all events are predictable. Thus one seems to regain freedom to act differently a moment from now, in spite of all the psychological responses-catalogues that can ever be invented. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In the absence of predictability, what obtains is not freedom, but chance. Free will versus determinism is a mistake opposition. There is chance versus predictability, and there is freedom versus constraint, but freedom and predictability belong to two different Universes of discourse. In the nature of the case they cannot be brought into any relationship with one another, save the mistake opposition with which classical philosophy has so long concerned itself. There is no solution to the problem of free will versus determinism; there is possible, and proper, only resolution. Freedom is a personal feeling. It is a range of possible adaptive responses available to organisms in all situation in which they may find themselves. Freedom generally increases univocally as the response repertoire increases. In a particular situation, it is a function as well of the constraints imposed by the situation. In effect, the situation together with the organism defines the organism’s freedom at any given moment. Thus one may speak of potential freedom and actual freedom, actual freedom being freedom at the moment in a given situation, and potential freedom being some value expressing the relation of the organism’s response repertoire to the population of possible situations in which the organism might be placed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Freedom in this sense is worth considerable thought. It can be given such thought by the human brain, the freest of all organizations. It is the happy and unique characteristic of the brain that its manifold possibilities of action may all take place inwardly, and that it may act invisibly. This capacity for inward action is a bother to tyrants and defeats the most valiant efforts at imposing constraints. That is why freedom of thought is an indefeasible natural right. One’s brain is inside one’s own skull, and within that limited space it exercises an utterly amazing potential for varied response. The more a person is able to direct one’s life consciously, the more one can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that one is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, one works not by choice but compulsion, the more one is then the object of quantitative time. One is the servant of the time clock or whistle; one teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, one feels good or bad depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; one gauges one’s rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time one puts in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The more conformist and unfree an individual is, the more time is the master. A particular in instance of freedom (for instance, indefeasible freedom of thought, or its intrinsic solitariness), while it seems most important at times wen forces are hostile to civilization are in the ascendancy, it is a relatively minor and unimportant aspect of the freedom that the development of a complicated nervous system has given mortals. It is safe to say that our potential freedom is unimaginable. A small extension of it may be seen in the most complex of our calculating machines, and a prevision of its scope enlivens the pages of science fiction. The essence of our human freedom is this, that matter has acquired the capacity to work radical modifications in itself. Thus, among its available responses is the ability to act in such a manner as to increase its own flexibility, or deliberately to maximize its own response variability. One of the products of this ability in the human case is the invention and cultivation of psychotherapy, which provides a unique meeting ground of the objectivity and subjective meanings of freedom. In any event, in this sense of freedom, as the range of possible adaptive responses, freedom is a characteristic of material organization, and the range of values it takes is infinite. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Some of the anxiety on the time is running out theme in our day comes from something deeper than the potential of what could happen to the World. For the passage of time in any age has the power to frighten the human being. Many people are caught in the short when they feel time slipping by. Some people had life plans that have been interrupted and will take time. For instance, a man who has been delayed in buying his house might be downtrodden because he wanted his trees to be mature by a certain age. Other people, in general, may feel that time is their archenemy. Our conscious time always confronts us with the question of whether we are alive, growing, or merely trying to ward off being finite beings. When people are afraid of maturing, it is usually because they are not really living. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about maturing is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive. However, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening void. If our awareness of the passage of time tells us that only that day comes and goes and Winter follows Autumn and that nothing is happening in our life expect hour succeeding hour, one must desensitize oneself or else suffer the painful boredom and emptiness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly extinct as possible. Every human being experiences some boredom; a great deal of one’s work, for example, must be gone through more or less by routine; but it becomes unendurable only when it has not been freely chosen or affirmed by the individual as necessary for the attainment of some greater foal. On a not so everyday level, the anticipation of empty time can be a horror for people because they feel that if they had nothing to do, no dates and no regular plans, they would suffer from neurosis or psychosis due to the uncertainty. That is why people develop hobbies, read books and plant gardens, human need something to make their time on this Earth feel meaningful. A good time is usually defined as escaping boredom. As we face hard things in the Lord’s way, may we lift up our heads and rejoice. Sometimes the Lord asks us to do a hard thing, and sometimes our challenges are created by our own or others’ use of agency. The generation gap refers to fundamental differences in experience and in philosophy of life between today’s young men and women and their parents, considered as generations separated in time by twenty or thirty years. It is interesting that some fathers are more concerned with their children thinking they are trendy, instead of them being stuffy. A few of them just want to be seen as the type of dad who drives a sports car. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nonetheless, all parents want to instill hope into their children. What a pleasant thing it is when your children are hopeful about their future. Hope in its creative and healthy sense—whether it is hope for religious fulfillment or for a happy marriage or for achievement in one’s profession—can and should be an energizing attitude, the bringing of part of the joy about some future event into the present so that by anticipation, we are more alive and more able to act in the present. Thinking of the past can, of course, have the same escape function as thinking of the future. Whenever a difficult problem appears in the present, one can say, “At least things were better at such and such a time,” and let one’s mind bask in that memory. Indeed, so strong and universal are the tendencies to find comfort in the distant past or future that there are recurrent myths in almost every culture picturing each pole—the Garden of Eden and its variants of the longing for the happier day in a state of childlike innocence, and the myths of paradise ahead in the form of Heaven or the Earthly utopias of those who believe in perpetual, automatic progress. As living in hopes for the future is said to be the usual escape of unsophisticated people, so living in the past may be the common escape of sophisticated persons. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In therapy, people who live in the past know that it is not always a good idea to flee into hopes of the future rewards in Heaven, but they have learned that it is entirely respectable to talk about the past: for do not one’s basic problems have their roots in early childhood? This truth can then be used as a neat rationalization. For when a person comes to a session after a quarrel with his wife, he can then leap back into talking about childhood and how it affected him, or how he got along with his last girlfriend. This is often easier for him than to confront the immediate question of what caused the quarrel and what are his motives in his present relation with his wife. Fortunately the therapist can generally tell whether the person is using one’s past as an escape (in which case to talk about it will never make any psychological change in him) or as a source of illumination and a release of dynamic for the present. One can be aware of the passage of time because we are so alive in the present moment, not just because we keep ourselves busy to escape time. Sometimes an hour is like a week because it lumbers so slowly and painfully: in the former—being unaware of time because of the heightened aliveness of the moment—an hour is like a week because it gives so much joy and happiness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Also, many people complain just because some want to watch a television program that the TV is telling them a vision of how to act, dress, and what to think. While they may be true, the TV also has a way of reinforcing norms, like the law, and it shows you what happens to people who break the law. Some people complain about the television because they think it is inhibiting their control over a person. However, many people read books and seek religion for enlightenment. So, the TV is not telling them how to feel. Recently, something happened in our community and for weeks, I was unable to really put into words how I felt because the situation was also tied to something I experienced. Yet, after a few weeks of reflection, I was able to express what I was feeling. No one could tell me what to think or what to feel because for me the situation was very unique. Sometimes when people are trying to control you and they see you growing and their programming slipping, they will try to confuse you. Face it, some people like TV because they like the action packed programs, or designing, it gives them a level of excitement they are not experiencing in their own lives and probably never will. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and live and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
This is the Land that the Sunshine Washes–Life is a Stone Thrown Uphill Against the Downward Rush of Matter
Her expression remained placid, though she looked away, her inner focus gathering. The situation is not encouraging when men and women attempt to cling to old patters of male dominated relationships. For the woman this often means that she takes great pride in being feminine and, perhaps, protests too much that she enjoys being just a housewife who devotes her life to home and children and is dependent on her husband for economic support, direction, and decision-making. Very often, particularly in a World where the position of women has changed, the woman has more hostility about this subordinate role than she admits, even to herself. Frequently this rage expresses itself in a helpless role played by the woman, which in reality gives her a powerful tool for controlling those around here. One such woman seemed helpless in many ways. She was frightened of driving into the nearby metropolitan area from the suburbs in which she lived. So whenever she needed to go it was up to her husband to take her. Her housework and shopping often seemed like overwhelming tasks, so her husband had to out. She depended heavily on him to take over with the children. Then, in the throes of marital difficulties, the husband moved out. However, she found to her surprise that se could function perfectly well without him. When she needed to go to the city, she drove without a qualm. She organized her housework and shopping around a job schedule and had things running more smoothly than they had ever been when he husband was around to help. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
After a few weeks of separation, the husband moved back home to give it another try. Immediately she slipped back into the helpless role. She suddenly was unable to do what she had been doing so nicely. Finally she was able to see that she had been playing this dependent role hoping thereby to hold on to her husband because she needed him so much and could not get along without him, although in reality the role made her seem an incompetent nag toward whom the husband reacted with irritability and criticism. The man who maintains a dominant role in the home and reserves important decision-making to himself may, if he is a benevolent dictator and his wife does not mind, have a relatively successful and happy relationship. Nevertheless, the role of superiority always creates some emotional distance. You cannot have it both ways, a superior-subordinate relationship and a full partnership. And probably only in the latter can the fullest intimacy be achieved. Little needs to be said, of course, about those situations in which men attempt to maintain a dominant position in the home by physical or psychological brutality. Emotional intimacy is absent, and if the relationship continues indefinitely the woman who tolerates it must either be too weak to institute a change or have a need for punishment. Perhaps the central characteristic of the relations that have been described is that each of them involves a denial and suppression of parts of the self. The person may have some awareness of this, or it may occur with little or no conscious thought. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
This denial of the self is the symptom of distrust and hate of one’s self. The individual not only does not accept as a legitimate part of himself that which he denies and suppresses; he also assumes it will not be accepted by those whose love he most desires. Furthermore, he lacks confidence in his ability to handle the situation if he were to express all of his feelings and then encounter the hurt he fears. Thus, although one woman may never see what she is doing clearly enough to admit it even to herself, her relationship to her husband may be summed up as follows: “Even though I long to be loved and protected, I dare not let him see that I am warm and soft and full of need for him. Even if he responds at the moment, he would see my vulnerability and weakness and would inevitably hurt me and use me more than I could bear. I would be in his power.” On another woman’s life may suggest that she is saying: “I have to tiptoe carefully through life and not let my husband see I have a mind of my own. I have good ideas about what should be done in our home and family life, but if I let him know directly about these things he will think I am trying to ruin his life. There are ways I have of getting things I want out of him, but I could never discuss them with him directly. If I did not keep him thinking I am pretty helpless and that he is the he-man around there, he would probably leave.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
And one man’s life may sounds something like this: “I have all kinds of feelings, but I cannot afford to let her see many of them. Sometimes I feel lonely and frightened—like I did often as a kid. And maybe I would like to put my head on her lap and cry a little and be confronted. However, I would not let myself do that—let her see my little-oy feelings. I would seem weak to her, and she would despise me even though she might make a show of comforting me at the time. In fact it is even hard for me to show my tenderness and love for her most of the time, for I just feel in my bones that she would get around to taking advantage of my weakness.” The tone of another man’s life may be: “I would like to be more significant to my wife and family than I am. And sometimes I feel angry both at myself and at her because I am not. I have some pretty definite ideas, too, about how things should be run around here, but often they seem to run counter to what she wants. However, I guess it makes sense to let her do things her way. If I did not there would probably be everlasting bickering and the marriage might not survive. I guess it is just better to get most of my satisfactions outside of the home.” Involved in all of these lives is an almost paradoxical relationship between independence and dependence. None of the persons described is truly independent; that is, they lack self-acceptance and confidence in their ability to stand alone if need be. There is, therefore, a deep-rooted insecurity about relationships and a fear that they will be abandoned by those who are important to them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Without full awareness of what is happening they dedicate their lives to the proposition that half a loaf is better than none. In other words, they settle for a partial relationship rather than risk no relationship at all. Since they do not feel truly independent, they cannot risk letting others see their dependency—their need for love. Or they feign a dependency that in reality is simply a new means of controlling the other person and seducing him to staying around. What it comes to is that our fear of manhood or womanhood is, above all else, a fear of being ourselves. For society today, if we only could grasp it, has probably opened the door more widely than ever before to the possibility of creative relationships between men and women. The answer lies in the direction of the disarmingly simple but very complex matter of being our total selves in relationship with the opposite gender. Concerning the general relationship of emotional conflict to creativity, much more needs to be said. To get some perspective on the dynamics involved, we must consider the problem in some of its formal aspects. To begin with, conflict, taken in the most general sense, describes a state of affairs in which one force, or a complex of forces acting in relative unity, meets another force or complex of forces similarly organized. Forces in the stars and forces in the atom are prototypical physical examples in which conflict may produce explosion and enormous destruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Conflict is one aspect of all natural phenomena; it is an indispensable part of life, of change, of the development of new forms. Forces change one another, just as people, who are forces, do; and we are changed by what we change. Conflict would cease only if the Universe itself in its totality came to a state of perfect equilibrium, in which case it would be dead. Like itself, in this interpretation, is a vehicle for the maintenance of disequilibrium. Life is a stone thrown uphill against the downward rush of matter. A bit cheerlessly, I thought, and inaccurately, life is a detour on the road to death. The physical theory that the material Universe is tending toward a state in which there will be no motion and no conflict. In this view, life itself is a force that offers challenge to the inanimate. Conflict is thus a Universal in all of nature and is in some sense disembodied; genuine emotional conflicts can be lively things and often we can thank our lucky stars when we get a good one to grapple with. They can have in them the makings of something better. Conflict is in many instances generative of new solutions rather than a disabling form of stasis. The real question is this: can an internal dialogue take place between conflicting forces in such a fashion that the speakers do not simply repeat themselves but that occasionally something new gets said? #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Let us consider for a moment the more common case, in which the dialogue is forever repeated and opposing forces in the conflict, quite undeterred by tedium, reassert their position over and over again in an intrapsychic equivalent of cold war. Dr. Freud gave the name “repetition compulsion” to the universal human tendency to get into the same jam time after time. Usually the situation that is repeated is one which it its most primitive form occurred in early childhood. As the brain develops, however, and the capacity for complex symbolization increases, the situations tend to get fancier and fancier so far as content is concerned, so that in extreme cases, such as the delusional system of a paranoid schizophrenic, the entire cosmos becomes involved, complete with people from outer space armed with ray guns, and private conversations with divine personages and the celebrated dead. A well-worked-out psychoneurosis may be equally elegant, however, and I think it not too much to suggest that many events of great importance in World history had their beginnings in infantile disasters or conquests which individuals of unusual personal force caused to find re-enactment, with the World itself as stage. Whether the re-enactment is momentous for others or hardly noticed at all by them, the point is that these repetitions are essentially static in character and have the smell of death about them. Forces in the unconscious are blind, they are locked in upon themselves, they do not change one another because essentially there is never a mutual confrontation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Moreover, the histrionic in which they involve the individual and those with whom one one’s self is involved in the external World are generally grade B or C melodramas. If viewed from the outside and if viewed without sympathy, they are like nothing so much as the kind of television film that is regularly re-run. Psychoneurosis in this view is the most tedious thing under the Sun, and banality is its essence. What depth psychotherapy attempts to do is to alter the deadly stasis of unconscious conflict by bringing the conflicting forces into consciousness, where they will have a chance to look at one another and hear what the other has to say. The hard necessity in depth therapy is to permit regression to occur, a little bit at a time, concurrently with efforts at increasing the strength of the ego, so that the patient may allow to come back into consciousness some painful feeling or severely tabooed impulse which had earlier been repressed. When this happens, the conflict can come out into the open, elements in it can be discriminated and criticized, and genuine confrontation with consequent decision may ensure. This sort of constructive meeting of opposing forces may occur without psychotherapy, of course. People were working hard at know themselves long before Dr. Freud cast into the form of a theoretical system and a technique of therapy hos own particular way of getting to know himself. Socrates long ago took self-knowledge as his goal, and judging from the Platonic dialogues he seems to have progressed well. Many of the philosophers and artists of the World have exemplified in their person the same process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The artist transforms material from the unconscious into a social communication; he gives it reality involving discrimination, selection, technique, purpose, and understanding both of the material itself and of its potential audience. In saying this, let me make it plain, I am not saying that the artist is usually neurotic or that his neurosis is being expressed in his art. Artists indeed seem to have more than their share of troubles, at least troubles of a certain sort, but we certainly need not say that because a person is troubled he has a psychoneurosis. Could it not be that individuals of unusual sensibility and symbolic scope are at once more prone to despair, disgust, forlornness, and rage at the tragedy, to use Yeats’ vivid expression, of consciousness harnessed to a dying animal and yet at the same time ore capable of transcending these universal human bonds through metaphor and through identification with natural processes? Fear, anger, guilt, and despair are perfectly natural and appropriate emotions for all of us at times, and people who experience life most intensely are likely to feel such emotions most extremely (as well, let it be said, as joy, love, and freedom of spirit). So, if they are artists, they will seek to express their image of life and their relation to it in the cultural language of which they have most command, and thus invite others to test the reality of their perceptions and, in a sense, to join them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
Whatever is neurotic in them then becomes a part of the content, symbolically expressed, of their creative activity, and not simply a part of themselves that inhibits construction. Many creative people offer to psychoanalysis when it is proferred them a fundamental objection which for them is perhaps right. Although by not accepting it they may thus be left with their woes, there is yet the chance that as they struggles with their problems they may out of their distress make a testament to their belief in the ultimate intelligibility and significance of not only their own lives, but the lives of others. And for this, of course, there are great rewards. However, one need not be an artist or philosopher or even just a singularly valiant person to do the work of getting a conflict out in the open. An individual who decides to enter upon a psychoanalysis formally, for instance, with benefit of couch and analyst (or, to put it another way, makes a systematic practice of going to bed twice, and at least once by himself, on certain days) has usually already begun the work himself. Moreover, when the analysis is, as they say, terminated, he almost invariably continues it by himself, using the techniques he has learned. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
These consist usually in paying attention to small signs in himself that something is going on within him that he does not quite does not quite know about his feelings and ideas come out even when they do not seem sensible, and paying attention to his dreams and reveries. It certainly is not easy, but it can be done. I might add, however, that psychoneurosis, in addition to being essentially stereotyped, is also rather shiftless and usually avoids work whenever possible, so that it is not a bad idea to have a schedule of appointments and some monetary inducement for keeping them. Some are always ready to obey any order, whatever it may be. However, one must know what righteousness is. Should one joyfully obey the order to go to the very center of hell and to remain there eternally. I do not have a preference for orders of this nature. I am not perverse like that. So many things are outside Christianity, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence. In all the history now known there has never been a period in which souls have in such peril as they are today in every part of the globe. The bronze serpent must be lifted up again so that whoever raises his or her eyes to it may be saved. The heart has to be transported, forever, I hope, into the Blessed Sacrament exposed on the altar. You see that I think most people are very far from the thoughts of hell, with the best of intentions, attributed to society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Life, it Seems, is but a Dream, and Even Dreams are Dream
Be assured of my love, and the love of those here. The World as it is, the reality principle, adamantine sanity, these reassuringly solid phrases may furnish just the firm ground one needs to embark on a consideration of the role of the unconscious, that realm of chaos and shadows, in creative activity. To see things as they are when they are not as we would like them to be is the sternest task to which as rational beings we are called. In the service of this stern necessity, conscious thought and reflection, discrimination, memory, judgment, logic, and experiment. To be able to doubt methodically while suspending judgment, to explore alternative explanations in the light of certain canons of evidence and criticism, is the essence of scientific attitude. Pristine common sense is the everyday form of this attitude; the physical sciences and mathematics are its most rigorous and pure embodiment. It is no news that many scientists, and especially the very best, are odd people. As we have suggested elsewhere, they are in the very forefront of the direction in which evolution is taking us, and as such they exemplify in their works such qualities as dryness of judgment, meticulous attention to details, distinctions and small differences, radical questioning of common assumptions, a distrust of the unfortified senses, and a preference for the abstract and the qualitative, and the immediately natural. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We are all children of Adam, however, if I may so show my hand, and even the most scientific of scientists usually has a streak of irrationality a yard wide up one’s back, which makes one’s oddness complete. The distinguished historian of science, A.C. Crombie, has given us in his monumental presentation of the history of the science revolution literally hundreds of accounts of how superstitions, whims, bizarre images or convictions lead finally to scientific advances and important break-throughs. The point of all this is that Necessity may be as stern as she wishes, and when we are called to the task we must go, but we rarely go quietly. There is something in the human mind that does not like things as they are, something that will make up its own little World in whatever way seems to that individual piece of mind to be an improvement. All things transitory but as symbols are sent; Earth’s insufficiency here grows to event. The symbol presents a reality transcended. It is the medium trough which superior vision of reality is attained; it amplifies the less affluent real World through the act of imagination. Life, it seems, is but a dream, and even dream are dreams. Players and painted stage took all my love and not the things that they were emblems of. Symbols, dreams, play, light-heartedness—these are the stuff of a part of mind that gives little service to syllogism, evidence, judgment, classification, prediction, law, and stern necessity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
However, stern necessity calls: let us consider the way in which unconscious and preconscious forces may influence the mental apparatus, which might just as well be called the mind, both topographically and dynamically. The topography does not, of course, have anything to do with the central nervous system, but is concerned solely with hypothetical spatial arrangements in formal theoretical system, irrespective of their possible situation or neurological correlates in the body. The mental apparatus, then, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the process constituting our mental activity; every mental act begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not. Between the unconscious and the preconscious there occurs a kind of testing process, which is called the censorship. The mental act in the unconscious has two alternative fates open to it: upon being scrutinized by censorship it may be rejected, not allowed to pass into the second phase, in which event is said to be repressed and must remain unconscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If, however, it passes this scrutiny it enters upon the second phase, the preconscious, and becomes capable of entering consciousness. The rigorous censorship exercises its office at the point of transition from the unconscious to the preconscious. Once in the preconscious, the thought my now, without any special resistance and given certain conditions, become the object of consciousness. The core of the unconscious consists of instinct-presentations having the sole aim of discharging the energy with which they are invested. In other words, they are the mental representation of impulses, or drives, or physiologically-based excitations which seek discharge. A tension or imbalance exists, and the tendency of the organism is to regain balance and stability by a discharge of energy. These ideational representations of drives that—because of the nature of the external World as well as of the organization of consciousness—are denied discharge become related to one another by laws quite different from those that govern logical thought. For one thing, they are exempt from mutual contradiction; quite opposite feelings about the same object may exist simultaneously in the unconscious. Time, place, and custom have no effect upon them. Moreover, they are continually seeking short-cuts to discharges of their energy, and this they achieve by such mechanism as displacement, condensation, substitution, and symbolization. These mechanisms are exhibited most clearly in dreams. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Several persons whom the dreamer knows in one’s waking state may be condensed into a single dream personage; one person may be substituted for another, and feelings displaced from the original object of them to another object; situations that trouble the dreamer in one’s waking life may undergo a symbolic transformation which serves to make them almost unrecognizable. Our studies of the psychology of literary creation persuade us that ideas from the unconscious play a large part in furnishing the material out of which the work of art is made. Art differs from dreams and neurosis, however, in that its elaboration requires conscious effort, criticism, judgment, and a sense of form that is quite alien to the chaos of the unconscious. What appears to happen is this: the censorship momentarily suspends its function and an unconscious idea passes into the preconscious. This idea at first seems vague and appears to have no relationship to other conscious content. Often it finds its first fleeting representation simply as a momentary visual or verbal image. In then somehow begins to pull along with it various associated ideas, feelings, and symbols from the unconscious, which then enter into relationship to one another in the preconscious, as well as with other ideas already in the preconscious. The complex of ideas thus elaborated may finally come to conscious expression almost fully formed, or, more commonly, they come in fragments, and it is the task of conscious thought to relate them to one another. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The real work, of course, comes in making out of this material a communication, for instance, giving it a social reality, which involves discrimination, selection, technique, purpose, and understanding both of the material itself and of an audience of at least one other person who can appreciate it. Most fictions, including many that are published in book form, are not works of art and do not possess social reality in the sense of which I have spoke of it. The World of the psychotic, and to a lesser degree of the neurotic, is a private World, and the creator of it is bond to feel alone in it. Probably the feeling of isolation is the most poignant aspect of neurotic suffering, rather than the effects that we designate as symptoms. It is obvious to everybody that we are in a process of cultural self-destruction. What is left is also not secure any more. It still stands because it was not exposed to the destructive pressure to which the rest has already succumbed. However, it too is built on gravel. The next landslide can take it along. The cultural capacity of modern mortals is diminished because the circumstances which surround them diminish them and damage them physically. The industrial being is unfree, unconcentrated, incomplete, and in danger of losing their humanity because society with its developed organization exercises a hitherto unknow power over mortals, mortal’s dependency on it has grown to a degree that one almost has ceased to live a mental existence of one’s own. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Thus we have entered a new Middle Ages. By a general act of will freedom of thought has been put out of function, because many give up thinking as free individuals, and are guided by the collective to which they belong. With the sacrifice of independence of thought we have—and how could it be otherwise—lost faith in truth. Our intellectual-emotional life is disorganized. The overorganization of public affairs culminates in the organization of thoughtlessness. The industrial society is characterized not only by a lack of freedom but also by overeffort. For two or three centuries many individuals have lived only as working begins and not as human beings. The human substance is stunted and in the upbringing of children by such stunted parents, an essential factor for their human development is lacking. The overoccupation the adult person succumbs to leads more and more to the need for superficial distraction. Absolute passivity, diverting attention from and forgetting of oneself are a physical need for modern humans. As a result, people need to make the most of the resources, make them last longer, and focus on the spiritual so they have more time to develop and grown. However, mortals are not to retire into an atmosphere of spiritual egotism, remote from the affairs of the World, but to lead an active life in which one tired to contribute to the spiritual perfection of society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
If among modern individuals there are so few whose human and ethical sentiments are intact, not the least reason is the fact that they sacrifice constantly their personal morality on the altar of the fatherland, instead of being in constant living interchange with the collective and giving it the power which drives the collective to its perfection. The present cultural and social structure drives toward a catastrophe, from which only a new Renaissance, much greater than the old one, will arise; we must renew ourselves in a new belief and attitude, unless we want to perish. Essential in this Renaissance will be the principle of activity, which rational thinking gives into our hands, the only rational and pragmatic principle of historical development produced by mortals. If we decide to become thinking human beings, I have confidence in my faith that this revolution will occur. We must have a reverence for life. As the basis of ethics, people have generally ignored that the decay of human society and the World is being brought about through the practice of industrialized life; at the beginning of this century we already saw the weakness and dependency of the people, the destructive effect of obsessional work, the need for spiritual development and less consumption. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
The necessity for a Renaissance of collective life will be organized by the spirit of solidarity and reverence for life. If one takes the World as it is, it is impossible to endow it with meaning in which the aims and goals of mortals and of humankind make sense. The only meaningful way of life is activity in the World; not activity in general but the activity of giving and caring for fellow creatures. There must be a demand for giving up the having orientation, and for more of a social activity in the spirit of care and human solidarity. A radical inner human change is the only alternative to economic catastrophe. There must be a New World consciousness, a new ethic in the use of material resources, a new attitude toward nature, based on harmony rather than on conquest, and a sense of identification with future generations. For the first time in mortal’s life on Earth, they are being asked to refrain from doing what one can do; they are being asked to restrain their economic and technological advancement, or at least to direct it differently from before; humans are being asked by all future generations of the Earth to share their good fortune with the unfortunate—not in a spirit of charity but in a spirit of necessity. Humans are being asked to concentrate now on the organic growth of the total World system. Can mortals, in a good conscience, say no? Without these fundamental human changes, Homo sapiens are as good as doomed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It is to be hoped that the Club of Rome comes to grips with the problem of those social and political changes that are the preconditions for attaining the general goals. It is time for an ethical World change, not as a consequence of ethical beliefs but as the rational consequence of economic analysis. Material increase of consumption does not necessarily mean increase in well-being; a characterological and spiritual change must go together wit the necessary social changes; unless we stop wasting our natural resources and destroying the ecological conditions for human survival, catastrophe within a hundred years if foreseeable. Our failures are the result of our success, and our techniques must be subordinated to our real human needs. Economy as a content of life is a deadly illness because infinite growth does not fit into a finite World. Economy should not be the content of life, and that fact that it cannot be is evident today. If one wants to describe the deadly illness in more detail, one can say that it is similar to an addiction like alcoholism or drug addiction. It does not matter too much whether this addiction appears in a more egotistical or more altruistic form, whether it seeks its satisfaction only in a crude materialistic way or also in an artistically, culturally, or scientifically refined way. Poison is poison, even if wrapped in sliver paper. If spiritual culture, the culture of the inner mortal, is neglected, then selfishness remains the dominating power in a mortal and a selfishness fits this orientation better than a system of love for one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Considering present technology and patterns of behavior our planet is grossly overpopulated now. The large absolute number of people and the rate of population growth are major hindrances to solving human problems. We are seeing climate change, not only because it is natural, but because there are more people on the planet. The limits of human capability to produce food by conventional means have very nearly been reached. Problems of supply and distribution already have resulted in roughly half of humanity being undernourished or malnourished. Some 20-30 million people are starving to death annually now. Attempts to increase food production further will tend to accelerate the deterioration of our environment, which will eventually reduce the capacity of the Earth to produce food. It is not clear whether environmental decay has now gone as far as to be essentially irreversible; it is possible that the capacity of the planet to support human life has been permanently impaired. Such technological success as automobiles, pesticides, and inorganic nitrogen fertilizers are major causes of environmental deterioration. There is reason to believe that population growth increases the probability of a lethal Worldwide plague and of a thermonuclear war. Either could provide an undesirable death rate solution to the population problem; each is potentially capable of destroying civilization and even driving Homo sapiens to extinction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
There is no technological panacea for the complex of problems composing the population-food-environment crisis, although technology properly applied in such areas as pollution abatement, communications, and fertility control can provide massive assistance. The basic solutions involve dramatic and rapid changes in human attitudes, especially those relating to reproductive behavior, economic growth, technology, the environment, and conflict resolution. The real problem for people in our day is preparatory to love itself, namely to become able to love. To be capable of giving and receiving mature love is as sound a criterion as we have for the fulfilled personality. However, by that very token it is a goal gained only in proportion to how much one has fulfilled the prior condition of becoming a person in one’s own right. Assuming the premise is right—that only a fundamental change in human character from a preponderance of the having mode to a predominantly being mode of existence can save us from a psychological and economic catastrophe—the question arises: Is large-scale characterological change possible, and if so, how can it be brought about? I suggest that human character can change if these conditions exist: We are suffering and are aware that we are, we recognize the origin of our ill-being, we recognize that there is a way of overcoming our ill-being, and we accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
There needs to be a historical development that will liberate human beings from those socioeconomic and political conditions that make people inhuman—prisoners of things, machines, and their own greed. When patients consult a doctor, it is because they have suffered and they are aware that they have suffered. However, they are not usually aware of what they suffered from. The goal is to help the patient become aware of what causes their ill-being. As a consequence of such knowledge, patients can arrive at the next step: the insight that their ill-being can be cured, provided its causes are done away with. However, I do not believe anything lasting can be achieved by persons who suffer from a general ill-being and form whom a change in character is necessary, unless they change their practice of life in according with the change in character they want to achieve. For instance, one can analyze the dependency of individuals until doomsday, but all the insights gained will accomplish nothing while they stay in the same practical situations they were living in before arriving at these insights. To give an example: a woman whose suffering is rooted in her dependency on her father, even though she has insight into deeper causes of the dependency, will not really change unless she changes her practice of life, for instance separates from her father, does not accept his favors, takes the risk and pain that these practical steps toward independence imply. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Insight separated from practice remains ineffective. Be very careful, because if you should pass over something important through your own fault it would be a pity. This should make one see intellectual honesty in a new light. It is not opposed to faith, but in some people there are obstacles to the faith, impure obstacles, such as prejudices, and habits. One must face the whole question of faith, doctrines and covenants, and the sacraments, this will oblige them to consider them closely and at length with the fullest possible attention, making once see them as thing which they have obligations to discern and perform. And there is a great blessing of another order when one gains friendship by charity, as it will provide one with a source of the most compelling and pure inspiration that is to be found among human things. For nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God, than friendship for the friends of God. Nothing will better enable an individual to measure the breadth of a true friend’s charity than the fact that they bore one for so long and with such gentleness. It may seem like a joke, but that is not the case. A friend may not have the same motives as self, but you will know that their patience can only spring from a supernatural generosity. “Learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God,” reports Alma 37.35. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Eden is that Old Fashioned House We Dwell in Every Day Without Suspecting Our Abode Until We Drive Away
Oh, this was nothing short of providential! I was absolutely furious and delirious happy at the same time. I closed my focus. In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. However, in an age of anxiety, an age of herd morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on one’s own at an earlier age and for a longer period. In the past courage has been oversimplified: we suppressed our awareness of death, told ourselves that happiness and freedom would come automatically and assumed that loneliness, anxiety and fear were always neurotic and could be overcome by better adjustment. It is true that neurotic anxiety and loneliness can and should be overcome: the chief courage needed in dealing with them is in taking steps to get professional help. However, there still remain the experiences of normal anxiety which confront any developing person, and it is in confronting rather than fleeing these that courage is essential. Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as one continues to grow, to move ahead; it is they only lasting virtue. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
We do not refer chiefly to the courage needed to face external threats, such as war and destructive weapons. We refer rather to courage as an inward quality, a way of relating to oneself and one’s possibilities. As this courage in dealing with oneself is achieved, one can with much greater equanimity meet the threats of the external situation. Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration. The need for courage arises not only at those stages when breaks with parental protection are most obvious—such as the birth of self-awareness, at going off to school, at adolescence, in crises of love, marriage and the facing of ultimate death—but t every step in between as one moves from the familiar surroundings over frontiers into the unfamiliar. Courage, in its final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one’s own nature. The opposite to courage is not cowardice: that, rather, is the lack of courage. To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say one is lazy: it simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked. The opposite to courage, as one endeavors to understand the problem in our particular age, is automaton conformity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
The courage to be oneself is scarcely admired as the top virtue these days. One trouble is that many people still associate that kind of courage with the stuffy attitudes of the self-made mortals of the late nineteenth century, or with the somewhat ridiculous no matter how sincere “I-am-the-master-of-my-fate” theme in such a poem as “Invictus.” With what qualified favor many people today view standing on one’s own convictions is revealed in such phrases as “sticking one’s neck out.” The central suggestion in this defenseless posture is that any passer-by could swing at the exposed neck and cut off the head. Or people describe moving ahead in one’s beliefs as “going out on a limb.” Again what a picture! The only things one can do out on a limb are to crawl back again, saw the limb off and come down, dramatic as Icarus in a martyr-like and probably useless crash, dramatic as Icarus in a martyr-like and probably useless crash, or remain out on the limb, vegetating like a Hindu tree-sitter and exposed to the ridicule of a populace which does not think highly of tree-sitting, till the limb breaks off of its own dead weight. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Both of these expressions highlight the fact that what is most dreaded is getting out of the group, protruding, not fitting in. People lack courage because their fear of being isolated, alone, or of being subjected to social isolation, that is, being laughed at, ridiculed or rejected. If one sinks back into the crowd, one does not risk these dangers. And this being isolated is no minor threat because primitive people may be literally killed by being psychologically isolated from the community. There have been observed cases of natives who, when socially ostracized and treated by their tribes as though they did not exit, have actually withered away and died. To be cut dead by social disapproval has much more truth than poetry in it. It is thus no figment of the neurotic imagination that people are deathly afraid of standing on their own convictions at the risk of being renounced by the group. What we lack in our day is an understanding of the friendly, warm, personal, original, constructive courage of a Socrates or a Spinoza. We need to recover an understanding of the beneficial aspects of courage—courage as the inner side of growth, courage as a constructive way of that becoming of oneself which is prior to the power to give oneself. Thus, when in this chapter we emphasize standing on one’s own belief, we do not at all imply living in a vacuum of separateness; actually, courage is the basis of any creative relationship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
It takes courage not only to asset oneself but to give oneself. When we suppress anger, insofar as its direct expression is concerned, we inevitably pay some price for this denial of ourselves. As a matter of fact, the idea of suppression of anger involve some self-deceit, for we always express our anger in some way. Attempting to suppress anger is like trying to push an inflated inner tube under water. When we manage to push one side of it under, it pops out at some other point. So when we suppress the direct expression of anger it manifests itself in some indirect way. We may take it out on ourselves or others. Usually our reactions involve some form of both. There is an emotional logic in our tendency to turn our anger inward in some self-damaging expression. After all, as we have seen, we have been taught to hate and mistrust this part of ourselves. We have been taught that anger is condemnable, so when we feel angry our feelings of self-hate are increased. Some punishment of ourselves for having these feelings that we do not accept in ourselves is therefore in order. Sometimes turning anger in on oneself results in physical illness. The symptoms may be relatively simple and fleeting. Many people, for example, will develop a slight headache following a conversation in which there was more anger than they expressed or perhaps even realized. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Often more chronic problems develop, such as ulcers or high blood pressure. Indeed, although there is much additional research to be done into the relation of anger and physical illness, it seems clear that such emotional factors can have much to do with either the onset or the progress (or both) of most physical ailments. The physical illness itself can then become a weapon for the expression of hostility, too. The wife, for example, who does not allow herself to express her anger toward her husband and children directly may mete out considerable punishment toward them as well as herself when she has frequently recurring sick headache. Depression is another frequent result of turning anger in one one’s self. Marge, a middle-aged woman, sought professional help because much of the time she was in moods of gloomy despair and because she seemed to have no motivation to do her work. Her thoughts were sufficiently suicidal that she asked the therapist to keep her supply of sleeping pills lest she take an overdose in the midst of an acute depression. As she talked, it rapidly became apparent that she had deep feelings of self-hatred stretching back into childhood, when her parents seemed to have had some need to take a very pessimistic attitude toward her, her adequacy, and the possibility of her ever amounting to anything. So sensitized had she become to this attitude that any sign of rejection or criticism by others was interpreted by her as total rejection and an indication of her complete worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
It is not surprising to learn that Marge was filled with rage about these slights, whether they were real or fancied. However, since she had also learned to despise her anger, her rage remained almost totally unexpressed and not fully experienced, since to be aware of it would be further confirmation to her of her worthlessness. Instead, the anger was converted into feelings of depression and helplessness. It was only as she was gradually able to express some anger directly in day-by-day situations that her depression slowly lifted and she became freer to devote energies to productive pursuits in her profession and in her personal life. Perhaps the most subtle but most damaging price we pay for the suppression of anger is in the gradual deadening of the self that often occurs. The child learns it is risky to express anger and even wrong and worthy of rebuke to feel angry. Yet anger-producing situations are constantly occurring. One solution to this dilemma that the child faces is gradually to shut anger out of immediate awareness. Years of practice lead to some degree of success at this task. In this process of cutting off one’s awareness of a significant part of one’s self, it is almost as though we were making a psychological command out of the biblical verse suggesting that “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” As a matter of fact, this verse is probably often quoted in ways that encourage us to keep ourselves unaware of our feelings of anger or desire of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Extreme examples of this tendency, which probably we all have to some extent, can be seen in advanced schizophrenic patients who seem unable to have any genuine emotional experience. It is true that such persons may occasionally appear to become enraged, and they may erupt in violence. Even then, however, there appears to be a mechanical quality to the rage. They are too emotional deadened to connect their explosion with any deep, meaningful feeling. Many of us who are not as seriously emotionally damaged as that might be described as having a slow fuse to anger. All of us probably had the experience of having an encounter with a person during which we feel vaguely uncomfortable. Later on, when the person was safely absent, we suddenly realized that we were quite angry. And then (safe again) we thought of all the things we would have liked to have said if we had only thought of them at the right moment. In addition to damaging our relationship to ourselves, we also pay a price in our relationship to others when we suppress our feelings of anger, for almost invariably we find some way of taking our anger out on them. Behind most anger is hurt, resentment, or frustration. If you dig deep enough into the anger that you have felt, one of these three roots will probably be there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
The Knowledge Which We Seek, the Answers for Which We Yearn, and the Strength Which We Desire
Believe me, our little consultation will not take long. We have strong obligations. We will call or come just as quickly as we can. As we turn to examine some major escape hatches, we see that some people escape from feelings of self-hate by developing physically illness. One patient, age 31, was a tall, athletically-built man of rather prepossessing appearance. He speaks in an intelligent, competent manner. He was obviously very tense, however, and seemed to be controlling himself only with some effort. He displayed a certain amount of hostility toward the testing procedure, but was overly cooperative and uncomplaining. The patient’s personality inventory is typical of the most clear-cut cases of psychopathy or impulse neurosis. Basic to the personality structure is a very deep and primitive oral fixation, with subsequent reaction formation against it. Direct satisfaction of libidinal impulses is sought, rather than repression or substitution. Conflicts tend to be acted out, and there is a constant flight from anxiety rather than an attempt to endure it. Associated with the underlying orality and passivity is considerable hostility which is also expressed orally (by such means as sarcasm, invective, and biting). What is most feared is the passivity, and dominance-submission is the characteristic conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
There is a considerable tendency toward self-dramatization. The primitive oral longing may lead to alcoholism or drug addiction, and pleasures of the flesh in such cases are usually polymorphous perverse. Such anxiety as is not handled by character defenses may be expressed gastrointestinally. There is a poverty of inner resources, an inability to sublimate or obtain substitutive gratification. Impulses are responded to in an uncontrolled fashion. Depression and anxiety are evident, the depression being the more prominent of the two. There is a good deal of preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh, and judgment defect manifests itself chiefly in that area. Otherwise, contact with reality is good. The patient had been divorced once, and he was not married to the woman with whom he was presently living, although they had been living together for several years. He came into the clinic purely on an impulse, although he had occasionally entertained the idea in the past because of vague feelings of dissatisfaction with certain aspects of his own behavior, such as his promiscuity, his predilection for comfort women, and his tendency to look for unusual forms of excitement and entertainment when he was inebriated. His common-law wife was fairly tolerant of these failings, but he was worried that sooner or later he would get in trouble with law enforcement, which would interfere with his profession as a teacher. He appeared to have no particular anxiety or neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The research that has been done into psychosomatic illness makes it evident that the body operates as a total organism and that most physical illness can either be caused or greatly modified by emotional factors. Two primary unconscious motivations appear to underlie such illness. In the first place, it seems evident that there is often a need to push one’s self. The person uses physical illness as an unconscious way of expressing one’s self-hate. Another motivation seems to be that of asking for help. It is almost as if the person were saying to the World, “Will not somebody please take care of me?” The therapist reported that the therapeutic interviews were generally “very man to man…the patient manipulated the situation so that we seemed to be sort jolly buddies rather than patient and doctor. He refused to admit of any professional distance between us.” The interviews were more like casual chats than therapeutic sessions. There was, nevertheless, a very strong transference. As the transference increased in intensity, and the patient’s passive desires got closer to the surface, his acting out of this conflict began to take a very hostile form. Therapists often report that they experience a great deal of trouble dealing effectively with physical illness caused by emotional difficulties. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It can be hard to deal with probably because the individual, in being ill, usually does satisfy some of the needs that motivate the illness in the first place. On one occasion, the patient came in drunk, having been drinking all night. At this time, he gave vent to considerable hostility, its first objection being the psychological tests and the psychologist. When the therapist pointed out that this too might be displaced, the patient turned violently upon the therapist himself, and began to compare psychologists very favorably with psychiatrists. The patient’s hostility was evinced plainly in his expressive movement during this hour, as he began many aggressive gestures which he quickly inhibited. Finally, he broke down and cried. Afterward, he said he felt better, “like after sleeping with a woman.” Following this, a good deal of passive homosexual material emerged in his associations, and this was dealt with very effectively and in an anxiety reliving manner by the therapist. The patient does succeed in pushing himself, and he often gains attention and care as a result of the illness. Both of these psychological gains, of course, are not ultimately satisfying, for there is usually growing resentment on the part of those who care for the ill person. This resentment is likely to be expressed in some form or other. Thus the stage is set for further feelings of rejection, more self-hate, and more pronounced physical problems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The cycle generally goes this way: Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into physical symptoms or illness, and further rejection (who likes somebody who is sick and complaining all the time?). When a person has been severely emotionally damaged as a child, the escape from self-hate may take the form of a severe mental illness, or psychosis. In this instance the feelings a person has about one’s self are so intolerable and life is so frightening that the person may escape into a fantasy World. One exchanges reality for unreality. All the gain that the therapist would claim for this patient after six months of psychotherapy was that the patient had been rendered more available for treatment. In view of the extreme difficulty of working with such psychopathic character disorders, this modest gain is indeed rather praiseworthy. Perhaps the escape from self-hate is seen most clearly in instance where the person becomes someone else in one’s imagination, someone who is powerful, good, or important in some way. One may acquire an unshakable belief that one is Jesus, Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Beyonce, Brad Pitt, Aaliyah, Reese Witherspoon, Paris Hilton, The Weekend, Drake, Elvis, Olivia Newton John, or some the famous person. The immediate gain from the illness is obvious. The person is no longer the hated self who seemed worthless, hopeless, and a failure. Now one can look on one’s self as an individual of great important and significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In spite of all our advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness, however, the psychotic person is almost certain to experience further feelings of rejection. Society will almost surely deem it necessary to segregate one’s self from normal people, at least during the acute phases of the illness. When one does return to society, one is likely to be regarded with suspicion, prejudice, and fear, with little understanding or even tolerance of one’s emotional problems. Again the cycle rejection cycle might start. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into mental illness, further rejection (why can he not snap out of it and face life like everybody else does?). Alcoholism and other forms of addiction provide other ways of attempting to escape from feelings of self-hate. For a large majority of people, the use of alcohol is a pleasant way to become more like the person they long to be. With the glowing warmth of two or three drinks, many people are able to talk more freely and enjoy their friends more openly. Usually too frightened of their love to reveal it, they are able to express their care more openly and with more feeling. The potential alcoholic, on the other hand, begins to rely on drinking as a way to avoid facing feelings of inadequacy, failure, and worthlessness. The alcohol numbs one to these feelings and, at least in the initial stages, helps one to escape one’s feeling of mediocrity and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
One is less aware of one’s fear of suffering further rejection and so one mixes more with people, somewhat mitigating the terrible loneliness experiences in sober hours. Feelings of rejection, lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape to alcoholism, further rejection (he used to be funny when he was drinking, but it seems now like he is drunk all the time and everybody suffers”), then further feelings or worthlessness ensue. However, when one is sober again, feelings of self-hate come closer to the surface, fortified now by guilt feelings about the meaningless waste of one’s hours of drunkenness. The only answer to the resulting moodiness and sense of emptiness seems to be possessed in resorting to drinking. Eventually the alcohol provides a more or less permanent escape from self-hate. Thus the alcoholic become more and more addicted. Meanwhile, one encounters ever more frequent rejection and one after another of his or her friends, and finally one’s family find one’s drinking and one’s behavior while intoxicated increasingly unbearable and desert the individual. The only way of gaining relief from these further feelings of rejection, or so it seems to one, comes through further drinking. And so the cycle runs it course. Homosexuality is another way of escaping feelings of self-hate. Sometimes have been cut off from both skills and the emotions of male existence. Yet, they also undoubtedly long for some kind of place in the male World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
With women, some of these men seem, superficially at least, very much at ease. They share many interests more typical of women in our culture. One may be artistic and creative. Yet, in relationships with girls that might have become intimate and meaningful at a deeper level, tend to become guarded and aloof. It is evident that one has a profound fear of being subtly manipulated and controlled by women, as one’s mother may have done (being made to do the household chores and care for the other kids, cook meals, becoming a pseudo mother, and without any male influence around). All women are seen by the male as threats to his individuality. It is not surprising that, when one is approached at college or work by men with similar problems, one falls quickly into homosexual practices. Though he later married, he seemed unable either to give up his homosexuality completely or to achieve genuine intimacy with his wife, although they were able to have pleasures of the flesh. After several years of attempting to make a satisfying married, she finally left him. With this individual, as with other homosexuals, his sexual relationship with men probably gave him some escape from his feelings of inability to satisfy his need for love and his feelings of worthlessness as a male. However, his escape into homosexuality led to further rejection by parents, other relatives, friends, and acquaintances who proved typically intolerant of problems with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
As often is the case, even he and his homosexual partners tended to despise each other. Such rejection seemed to lead only to the search for the reassurance of new sexual partners in an unbroken cycle of rejection. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into homosexuality, further rejections (he is different from other men. He is repulsive to me) and more feelings of worthlessness. No attempt is being made here to explain fully why a person chooses one escape from self-hate rather than another, as, for example, why one person becomes an alcoholic and another becomes a braggart or develops symptoms of physical illness. There are many complex reasons for these differences. Some of them certainly have to do with the kind of rejection that is experienced. Chance occurrences may lead to the expression of one symptom rather than another. For example, it is possible that the man, the homosexual just described, might have become an alcoholic if her had not been approached by an experienced homosexual and if his rigid religious training had not discouraged any experimentation with drinking. The purpose here, however, is to show that feelings of rejection, worthlessness, and self-hate lie at the root of these problems, whatever the various nuances may be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There is also room for inborn differences within this general pattern. Perhaps, for example, it is possible that some people are chemically more susceptible to alcoholic addiction than others. This would not mean that alcoholism would be a certainty for such a person even if it were found that such potentials occur. Without the need to escape from severe feelings of inadequacy and self-hate, the individual would not likely become an alcoholic. “The male patient then stood up, heaved a sigh and headed for the door. I asked if he needed a ride back home and he murmured that his car had brought him down town.” There is something creative in psychotherapy thus carried on. To the old patterns of perception and action is added a force for change, so that they gradually become something quite different, though retaining many of their former elements. It is important for people to learn to accept things at face value, and there should be a willingness to let the other person be as he or she wished, combined with an insistence on yourself being as you wish. It may sound absurd because the aim of psychotherapy is to induce changes in the behavior of the patient. Do we not want one to have fewer symptoms, better relations with people, a constructive set of social values, a happier out look on life? While we may have all of these desires as secondary goals for the patient, we must wish for one, above all else, and is necessary even at the expense of those secondary goals, simply that one be free to choose what one wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The patient may in the end choose to be much as one was in the beginning; the difference should be that one chooses freely and is not compelled by one’s own blind needs. It is, indeed, our faith that there are many things, to us undesirable, that free mortals would not choose for oneself; but we must be willing, in the final analysis and to state the case in its most extreme form, to grant the other’s right to choose destruction and evil, if one does so freely. If we accept this principle, we will not pity the patient, nor hold ourselves wise or good as compared to him or her, nor wish to impart on the individual our own virtues or visions. Rather, we will wish only to help one to understand who he or she is as a person, that one may be made more free to choose, and less the slave of one’s own history. Humans are generally ethical beings: but one’s achievement of ethical awareness is not easy. One does not grow into ethical judgment as simply as the California Golden Poppy (flower) grows toward the Sun. Indeed, like freedom and the other aspects of mortal’s consciousness of self, ethical awareness is gained only at a price of inner conflict and anxiety. With the loss of innocence and the rudimentary beginnings of ethical sensitivity, the person falls heir to the particular burdens of self-consciousness, anxiety and guilt feelings, but this awareness may not appear till later—that one is of dust. That is to say, when one realizes the one will some time die; one becomes conscious of one’s own finiteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The fall of man is seen as a fall upward because learning of right and wrong represent the birth of the psychological and spiritual person. The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s ignorance, and mortals can creatively use their powers, and to some extent transcend their limitations, only as one humbly and honestly admits these limitations to begin with so we do not become infected with false pride. Every society must have the influences which being ideas and ethical insight into birth, and the institutions which conserve that values of the past. No society would survive long without both new vitality and old forms, change and stability, the prophetic religion which attacks existing institutions and the priestly religion which protects the institutions. Many human beings are struggling toward enlarged self-awareness, maturity, freedom and responsibility, and some have the tendency to remain a child and cling to the protection of parents or parental substitutes. In capitalism, it is required for its functioning that there must be a strict obedience of the individuals to the laws, those that serve their true interests as well as those that do not. How oppressive or how liberal the laws and what the means for their enforcement are make little difference with regard to the central issue: the people must learn to fear authority, and not only in the person of the law enforcement officers because they carry weapons. This fear is not enough of a safeguard for the proper functioning of the state; the citizen must internalize this fear and transform obedience into a moral and religious category: sin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
People respect the laws not only because they are afraid but also because they feel guilty for their disobedience. This feeling of guilt can be overcome by the forgiveness that only the authority itself can grant. The conditions for such forgiveness are: the sinners repents, is punished, and by accepting punishment submits again. The sequence: sin (disobedience), feelings of guilt, new submission (punishment), forgiveness is a brutal cycle, inasmuch as each act of disobedience leads to increased obedience. A knowledge of truth and the answers to our greatest questions come to us as we are obedient to the commandments of God. We learn obedience throughout our lives. Beginning when we are very young, those responsible for our care set forth guidelines and rules to ensure our safety. Life would be simpler for all of us if we would obey such rules completely. Many of us, however, learn through experience the wisdom of being obedient. There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treacherous moral existence and return eventually to our Heavenly Fathers. The Savior demonstrated genuine love of God by living the perfect life, by honoring the sacred mission that was his. Never was he haughty. Never was he puffed up with pride. Never was he disloyal. Jesus as humble, sincere, and obedient. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 