Home » Barbarism (Page 13)
Category Archives: Barbarism
Freedom is Not Gained at a Single Bound, it Must be Achieved Each Day
Ahhhhh, gambling debts, millions, how does one do that, but it was only the tip of it, she had been in much deeper, flying back and forth to Europe, stashing the wealth for the wrong man. When she fired a gun, she emptied it. Making a living. Her partner had vanished. She knew she was next. Did not care anymore. All that money gone to waste. Lots of there there, but who cares? Sometimes dark dreams no doubt have many meanings, but certainly their chief mood and meaning are disillusion. Disillusions pass just as illusions do, and often both illusion and disillusion are necessary steps in our understanding of reality. The dream might tell sometimes one is feeling and that is reflected in an aspect of the current reality. Out of this feeling came a recognition of the urgent need for some research, with its own particular sort of siren song: “Let us get some facts to go on.” It has been discovered the people with a strong sense of pride in themselves and in their heritage, at the beginning of therapy, even thought obscured by the usual clinical overlay of anxiety and depression, are usually better off and are predicted to display improvement by the end of therapy. These same patients, however, even if they are just on the list and do not receive psychotherapy, will still show improvement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The reason being is it is predicted that they have a favorable reaction to stress and challenge in many different situations. Many behaviors that appear to change as a result of psychotherapy are actually influenced little or not at all by the therapy, and the observed changes are produced by endogenous processes of a counteractive sort which are set in motion within the reasonably strong individual after some trauma has produced a temporary regression. To say this, however, is by no means to say, as some psychologists have said in interpreting these results and others like them, that “psychotherapy is no blessed good,” or words to that effect. Science by its method limits itself to appearances of a public or potentially public sort, and in the interests of verification insists upon objectification. This works quite so well, yet well enough for many purposes—even when the objects do have feelings. However, if the questions I am asking myself is “Why was I ever born?” or “Why live?” there are no objective answers that can be satisfying to me within the realm of science. The “question” is a feeling which cannot be “answered,” but which can only give way to another feeling, “How good it is to be alive!” And the human transaction that enables the one feeling to give way to the other is a transaction between subjects, the objective indices of which are extremely subtle and highly valuable at best. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
One can make tape-recordings, take motion pictures, count heart beats, measure muscle potentials, note the number of minutes spent together, ask questions (True-False questions, open-ended questions, questions in disguise), get interpretations of inkblots, or do any number of those tricks of the trade with which we are all familiar. They avail little, for the vitalizing transaction is a matter of feeling, having an existence and known only in the subject, or, as I prefer to say, in the realm of my spirit. For instance, once, I told a therapist I want a really big house so I could spend all day cleaning it. She assumed my house was a mess. The actual reason is because have you notice how many miles you walk in a standard size 2,000 square foot house when you are cleaning it? Sometimes, by the time I was done cleaning I had walked between 3-7 miles inside the house. So, if I had a house three times that size, chances are I would get even more exercise in the safety of my home. And there is always something in a house that needs to be cleaned from the base boards, the walls, light switches, tile and wood floors, the carpets need to be vacuumed, laundry always needs to be done, closets and drawers need to be organized. In the cleanest houses in America, there is always work to do, but in a one bedroom apartment, most are so small there is not much room to walk around. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
People you talk to and vent to cannot always understand what you are saying because they have filters, and even though the privacy laws prevent therapist from sharing or disclosing your information, can you really trust anyone with details of your lives when you know nothing about them, their record and the professional standards? And there is no telling what they are compiling in their notes about you after you leave their office, and I would just hate from the information to land up in a newsroom or a police station when it is someone’s interpretation anyway. We are not really living in the most ethical times and everyone is looking to make money anyway they can. People are willing to sacrifice their careers, families, freedom and homes to become famous, even if it is through illegal means because they figure the payoff is much more worth what they are enduring at the time, which makes one wonder….how much do people really love their families, God, and having a good reputation is the allure of money is more appealing? One of the troubles of the sometimes scientist who is also sometime psychotherapist is that one’s sentiments are mixed, and are especially mixed when one undertakes to do research on psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
From the point of view of the subject, then, the essence of the beneficence that psychotherapy may bring is entirely of the spirit. The appearances that may accompany such spiritual beneficences are variable and elusive, and the superficies of adjustment to any given cultural norm may yield a rather bad fit to the behavior of the person who has benefited from psychotherapy. And to make matters even more difficult for thee research psychologist, the moment of genuine encounter, the vitalizing transaction, may pass almost unnoticed at the time. It is ephemeral, as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation, the fecundating act; it has its begin in the imagination and the spirit, while the dull machinery of routine thought chugs monotonously along and the inertia that makes us think the same thought in just the same way so many thousands of times over continues its hebetudinous reign. In almost all appearance we remain the same, even though we are different. To put the matter commonly, I have never known any case, no matter how successful, with treatment both thorough and inspired and with real movement felt by the patient and therapist, in which at the conclusion of the work the patient was not readily recognized by friends and neighbors, and in a million ways, some of them measured by the best psychological tests, just about the same. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day. The basic step in achieving inward freedom is choosing one’s self. This is the stage of affirming one’s responsibility for oneself and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence: it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes the one exists in one’s particular spot in the Universe, and one accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what is mean by the will to live—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is oneself, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make one’s basic choices oneself. We can see more clearly what choosing oneself and one’s existence means by looking at the opposite—choosing not to exist, that is to commit suicide. The significance of suicide lies not in the fact that people actually experience death by suicide in any large numbers. It is indeed a very rare occurrence except among those who are usually extremely distressed. However, psychologically and spiritually the thought of suicide has a much wider meaning. There is an such thing as psychological suicide in which one does not take one’s own life by a given act, but dies because one has chosen—perhaps without being entirely aware of it—not to live. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
There have been cases were people are going through so much hardship and they have been told that they are going to die and they make up their mind not to live and let go and shortly after they pass away. There have been other cases where the lives of persons who have dedicated themselves to certain tasks, such as taking care of a sick loved one or finishing an import film or work. They keep going under difficult circumstances as though they had determined they had to live; and then when the task is completed, when success is attained, they proceed to die as though by some inner decision. Soren Kierkegaard wrote twenty books in fourteen years, completed them at the early age of forty-two, and then—we almost say in conclusion—he took to his bed and died. Aaliyah did in interview at the age of 22, on MTV Diaries, talking about how she wanted to be remembered after she died, and a few months later her plane crashed and she died. These ways of choosing not to live show how crucial it can be to choose to live. I think that is why people do not like to think about death, talk about it, or speak ill of the dead. It makes them feel that they become more vulnerable and could be the next on the grim reaper’s list. It is doubtful whether anyone really begins to live, that is, to affirm and choose one’s own existence, until one has frankly confronted the terrifying fact that one could wipe out one’s existence but chooses not to. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Since one is free to die, one is also free to live. The mass patterns of routine are broken: one no longer exists as an accidental result of one’s parents having conceived one, of one’s growing up and living as an infinitesimal item on the treadmill of cause-and-effect, marrying, begetting new children, growing old and dying. Since one could have chosen to die but chose not to, every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act then has its special element of freedom. People often actually go through the experience of experiencing death by psychological suicide in some sector of their lives. For instance, a woman believes she cannot live unless a certain man loves her. When he marries someone else, she contemplates suicide. In the course of her meditating on the idea for some days, she fantasies, “Well, assume I do it.” However, then, she suddenly thinks, “After I have done it, it would still be good to be alive in other ways—the Sun still shines, water is still cool to the body, one can still make things,” and the suggestion creeps in that there may still be other people to love. So she decides to live. Assuming the decision is made for beneficial reasons rater than just the fear of dying or inertia, the conflict may actually have given her some new freedom. It is as though the part of her which clung to the man did not experience death by suicide, and as a result she can begin life anew. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Or a young man feels he can never be happy unless he gains some fame. He begins to realize that he is competent and valuable, let us say as an assistant professor; but the higher he gets on the ladder the clearer he sees that there are always persons above him, that many are called but few are chosen, that very few people gain fame anyway, and that he may end up just a good and competent teacher. He might then feel that he would be as insignificant as a grain of sand, his life meaningless, and he might as well not be alive. The idea of experiencing death by suicide creeps into his mind in his more despondent moods. Sooner or later he, too, thinks, “All right, assume I have done it—what then?” And it suddenly dawns on him that, if he came back after the death by suicide, there would be a lot left in life even if one were not famous. He then chooses to go on living, as it were, without the demand for fame. It is as though the part of him which could not live without fame does experience death by suicide. And in killing the demand for fame, he may also realize as a byproduct that the thing which yield lasting joy and inner security have very little to do with external and fickle standards of public opinion anyway. He may then appreciate the more then flippant wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s remark, “Who the hell wants fame over the week-end? I want to write well.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
And finally, as a result of the partial suicide, he may clarify his own goals and arrive at more of a feeling for the joy which comes from fulfilling his own potentialities, from finding and teaching the truth as he sees it and adding his own unique contribution arising from his own integrity. In contemporary society the having mode of existing is assumed to be rooted in human nature and, hence, virtually unchangeable. The same idea is expressed in the dogma that people are basically lazy, passive by nature, and that they do not want to work or to do anything else, unless they are driven by the incentive of material gain, or hunger, or the fear of punishment. This rigid doctrine is doubted by hardly anybody, and it determines our methods of education and work. However, it is little more than an expression of the wish to prove the value of our social arrangements by imputing to them that they follow the needs of human nature. To the members of many different societies of both past and present, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness would appear as fantastic as the reverse sound to us. The truth is that both the having and the being modes of existence are potentialities of human nature, that our biological urge for survival tends to further the having mode, but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities inhere in human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We human beings have an inherent and deeply rooted desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be related to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness. The truth of this statement is proven by so much evidence. We would emphasize again that the actual process of these partial psychological studies is much more complex than these illustrations imply. Actually some people—perhaps most people—move in the opposite direction when they have to renounce a demand: they retreat, constrict their lives and become less free. However, we wish only to make clear that there is a beneficial aspect to partial suicide, and that the dying of one attitude or need may be the other side of the birth of something new (which is a law of growth in nature not at all limited to human beings). One can choose to terminate a neurotic strategy, a dependency, a clinging, and then find that one can choose to live as a freer self. The woman in our example would no doubt find with clearer insight that her so-called live for the man for whom she would have experienced death by suicide was really not love at all, but clinging parasitism balanced by desire to have power over the man. A dying to part of oneself is often followed by a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, one’s responsibility for oneself takes on a new meaning. One accepts responsibility for one’s own life not as something with which one has been saddled, a burden forced upon one: but as a something one has chosen oneself. For this person, oneself, now exists as a result of a decision he or she, oneself, has made. To be sure, any thinking person realizes in theory that freedom and responsibility go together: if one is not free, one is an automaton and there is obviously no such thing as responsibility, and if one cannot be responsible for oneself, one cannot be trusted with freedom. However, when one has chosen oneself, this partnership of freedom and responsibility become more than a nice idea: one experiences it on one’s own pulse; in one’s choosing oneself, one becomes aware that one has chosen personal freedom and responsibility for oneself in the same breath. The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into self-discipline. One accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take one’s own life?—but because one has chosen with greater freedom what one wants to do with one’s own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values one wishes to achieve. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This self-discipline can be given fancy names—it is loving one’s fate and obedience to the laws of life. However, whether bedecked by fancy terms or not, it is, I believe, a lesson everyone progressively learns in one’s struggle toward maturity. We cannot will potency; we cannot will to love. However, we can will to open ourselves, participate in the experience, allow the possibility to become a reality. The belief that people do not want to make sacrifices is notoriously wrong. When Churchill announced at the beginning of the Second World War that what he had to demand from the British was blood, sweat, and tears, he did not deter them, but on the contrary, he appealed to their deep-seated human desire to make sacrifices, to give of themselves. The reaction of the British—and of the Germans and the Russians as well—toward the indiscriminate bombing of population centers by the belligerents proves that common suffering did not weaken their spirit; it strengthened their resistance and proved wrong those who believed terror bombing could break the morale of the enemy and help finish the war. It is a sad commentary on our civilization, however, that war and suffering rather than peacetime living can mobilize human readiness to make sacrifices, and that the times of peace seem mainly to encourage selfishness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Fortunately, there are situations in peacetime in which human striving for giving and solidarity manifest themselves in individual behavior. The workers’ strikes, especially up to the period of the First World War, are an example of such essentially nonviolent behavior. The workers sought higher wages, but at the same time, they risked and accepted severe hardships in order to fight for their own dignity and the satisfaction of experiencing human solidarity. The strike was as much a religious as an economic phenomenon. While such strikes still do occur even today, most present-day strikes are for economic reasons—although strikes for better working conditions have increased recently. The need to give and to share and the willingness to make sacrifices for others are still to be found among the members of certain professions, such as nurses, physicians, lawyers, fire fighters, law enforcement, ambulatory care. The goal of helping and sacrificing is given only lip service by many, if not most, of these professionals; yet the character of a goodly number corresponds to the values they profess. We find the same needs affirmed and expressed in many communities throughout the centuries, whether religious, capitalist, or humanist. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
We find the wish to give in the people who volunteer their blood (without payment), in the many situations in which people risk their lives to save another’s. We find the manifestation of the will to give in people who genuinely love. False love, for instance, shared mutual selfishness make people more selfish (and this is the case often enough). Genuine love increases the capacity to love and to give to others. The true lovers live the whole World, in his or her live for a specific person. Conversely, we find that not a few people, especially younger ones, cannot stand the luxury and selfishness that surround them in their affluent families. Quite against the expectations of their elders, who think that their children have everything they wish, they rebel against the deadness and isolation of their lives. For the fact is, they do not have everything they wish and they wish for what they do not have. Some people can no longer stand the life of idleness and injustice they have been born into, these young people leave their families and join the poor, living with them, and helped to lay one of the foundations to help them establish communities. However, out of the backlash to their luxury lives, some of these idealistic and sensitivity young, lacking in tradition, maturity, experience, and political wisdom, become desperate, narcissistically overestimate their own capacities and possibilities, and try to achieve the impossible by the use of force. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
As the Formula Runs in the Brave New World: Everybody is Happy Nowadays!
The problem with you is you think you are still human. I came quite close to losing my mind. Did anyone have a clue as to the crash and thunder inside me? I locked the casket of my heart. I punished it. I endured it. Motivation researchers are those harlot social scientists who, in impressive psychoanalytic and/or sociological jargon, tell their clients what their clients want to hear, namely, that appeals to human irrationality are likely to be far more profitable than appeals to rationality. There is a myth of inborn behaviors based on race, nationality, ethnic group, or gender and it is one of the stubornest fantasies around. It has become so much a part of our thinking and is partially validated just often enough that we sometimes wonder if we will ever rid ourselves of it. Currently, a number of psychologists are engaged in research to discover what, if any, motivations are inborn in human beings. For instance, several are interested in the question of whether violent, aggressive behaviors are inborn or acquired. The arguments rage as both sides pile up mountains of evidence. For instance, if a man is born with an extra Y chromosome, does this cause him to be more aggressive, more hostile, to get into difficulty more often with society? Some of the evidence says yes. For instance, a startling number of convicted violent criminals have been found to have this extra chromosome. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Other psychologists think the evidence is still much too sketchy to justify a scientific conclusion. Adam fell that mortals might be; and mortals are, that they might have joy. Who put it together with love and purpose? Pleasing work of God heals wounded souls. We all have the ability to choose eternal life according to will of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that existentialism will not only enrich psychology. It may also be an additional push toward the establishment of another branch of psychology, the psychology of the fully evolved and authentic Self and its ways of being. Someone better than us, has to be—somebody better than every creature who walks the Earth, somebody who shows compassion. Human beings can sometimes transcend their physical needs. “Behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell; I have beheld his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love,” 2 Nephi 1:15. Although the satisfaction of the physical needs is indeed the indispensable precondition of a satisfactory existence, in itself it is not enough. In order to be content, mortals must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics and abilities. Human behavior is governed by many types of motives. Some of these are physiological, but many more are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experiences, and growth experiences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Those human impulses which have seemed throughout history to be deepest, to be most instinctive and unchangeable, to be most widely spread throughout humankind, i.e., the impulse to hate, to be jealous, to be hostile, to be greedy, to be egoistic and selfish are now being discovered more and more clearly to be acquired and not instinctive. They are almost certainly neurotic and sick reactions to bad situations, more specifically to frustrations of our truly basic and instinctlike needs and impulses. Some individuals seem to bypass or ignore their physiological needs and do things that actually indicate they are operating at higher levels of motivation. For example, some parents give up their own food for the sake of their children; many individuals sacrifice their lives for friends or for causes; and there are less affluent people in every part of the World who have been able to actualize their potentials, even though lower needs to not seem to be met. The apparent paradox leads to the conclusion that some people are more evolved than others. Transcendence is the father reaches of human nature and it deserves far more attention and study than psychologists have heretofore given them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Tension, whether large or small, is painful. It causes discomfort. We want to stop it. So, to reduce the tension, we search out a goal, an incentive. The goal must have two qualities: it must actually satisfy the need, and it must be something the individual recognizes as being able to meet that need. The achievement of the goal result in satisfaction and a return to homeostasis (a state of balance or equilibrium among the various bodily processes). So tell yourself, you need to make at least $9,000.00 a month, save up $120,000.00 and have good credit to buy a $500,000.00 house, so do not take out student loans. “And not choose eternal death, according to the will of the flesh and the evil which is therein, which giveth the spirit of the devil power to captivate, to bring you down to hell, that he may reign over you in his own kingdom,” 2 Nephi 2.29. Many of our strongest motivations can be traced back to one or more of the physiological needs. For example, being deprived of food and shelter in childhood can set a lifetime pattern for individual: they are always trying to get enough food, money, or clothing, no matter what their income, and they may even hoard food or money in the attempt. Their reasoning—strange to those of us who have never felt this deprived—is that they must always keep on hand a sufficient supply of food, clothing, or money—just in case. This is called the functional autonomy of motives—when a motive ends up as a goal in and of itself, long after the basic need has been satisfied. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Physiological needs persist throughout our lives, but for most of us the first two or three years of life are the only period when satisfying them seems more important to our existence than anything else. This is not true for the 40 percent of the World’s people who go to be (if they have a bed) with their stomachs empty. They may live to be adults, but as long as they are so poor, most of them will find it hard to pay much attention to anything else except getting enough food to stay alive. The most basic physiological motives are those that keep the body going. They work to regulate the body’s homeostatic processes. They arise out of such basic needs as the needs for food, liquid, and air. The need for nutriments to supply energy and to build and rebuild body cells activates the drive we call hunger. Other needs may become more pressing and may overrule the need for food. On the other hand, being deprived of food for a long period of time may make the hunger drive so strong that other drives are not even felt. In studies of semi-starvation conducted during the Second World War, volunteers were kept for six months on a bare subsistence diet that resulted in an average weight loss of 25 percent. I mean, if the old resignation of the Savage Garden was wrong, what has replaced it? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Well, the subjects showed marked personality changes, such as increased irritability, extreme fascination with food, cookbooks, recipes, and each other’s mail (in hopes of receiving a package containing somebody’s mother’s homemade cake or cookies or some cold hard cash); and loss of interest in health, exercise, reading, pleasures of the flesh, love, and family. In addition to a general need for food, the hunger drive can result in a specific hunger for a particular food. This may be the result of learned preferences. There is some evidence, however, that these specific hungers may be as important physiologically as they are psychologically. They may be based upon the body’s particular needs, such as for sugar during a sugar-free diet, or for salt during a salt-free diet. Studies that show naïve or very young subjects, given a wide choice of many food, often choose those that their bodies most need. In addition to deficiencies or blood-sugar imbalances, we can also be stimulated to feel hunger by thinking about food, smelling food, or seeing others eating. Many people are above average weight because they use food as a substitute to meet other needs. Statistics very as to how long the average adult can go without any form of food. They ran from a few days to over a month (the latter depending upon some regular intake of water). #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The cells of our body require a specific fluid level, just as does the battery of your car. Without the optimum amount of water, dehydration results. Dehydration is the loss of water or other moisture by an organism. The need for liquid results in the drive called thirst. The goal of this drive is the intake of fluid (water, cranberry juice, soda pop, milk—any of them will do; our preferences are learned). Like hunger, the thirst drive is largely triggered by the chemical balance of body tissues. Any imbalance is relayed to the hypothalamus, which sets off the drive. The maximum amount of time the average adult can go without fluids is a week or less, a much shorter time than people can go without food. Lack of air flow results in strangulation. The need for air differs from some other physiological needs in that breathing is an automatic response, controlled by the autonomic nervous system. It is estimated that the brain cannot survive more than three minutes without oxygen in the blood steam. You secret is utterly safe. It will be exactly the way you want it. Wait a safe period of time. “May the Lord bless thee forever, for they seed shall not utterly be destroyed,” reports 2 Nephi 3.3. The use and fatigue of the physical body and the brain creates a need for a period of rest, recuperation, and restoration of energies. This need is met by sleep. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
During this period of sleep, stress on muscle cells is reduced and gross neural activity is reduced. Of course, the nervous system is never completely shut down at any time during life. The brain, for instance, continues to function and is stimulated by dreaming. Studies of people deprived of sleep sow that subjects experience increased irritability, reduction of cognitive function (measured by before-and-after intelligence tests), restlessness, and a tendency to hallucinate. Although defunct Governor of California, Jerry Brown, thinks it is funny to experiment on people and not allow some to use the restroom until it causes internal damage, elimination of body wastes—urination and defecation—is a response to tensions in inner organs and is essential to good health. It is not known how long a person can go without elimination before harm or death occurs. If we lived alone, perhaps all our needs would be basic physiological needs. However, because we live in groups, many of our needs—even our physiological needs—require other people for their fulfillment. Some physiological motives are affected by learning, and by the needs, wishes, or demands of others. For instance, elimination of bodily wastes is done (after the first few months) according to certain social and cultural formulas: we are told how, when, and where to urinate and defecate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
We learn which of all the possible foods available are properly called “food” by the people with whom we live. However, these are still basically purely physiological motives. Some motives, on the other hand, can only be correctly identified as physiological/social in nature, so much do they depend upon social factors. Let us considered as primarily physiological/social needs and to some degree, those called love and belongingness needs. I cannot live in a shadow World. I have to be there for all the ordinary people, signing contracts, rolling out blue prints, calling doctors all over the country, flying to Switzerland and Vienna to interview physicians who want to work in the ideal medical center, the medical center that surpasses every other in its equipment, its laboratories, its staff, its comforts, it protocols and projects. It is to rivet me to the sane World, it is to push my own medical visions to the very limits. Now remember we were talking about men with an extra Y chromosome? Well, Electrical Brain Stimulation (Abbreviated EBS or ESB) are microelectrodes, or tiny electrical receptors, they can be inserted into various portions of the brain. The brain can then be stimulated with low-voltage electricity. This activates the brain externally, without the controls of the nervous system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
EBS has been instrumental in providing a whole new range of insights into brain processes and behavior. For example, electrical stimulation of certain portions of the limbic system produces all the symptoms of certain emotions, such as fear, anger, anxiety; certain drives, such as hunger, thirst, excitation, and pain; and certain reasons, such as intense pleasure. What began as research into motivation, learning, and emotion has now evolved into a technique to simulate internal processes. EBS helps neurologists assist people with such problem behaviors as unmanageable rage or anxiety. Stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain produces feelings so intense that this stimulation can be used as a reward in conditioning and it has been determined that anti-depressants can curb harsh behavior in some people because they produce serotonin, which will make them feel more at ease. The brain is so powerful, so energetic is the brain that it utilizes about 75 percent of the body’s blood sugar and oxygen. (You can take advantage of this fact the next time you take an examination or do other brain work by increasing your intake of glucose—especially in the form of honey, as many athletes do—and take several deep breaths just beforehand). #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Individuals who have suffered brain injuries can be observed. If such a person cannot move a portion of his or her body, for instance, or cannot speak, and no other explanation fits, the assumption may be made that the damaged portion of the brain is related to the damaged or missing function. The nervous system is actually made up of several systems, each responsible for specialized functions. The central nervous system is the center for operations of the nervous system as a whole. It is made up of the brain and the spinal cord. The spinal cord is a bundle of nerves, about the diameter of a pencil in size, running from the center of the brain down to the tip of the spinal column (or backbone). The spinal cord is vitally important to most bodily movement. Damage to it can result in paralysis of part of the body. It helps all manner of human beings, it embraces them, it is real to them, real, that is what is important. I could not let go, I could not ever retreat into nightmares or scribblings in my room, I could not ever fail my interns and residents, my laboratory assistants, my research teams, and you know, with my background, the neurosurgeon, the scientist at heart, I brought to every aspect of this giant organism a personal approach; I could not run away, I could not fail, I cannot fail now, I cannot be absent, I cannot. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The concept of self-love seems at first to be a contradiction in terms. If love involves giving and getting, how can one person do both? And how can one do both within one person? The ability to love means to break down any divisions between the subject and the object; as in the concept of the Earth and Sky, mutually complementary halves become one whole with no real or important line between them. This is done, paradoxically, without either half (or either partner) losing its identity. The Earth does not become the Sky, nor does the Sky become the Earth: they only complete each other. There is unity without sameness. In the attitude a person has toward oneself, the distinction between I, the subject, and Me, the object, is only an academic exercise. “I” describes the active, knowing part of self; “Me” describes the known part of self. Both terms are fictions created for purposes of discourse. I can love myself, and indeed, I must love myself if I am to talk about any meaningful complementary relationship with another person. If I do not know, care about, respect, and respond to my needs, then I do not love myself and certainly cannot love someone whom I experience less intimately. Furthermore, an unloved package is more likely to be a burden than a gift. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
So, in spite of the seeming paradox, the person who loves others loves oneself. One loves others because one loves oneself. To become familiar with the fullest meanings of love, you must begin at home. The child who knows the affection, the caring, the respecting, the involving of loving parents begins to gain emotional as well as rational understanding of the love process, even though one may never be able to articulate or explain it, either to oneself or to others. But, one knows in the intuitive sense that one is loved and one becomes to value what is one’s parents value—in this case, oneself. However, the Canadian rapper Drake, in his song God’s Plan declares, “I only love my bed and my mom,” such a combination would lead one to believe he is suffering from an Oedipus complex. The fixation to the mother was recognized by Dr. Freud as the crucial problem of human development, both of the race and of the individual. The intensity of the fixation to the mother is derived from the little boy’s sexual attraction to her, as the expression of the incestuous striving inherent in his nature. People with an Oedipus complex usually have a hostile relationship to the father as a result of sexual rivalry with him. This is why in romantic situations, women will be turned off if you tell them they remind them of your mother. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The ultimate aim of the socialization process, as it relates to dependency, is for the child to be fond of the mother rather than passionately attached to her, to be pleased by her attention and interest but not incessantly to demand it. It is possible that Drake’s father projected into the boy the sexual feeling of the adult man; the little boy having sexual desires, was supposed to be sexually attracted to the woman closet to him, and only by the superior power of the rival, in this case his father, in the triangle, is he forced to give up his desire, without ever recovering fully from this frustration. The depth and intensity of the irrational affective tie to the mother, the wish to return into her orbit to remain a part of her, the fear of emerging fully from her. The Oedipus complex is the acknowledgment and the denial of the crucial phenomenon of man’s longing for mother’s love. However, another problem is when someone has their eyes on a young man, and ruins all his relationships and friendships, to where he only has contact with his mother. This usually happens when an obsessive man has a fix on a young man, who is not interested in him, at all. So, he tries to keep the young man in an adolescent state in hopes that an unlikely dependence will form. An individual who is neurotic has an emotional condition characterized by much anxiety and conflicting motives; this condition is often stimulated by choices that all seem bad. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Incest or trying to force relationships in American society is not healthy, and is actually illegal. When a young man is not allowed to grow and develop and form relationships, friendships, and a career of his choice he will never truly be happy. There will always be some anger or bitterness about being stuck in a place with no one he can actually relate to. Humans are in need of the kind of love that makes them feel comfortable, not like they are being held hostage or in enemy hands. When people can develop relationships they want, this kind of experience builds in them the first pleasurable sensations and satisfactions that are part of an emerging concept of self. When this develops in the normal, ordinary way, the child comes to know and accept and love himself. Happiness is another, and one of the more popular concepts by which mental health is defined today. As the formula runs in the Brave New World: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” What is meant by happiness? Most people today would probably answer the question by saying that to be happy is to have fun or to have a good time. The answer to the question is, “What is fun?” depends somewhat on the economic situation of the individual, and more, on one’s education and personality structure. Economic differences, however, are not as important as they may seem. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The good time of society’s upper strata is the fun model for those not yet able to pay for it while earnestly hoping for that happy eventuality—and the good time of society’s lower strata is increasingly a less affluent imitation of the upper strata’s, differing in cost, but not so much in quality. What does this fun consist in? Going to the movies, parties, ball games, listening to a state of trance (ASOT 811) and watching television, taking a rise in the car on Sundays, dining out, sleeping late on Sunday mornings (but we know many of you have church on Saturday and/or Sunday mornings), and traveling for those who can afford it. If we use a more respectable term, instead of the word fun, and having a good time, we might say that the concept of happiness is, at best, identified with that of pleasure. Taking into consideration our discussion of the problem of consumption, we can define the concept somewhat more accurately as the pleasure of unrestricted consumption, and push-button power and laziness. From this standpoint, happiness could be defined as the opposite of sadness or sorrow, and indeed, the average person defines happiness as a state of mind which is free from sadness or sorrow. This definition, however, shows that there is something profoundly wrong in this concept of happiness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
A person who is alive and sensitive cannot fail to be sad, and to feel sorrow many times in one’s life. This is so, not only because of the amount of unnecessary suffering produced by the imperfection of our social arrangements, but because of the nature of human existence, which makes it impossible not to react to life with a good deal of pain and sorrow. Since we are living beings, we must be sadly aware of the necessary gap between out aspirations and what can be achieved in our short and troubled life. Since death confronts us with the inevitable fact that either we shall die before our loved ones of they before us—since we see suffering, the unavoidable as well as the unnecessary and wasteful, around us every day, how can we avoid the experience of pain and sorrow? The effort to avoid it is only possible if we reduce our sensitivity, responsiveness and love, if we harden our hearts and withdraw our attention and our feeling from others, as well as form ourselves. “And out of weakness one shall be made strong, in that day when my work shall commence among all my people,” reports 2 Nephi 3.13. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Royalty is Not Enough for Me–Shall Not Loveliness be Loved Forever?
A soul unlike any other, tutored in courage, never looking back, lifted from misery, and seeking to marvel at all things without malice or lamenting. I saw a graduate of the school of suffering. Allport’s theory declares that people are busy living their lives forward; they are oriented toward the future, and therefore, the psychologist cannot be correct if one is totally oriented entirely in the past. Yet, there is a sense of uniqueness at every stage of being. Allport’s theory stresses the importance of forward-learning orientation in life, which he called proactivity. People are not simply made up, like block towers, out of their past experiences. They have intentions, plans, goals, dreams, visions, faith, and hopes. In addition, because people are present or future oriented, their needs and motives change throughout their lives. Many motivations that were once important purely for survival may later still serve as motivators, but for different reasons. These motives that are not strictly for survival may later still serve as motivators, but for different reasons. Thee motives that are not strictly for survival become part of the individual’s self-concept and take on meaning through personal experiences and strivings. Such needs are reported to have a functional autonomy—an independent reason for being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Allport also talks about the mature personality as it must be an extension of self. It is evidenced by an ability to experience, enjoy, appreciate, and participate in a wide variety of activities and by a continual sense of planning and hoping. The individual with mature personality is comfortable with other people, emotionally secure, and self-accepting. He or she is reality oriented and has some sort of unifying philosophy of life. Basic to all else, the mature personality finds these experiences and feelings to be personally meaningful. It is very characteristic of seniors to seek a fourth stage of life which is called meaning, or liberation. The ultimate source of the courage to be is the God above God; this is the result of our demand to transcend theism. Only if the God of theism is transcended can the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness be taken into the courage to be. The God above God is the object of all mystical longing, but mysticism also must be transcended in order to reach him. Mysticism does not take seriously the concrete and the doubt concerning the concrete. It plunges directly into the ground of being and meaning, and leaves the concrete, the World of finite values and meanings, behind. Therefore, it does not solve the problem of meaningslessness. In terms of the present religious situation this means that Eastern mysticism is not the solution of the problems of Western Existentialism, although many people attempt this solution. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The God above the God of theism is not the devaluation of the meanings which doubt has thrown into the abyss of meaninglessness; he is their potential restitution. Nevertheless, absolute faith agrees with the faith implied in mysticism in that both transcend the theistic objectivation of a God who is a being. For mysticism such a God is not more real than any finite being, for the courage to be such a God has disappeared in the abyss of meaninglessness with every other value. The God above the God of theism is present, although hidden, in every divine-human encounter. Biblical religion as well as Protestant theology are aware of the paradoxical character of this encounter. They are aware that if God encounters mortals, God is neither object nor subject and is therefore above the scheme into which theism has forced him. They are aware that personalism with respect to God is balanced by a transpersonal presence of the divine. They are aware that forgiveness can be accepted only if the power of acceptance is effective in mortals—biblically speaking, if the power of grace is effective in mortals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
They are aware of the paradoxical character of every prayer, of speaking to somebody to whom you cannot speak because he is not “somebody,” of asking somebody of whom you cannot ask anything because he gives not before you ask, of saying “thou” to somebody who is nearer to the I than the I is to self. Each of these paradoxes drives the religious consciousness toward a God above the God of theism. The courage to be which is rooted in the experience of the God above the God of theism unites and transcends the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. It avoids both the loss of oneself by participation and the loss of one’s World by individualization. The acceptance of the God above the God of theism makes us a part of that which is not also a part but is the ground of the whole. Therefore, our self is not lost in the larger whole, which submerges it in the life of a limited group. If the self participates in the power of being-itself it receives itself back. For the power of being acts through the power of the individual selves. It does not swallow them as every limited whole, every collectivism, and every conformism does. This is why the Church, which stands for the power of being-itself or for the God who transcends the God of the religious, claims to be the mediator of the courage to be. A church which is based on the authority of the God of theism cannot make such a claim. It inescapably develops into a collectivist or semicollectivist system itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
However, a church which raises itself in its message and its devotion to the God above the God of theism without sacrificing its concrete symbols can mediate a courage which takes doubt and meaninglessness into itself. It is the Church under the Cross which alone can do this, the Church which preaches the Crucified who cried to God who remained one’s God after the God of confidence had left one in the darkness of doubt and meaninglessness. To be as a part in such a church is to receive a courage to be in which once cannot lose one’s self and in which one receives one’s World. Absolute faith, or the state of being grasped by the God beyond God, is not a state which appears beside other states of the mine. It never is something separated and definite, an event which could be isolated and described. It is always a movement in, with, and under other states of mine. It is the situation on the boundary of mortal’s possibilities. It is this boundary. Therefore, it is bot the courage of despair and the courage in and above every courage. It is not a place where one can live, it is without the safety of words and concepts, it is without a name, a church, a cult, a theology. However, it is moving in the depths of all of them. It is the power of being, in which they participate and of which they are fragmentary expressions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
One can become aware of it in the anxiety of fate and death when the traditional symbols, which enable mortals have lost their power. When providence has become a superstition and immortality something imaginary that which once was the power in these symbols can still be present and create the courage to be in spire of the experience of a chaotic World and a finite existence. The stoic courage returns but not as the faith in universal reason. It returns as the absolute faith which says Yes to being without seeing anything concrete which could conquer the nonbeing in fate and death. And one can become aware of the God above the God of theism in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation when the traditional symbols that enable mortals to withstand the anxiety of guilt and condemnation have lost their power. When divine judgment is interpreted as a psychological complex and forgiveness as a remnant of the father image, what once was the power in those symbols can still be present and create the courage to be in spite of the experience of an infinite gap between what we are and what we ought to be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The Lutheran courage returns but not supported by the faith in a judging and forgiving God. It returns in terms of the absolute faith in which says Yes although there is no special power that conquers guilt. The courage to take the anxiety of meaninglessness upon oneself is the boundary line up to which the courage to be can go. Beyond its mere non-being. Within it all forms of courage are re-established in the power of the God above the God of theism. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. “And what is it that ye shall hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal, and this because of your faith in him according to the promise. Wherefore, if a person has faith one must need have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope,” reports Moroni 7.41-42. Basic to love relationship and life is trust. Fromm’s four-fold test of love assumes it: you must trust someone to know him or her and let that individual know you, to care and be cared for, to respect and be respected. And trust determines the quality of the responses made to another person. Yet trust is difficult to come by. We acquire it in varying degrees throughout our growth cycles. A reliance on some sort of order helps one to learn trust. The most important aspect is what is internalized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Those who experience reliability, dependability, constancy in the people and objects around them tend to perceive reality in those terms, and the perception generalizes to include personal behavior—they gradually come to trust themselves. Trust is a basic prerequisite for healthy, satisfying interpersonal relations. The truster is one who continues to believe in other people in general, even when individual people let one down, do one dirty, or even try to do one harm. One maintains a generalized good feeling about people, though one often develops a cautious attitude toward particular persons. One of the key concepts in the trust necessary for love relationships is openness. Love is the binding element par excellence. It is the bridge between being and becoming, and it binds fact and value together. Love, in short, is the original creative force now transmuted into power which is both inside and outside the person. We see that love have much in common with the concept of intentionality for it presupposes that mortals yearn toward uniting oneself with the object not only of one’s desires but one’s knowledge as well. And this very process implies that a mortal already participates to some extent in the knowledge one seeks and the person one loves. Love is also seen as the power which draws one towards God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Love is the yearning for the mystic union which comes out in the religious experience of union with God, or in Dr. Freud’s oceanic experience. There is also an element in life which binds one to the love of one’s fate—amor fati. By fate I do not mean the specific or accidental misfortunes which befall us, but rather fate as the acceptance and affirmation of the finite state of mortals, limited as we are in intelligence and strength, faced everlasting with weakness and death. The myth of Sisyphus presents a man’s fate in as stark a form as could be imagined; yet Camus finds in that fate, for the mortal who has courage to accept the consciousness of it, something which call forth his eros, something to love: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! This Universe without a master seems to him neither sterile nr futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a World. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a person heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Eros pushes toward self-fulfillment, but it is not all the ego-centric assertion of one’s subjective whims and wises on a passive World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
The idea of mastering nature of reality would have horrified the Greeks and would promptly have been labelled hubris, or inordinate pride which is an affront to the gods and a sure invitation of a mortal’s doom. The Greeks always showed a respect which amounted to a reverence for the objective, given World. They delighted in their World—its beauty, it is from, its endless challenges to their curiosity, it is mysteries to be explored; and they were everlastingly attracted by this World. Not that they would have had any truck with the modern sentimental belief that life by itself is good or bad; it all depends on what mortals dedicate themselves to. Their tragic view itself enabled them to delight in life. One cannot outwit death anyway by progress or accumulating wealth; so why not accept your fate, choose values which are authentic, and let yourself delight and believe in the being you are and the Being you are part of? “Shall not loveliness be loved forever?” sings Euripides. The question is rhetorical, but the answer is not. Loveliness shall be loved because of infantile needs, or because it stands for the heart, or because it is intimacy, or because it assists adjustment or because it will make us happy—but simply because it is lovely. Loveliness exercises a pull on us; we are drawn to life by love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
What does all this have to do with psychotherapy? I believe a great deal. When Socrates remarks, with a deceptive simplicity, “Human nature will not easily find a helper better than eros,” we can take his words as applying to the process of psychotherapy as well as the drive within a person toward psychic healthy. Socrates himself, as we see and listen to him in the Dialogues, is perhaps history’s greatest model of the psychotherapist. His prayer at the end of Phaedo could well be inscribed on the wall of every therapist’s office: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward mortal be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. Heavenly Father guides us and gives us the experiences we need based on our strengths, weaknesses, and choices so that we might bear good products. The Father chastens us when necessary because he loves us. It is Heavenly Father who sends both the influence and the gift of the Holy Ghost into our lives. Through the gift of the Holy Ghost, the glory-or intelligence, light, and power of the Father can dwell in us. If we will strive to increase in light and truth until our eyes become single to God’s glory, Heavenly Father will send us up unto eternal life and reveal His face unto us—either in this life or the next. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Love’s Depth is Often Tested in Crisis: Such Creativity is as Close as Mortals Ever Get to becoming Immortal
I know you have survived centuries. You have even survived yourself. You went into a desert place like Christ. You did not die because your blood is too strong. You are afraid you cannot die. Everything you have believed in has been shattered You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Mutuality, the giving-taking circle, replenishes and nourishes and assists the growth of each person in any relationship. What becomes of reason, conscience and religion in an alienated World? Superficially seen, they prosper. There is hardly any illiteracy to speak of in the Western countries; more and more people go to college in the United States; everybody reads the newspaper and talks reasonably about World affairs. As to conscience, most people act quite decently in their narrow personal sphere, in fact surprisingly so, considering their general confusion. As far as religion is concerned, it is well known that church affiliation is higher than ever, and the vast majority of Americans believe in God—or so they say in public-opinion polls. However, one does not need to dig too deeply to arrive at less pleasant findings. If we talk about reason, we must decide what human capacity we are referring to. As I have suggested before, we must differentiate between intelligence and reason. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee—who puts the two sticks together in order to get to do the job—uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, figuring out how to do things. Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulations: intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival. Reason, one the other and, aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality which surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence. However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict (considering that prediction often depends on recognition of forces which operate underneath the surface), and prediction sometimes is necessary even for physical survival. “Therefore, go to your homes, and ponder upon the things which I has said, and ask the Father, in my name that you may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again, reports 3 Nephi 17.3. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Reason requires relatedness and a sense of self. If I am only the passive receptor of impressions, thoughts, opinions, I can compare them, manipulate them—but I cannot penetrate them. I deduce the existence of myself as an individual from the fact that I think. I doubt, so hence I think; I think, hence I am. The reverse is true, too. Only if I am I, if I have not lost my individuality in the It, can I think, that is, can I make use of my reason. It might be maintained that the reasoning necessary for the knowledge of God is, as a matter of fact, too difficult for frail and mortal human beings to manage. Closely related to this the lacking sense of reality which is characteristic of the alienated personality. To speak of the lacking sense of reality in modern mortals is contrary to the widely held idea that we are distinguished from most periods of history by our greater realism. However, to speak of our realism is almost like a paranoid distortion. What realists, who are playing wit weapons which may lead to the destruction of all modern civilization, if not of our Earth itself! If an individual were found doing that, he or she would be locked up immediately, and if one prided oneself on one’s realism, the psychiatrists would consider this an additional and rather serious symptom of a diseased mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, quite aside from this—the fact is that modern humans exhibit an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought. One has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with one’s artificial, prettified picture of a pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads and paper. Indeed, one is so far away from human reality, that one can say with the inhabitants of the Brave Knew World: “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Another factor in contemporary society already mentioned is destructive to reason. Since nobody ever does the whole job, but only a fraction of it, since the dimension of things and of the organization of people is too vast to be understood as a whole, nothing can be seen in its totality. Hence the laws underlying the phenomena cannot be observed. Intelligence is sufficient to manipulate properly one sector of a larger unit, whether it is a machine or a state. However, reason can develop only if it is geared to the whole, if it deals with observable and manageable entities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Just as our eyes and ears function only within certain quantitative limits of wave length, our reason too is bound by what is observable as a whole and in its functioning. To put it differently, beyond a certain order of bigness, concreteness is necessarily lost and abstractification takes place; with it, the sense for reality fades out. The first one to see this problem was Aristotle, who thought that a city which transcended in number what we would call today a small town was not livable. In observing the quality of thinking in alienated mortals, it is striking to see how one’s intelligence has developed and how one’s reason has deteriorated. Mortals take their reality for granted; they want to eat it, consumer it, touch it, manipulate it. Mortals do not even ask what is behind it, why things are as they are, and where they are going. One cannot eat the meaning, one cannot consume the sense, and as far as the future is concered—apres nous le deluge! Even from the nineteenth century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity, if by this we mean the opposite to reason, rather than to intelligence. In spite of the fact that everybody reads the daily paper religiously, there is an absence of understanding of the meaning of political events which is truly frightening, because our intelligence helps us to produce weapons which our reason is not capable of controlling. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Indeed, we have the know-how, but we do not have the know-why, nor the know-what-for of what we are creating. We have many persons with good and high intelligence quotients, but our intelligence tests measure the ability to memorize, to manipulate thoughts quickly—but not to reason. All this is true notwithstanding the fact that there are mortals of outstanding reason in our midst, whose thinking is as profound and vigorous as ever existed in the history of the human race. However, they think apart from the general herd thought, and they are looked upon with suspicion—even if they are needed for their extraordinary achievements in the natural sciences. The new automatic brains are indeed a good illustration of what is meant here by intelligence. They manipulate data which are fed into them; they compare, select, and eventually come out with results more quickly or more error-proof than human intelligence could. However, the condition of all this is that the basic data are fed into them beforehand. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
What the electric brain cannot do is think creatively, even with its algorithms and predictions, the computer cannot arrive at an insight into the essence of the observed fact, to go beyond state with which it is fed. It cannot feel and ask questions for further understanding. It does not have emotions. It does not care. It cannot put itself in one’s situation and consider some circumstanced may cause some people to work ten times harder than the average person their age, or that recalling certain things can be painful. The computer does not care. The machine can duplicate or even improve on intelligence, but it cannot simulate reason, and it can be hacked and manipulated and cause great harm and bodily damage to many without being held responsible because it is not a unique biological unit. Therefore, the machine can repeat the same mistake over and over without people demanding it to be dismantled, or greater control placed over it because statistically, it proves well and is better than a human. Ethics, at least in the meaning of the Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition, is inseparable from reason. Ethical behavior is based on the faculty of making value judgments on the basis of reason; it means deciding between good and evil, and to act upon decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Use of reason presupposes the presence of self; so does ethical judgment and action. Furthermore, ethics, whether it is that of monotheistic religion or that of secular humanism, is based on the principle that no institution and no thing is higher than any human individual; that the aim of life is to unfold mortal’s love and reason and that every other human activity has to be subordinated to this aim. How then can ethics be a significant part of a life in which the individual becomes an automaton, in which one serves the big It? Furthermore, how can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience by its very nature is nonconforming; it must be able to say this “no” it must be certain in the rightness of the judgment on which the no is based. To the degree to which a person conforms one cannot hear the voice of one’s conscience, must less act upon it. Conscience exists only when mortals experience themselves, as mortal, not as a thing, as a commodity. So calling a person by their title kind of robs them of their humanity and turns them into an object, and that can lead to condescendence, depending on what the individual does for a living and how society views their career or lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Concerning things which are exchanged on the market there exists another quasi ethical code, that of fairness. The question is, whether they are exchanged at a fair price, no tricks and no force interfering with the fairness of the bargain; this fairness, not good and evil, is the ethical principle of the market and it is the ethical principle governing the life of the marketing personality. The principle of fairness, no doubt, makes for a certain type of ethical behavior. You do not lie, cheat nor use force—you even give the other person a chance—if you act according to the code of fairness. However, to love your neighbor, to feel one with him, or her, or them, to devote your life to the aim of developing your spiritual powers, is not part of the fairness ethics. We live in a paradoxical situation: We practice fairness ethics, and profess Christian ethics. Must we not stumble over this obvious contradiction? Obviously, we do not stumble. What is the reason? Partly, it is to be found in the fact that the heritage of four thousand years of the development of conscience is by no means completely lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
On the contrary, in many way the liberation of mortals from the powers of the feudal state and Church, made is possible for this heritage to be brought to fruition and in the period between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first century it blossomed as perhaps never before. We still are part of this process—but given our own twenty-first century condition of life, it seems that there is no new bun which will blossom when this flower has wilted. Another reason why we do not stumble over the contradiction between humanistic ethics and fairness ethics is based in the fact that we reinterpret religious and humanistic ethics in the light of fairness ethics. A good illustration of this interpretation is the Golden Rule. In its original Jewish and Christian meaning, it was a popular phrasing of the Bible maxim to love thy neighbor as thyself. In the system of fairness ethics, it means simply when you exchange, be fair. Give what you expect to get. Do not cheat! No wonder the Golden Rule is the most popular religious phrase of today. It combines two opposite system of ethics and helps us to forget the contradiction. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While we still live from the Christian-humanistic heritage it is not surprising that the younger generation exhibits less and less of the traditional ethics and that we come across a moral barbarism among our youth which is in complete contrast to the economic and educational level society has reached. Today, while revising this manuscript, I read two items. One in The New York Times, regarding the fact of the murder of a man, cruelly trampled to death by four teenagers of average middle-class families. The other in Time magazine, a description of the new Guatemalan chief of police, who as former chief of police under the Ubico dictatorship had perfected a head-shrinking steel skull cap to pry loose secrets and crush improper political thoughts. His picture is published with the caption “For improper thought, a crusher.” Could anything be more insanely insensitive to extremes of sadism than this flippant line? It is surprising when in a culture in which the most popular news magazine can write this, some teenagers have no scruples about beating a man to death? Is the fact that we show brutality and cruelty in comic books and movies, because money is made with these commodities, not enough of an explanation for the growing barbarism and vandalism in our youth? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Our movie censors watch that no sexual scenes are shown, since this could suggest illicit sexual desires. How innocent would this result be in comparison with the dehumanizing effect of what the censors permit and the churches seem to object to less than to the traditional sins. Yes, we still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent and will be replaced by the ethics of the Brave New World, or 1984, or New Jack City or Minority Report unless it ceases to be a heritage and is re-created in our whole mode of life. At the moment, it seems that ethical behavior is still to be found in the concrete situation of many individuals, while society is marching toward barbarism. Much of what has been said about ethics is to be said about religion. Of course, speaking of the role of religion among alienated mortals, everything depends on what we call religion. If we are referring to religion in its widest sense, as a system of orientation and an object of devotion, then, indeed, every human being is religious, since nobody can live without such a system and remain sane. Then, our culture is as religious as any. Our gods are the machine, and the idea of efficiency; the meaning of our life is to move, to forge ahead, to arrive as near to the top of the pyramid as possible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, if religion we mean monotheism, then, indeed, our religions is not more than one of the commodities in our show windows. Monotheism is incompatible with alienation and with our ethics of fairness. It makes mortal’s unfolding, one’s salvation, the supreme aim of life, an aim which never can be subordinated to any other. Inasmuch as God is unrecognizable, indefinable, and indefinable—which means he is not and can never be considered a thing. The fight between monotheism and idolatry is exactly the fight between the productive and the alienated way of life. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life, with the solution to it; we start out with the conviction that there is no purpose except to invest life successfully and to get it over with without major mishaps. That is why people try to live right and obey God’s commandments. The majority of us believe in God, take it for granted the God exists. The rest, who do not believe, take it for granted that God does not exist. Either way, God is taken for granted. Neither belief nor disbelief cause any sleepless nights, nor any serious concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In fact, whether a mortal in our culture believes in God or not makes hardly any difference either from a psychological or from a truly religious standpoint. In both instances one does not care—either about God or about the answer to the problem of one’s own existence. Just as humanly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that God is there, God runs the show (although it probably would run without God too), you never see God, but you acknowledge God’s leadership while you are doing your part and paying your fair share or what seems to be more than fair. The religious renaissance which we witness in these days is perhaps the worst blow monotheism has yet received. Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of the Man upstairs, to teach to pray in order to make God your partners in business, to sell religions with the method and appeals of a new BMW or Buick? In view of the fact that the alienation of modern mortals is incompatible with monotheism, one might expect that ministers, priests and rabbis would form the spearhead of criticism of modern Capitalism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
While it is true that from high Catholic quarters and from a number of less highly placed ministers and rabbis such criticism has been voiced, all churches belong essentially to the conservative forces in modern society and use religion to keep mortals going and satisfied with a profoundly irreligious system. The majority of them do not seem to recognize that this type of religion will eventually degenerate into overt idolatry, unless they begin to define and then to fight against modern idolatry, rather than to make prenouncements about God and thus to use God’s name in vain—in more than one sense. The courage to be in all its forms has, by itself, revelatory character. It shows the nature of being, it shows that the self-affirmation of being is an affirmation that overcome negation. In a metaphorical statement (and every assertion about being-itself is either metaphorical or symbolic) one could say that being include nonbeing but nonbeing does not prevail against it. Including is a spatial metaphor which indicates that being embraces itself and that which is opposed to it, nonbeing. Nonbeing belongs to being, it cannot be separated from it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
We could not thing being without a double negation: being must be thought as the negation of the negation of being. This is why we describe being best by the metaphor power of being. Power is the possibility a being has to actualize itself against the resistance of other beings. If we speak of the power of being-itself we indicate the being affirms itself against nonbeing. In our discussion of courage and life we have mentioned the dynamic self-affirmation of being—itself wherever it spoke dialectically, notably in Neoplatonism, Hegel, and the philosophers of life and process. Theology has done the same whenever it took the idea of the living God seriously, most obviously in the trinitarian symbolization of the inner life of God. In spite of the static definition of substance (the name for the ultimate power of being), it unites philosophical and mystical tendencies when we speak of the love and knowledge with which God loves and know himself through the love and knowledge for finite beings. Nonbeing (that in God which makes his self-affirmation dynamic) opens up the divine self-seclusion and reveals him as power of love. Nonbeing makes God a living God. Without the No he as to overcome in himself and in his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless. There would be no revelation of the ground of being, there would be no life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, where there is nonbeing there is finitude and anxiety. If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself, we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself. Wherever philosophers or theologians have spoke of the divine blessedness they have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) spoken of the anxiety of finitude which is eternally taken into the blessedness of the divine infinity. The infinite embraces itself and the finite, the Yes includes itself and the No which it takes into itself, blessedness comprises itself and the anxiety of which it is the conquest. All this is implied if one says that being includes nonbeing and that through nonbeing it reveals itself. It is a highly symbolic language which mist be used at this point. However, its symbolic character does not diminish its truth; on the contrary, it is a condition of its truth. To speak unsymbolically about being-itself is untrue. The divine self-affirmation is the power that makes the self-affirmation of the finite being, the courage to be, possible. Only because being-itself has the character of self-affirmation inspite of nonbeing is courage possible. Courage participates in the power of being which prevails against nonbeing. One who receives this power in an act of mystical or personal or absolute faith is aware of the source of one’s courage to be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mortals are not necessarily aware of this source. In situations of cynicism and indifference one is not aware of it. However, it works in one as long as one maintains the courage to take one’s anxiety upon oneself. In the act of the courage to be the power of being is effective in us, whether we recognize it or not. Every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be. The content may hide or distort true being, the courage in it reveals true being. Not arugments but the courage in it reveals true being. Not arguments but the courage to be reveals the true nature of being-itself. By affirming our being we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not. If we know it, we accept acceptance consciously. If we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Love’s depth is often tested in crisis. In addition to courage, there must be caring for us to manifest our true divine heritage. We must care, be concerned, about other people’s well-being, their growth, their health, their ups and downs. A deeply felt and often expressed statement, verbal or not, that we convey to each other when we love is “I care about you, how you are, what happens to you, about protecting you, about seeing your grow and become everything you can be.” And it goes a bit further: “I hurt when you hurt: I feel your joy, your sorrow, your ecstasy, your loss, your fear, and your confidence.” The caring aspect of love is seen most vividly in the love expressed by a mother for her child. You birth the baby, carrying him or her on your hip like the child is apart of you and watch the being grow. The child is not yet a full partner in the love relationship; he or she is a recipient of the mother’s affection, concern and tenderness. What satisfies the mother, though, is response. The child can smile when filled or comfortable. One can gurgle and good and wave his or her arms when he or she see her coming. These simple expressions are sufficient for most of us. However, in a mature and authentic love relationship, if one person is inadequate or poorly equipped in responding, the other person may find that one cannot continue giving. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
When it comes to romance, there is good basis in mortal’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. This holds in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted. Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two…He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divines mortals and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. Eros is not a god in the sense of being above mortals, but the power that binds all things and all mortal together, the power informing all things. It means to give inward from, to seek out by the devotion of love the unique form of the beloved person or object and to unite one’s self with that form. Eros also incites mortals in the yearning for knowledge and drives one passionately to seek union with truth. Through eros, we not only become poets and inventors, but also achieve ethical goodness. Love, in the form of eros, is the power which generates, and this generation is a kind of eternity and immortality—which is to say that such creativity is as close as mortals ever get to becoming immortal. #RandolpHarris 20 of 20
You Are the Great Unknown, Sweetheart–To Love Someone is to Bid One to Live and Invite One to Grow
Enough about the Garden of Eden. You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Rock Music scene is a cultic activity. This one is not properly a cult, for rock music, country rock, folk rock, and soul music are real and important trends in American and European music. They began, of course, in Afro-Cuban rhythms, African jazz and blues, and country and Western ballads. More than a fad, rock music has made an indelible mark on the American musical tradition. The cult that has grown up around performers and styles represents still another attempt to transcend certain ordinary experiences and reach out for something else, something beyond. The first real stars in the young rock movement were B.B, King, Bill Haley, and Chuck Berry. Elvis Presley brought rock to the mass media and made it a fantastically profitable occupation and art form. The Beatles gave full credit to these early stars for their original inspiration, but they added some dimensions of their own which enabled the rough and wild rock “child” to grow up into a musical form of sophistication and wide appeal. Bob Dylan introduced social comment into his music, at least in the first big commercial sense. Most folk songs had some kind of message, but Dylan’s commentary told the Establishment that the younger generation was very serious about remaking and challenging the established patterns. Pacifism and brotherhood became themes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Rock music is a form of transcendent behavior for many people. The Flower Children soon came to recognize the impact of electronically amplified music and some of their most significant messages were promoted by performers like Donovan, The Beatles, the Iron Butterfly, Mothers of Invention, and others. Joan Baez and Judy Collins made branding-iron-hot comments about life in the technological age with their soft and plaintive folk-rock sounds. So did Peter, Paul and Mary and many others. The young people began to recognize many things about themselves with their cultic involvement in Rock Music. They found, for example, that they were a force to be reckoned with. Their sounds and their themes were picked up and imitated by older, more established performers. They found that they had economic power: they could make or break a performer by either buying or not buying his or her record, tape, CD or steaming their music. The young generation found that they were also style-setters, and that older youth and even grown-ups were eager to follow in their footsteps. Out of all this, the young have found that they actually do have some significance. As a group, they represent youth, enthusiasm, economic power, political pressure, and above all, a separate and discrete identity that does not easily shade into those of groups on either side of them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Now, our question runs, can the individual love child or rock cultist emerge from this group identity into a phase of knowing oneself to be fully and truly significant, apart from one’s identification and involvement with a cult or group? We do not mean isolation, alienation, or repudiation; we mean, a person must by truly a significant and actualized. One is both a solitary and social being, neither one alone, but capable of being either. Too many people are only identity. Others have only a solitary or isolated identity. Real self-actualization, and this means mental health, is to know yourself, fully and really, both alone and in interaction with others. There are so many other activities that are cultic or similar to cults. Nudism, sexual cults, political action cults, organic food cults—each is important to many people. The cult is a situation that enables the person to experience oneself in safety or to transcend oneself at times. Since self-transcendence is a universal need of all people, we have tried to describe some of these cultic activities and religion solely as means by which individuals rise above their ordinary experiences, not with the intention of promoting or demeaning any one of them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we spend too much of our time and energy in actualizing ourselves, we lose sight of our relations to the larger reality, the realm of Meaning. We must not make actualization of the self our end-goal. Rather, one must seek to align oneself with the Meaning in life, seek purpose and intention, primarily through work or causes. Then self-actualization comes, not as a goal to be sought, but as a by-product of the search for Meaning. Hunting for peak experiences does not usually work. They usually just happen. We are surprised by joy. So, mortals are a pleasure-seeking or peak-experiencing being, not so much by intent as by accident. Oh, yes, we can seek pleasure, even more pleasure than Dr. Freud spoke of. We all do. However, the pleasures we seek are more momentary, more superficial: a white chocolate Twix, a warm drink of eggnog on a cold night, a hug, the sense of intimacy. Not all pleasures are quite in the same league, though. There is a hierarchy of pleasures: The cessation of pain, the moratorium of drunkenness, the relief of urination, the pleasure of a hot bath, the contentment of having done a job well, the satisfaction of success, on up through the happiness of being with loved friends, the rapture of being in love, the ecstasy of the perfect love act, on up to the final pleasure-beyond-pleasure of the mystical fusion with the Universe. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We all have some needs to go beyond our own existences, beyond and above our own experiences. We are not simply ordinariness-bound. The sense of significance is more than feeling that comes from knowing who you are, knowing that who you are is OK, knowing that others know you and appreciate you. It comes from some more grand experiences as well. A significant human being is one who can identify one’s own humanness with that of all other people. More than this, one identifies with Humanity, the same Humanity that ties all people together. And, one does even more than that. Once he or she experiences one’s identification with Humanity, one finds how much this means identification with all nature and, finally, with all of life. The search for personal significance is a search that involves growing as you go: the more you find, the more there is to find. The search begins at the small end of a cornucopia—the horn of plenty. We enter it small, because that is how must of us feel: the small opening fits our self-concept at the time. However, as we go through the cornucopia-shared search, we find that the horn is increasingly larger—and that is a good thing, for we are getting larger right along with it. At the end are the fruits of the search, the plenty which comes of knowing ourselves fully and being full selves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
There are many paths, many cornucopias: religion, a variety of cultic activities, medications and play, physical intimacy and work, prayer and practice: the styles and activities are infinite in number. To live life fully and most significantly means to experience as many things as possible. It means continually enlarging our scope of self-awareness by enlarging our perspective. “All you need is love” declares the Beatles, and though it is oversimplified, it is a great all-encompassing idea. Many of the goals and aspirations sought for by people in the religious and cultic activities mentioned are attained through the full experience of love. It should be repeated and impressed upon you that love is an experience that enables a person to transcend oneself without really losing oneself. Loving another is perhaps the only way both to find oneself and rise above oneself to experience the Larger realities of life. We do have myths. We had a goddess. However, not is not the time for all those things. You need not believe all I have seen. What I do have to give you is a vision. I think a vision is stronger than an illusion. And the vision is that we can exist as powerful beings without hurting anyone who is good and kind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Love is not only a many-splendored thing; it is a confusing and frustrating human experience as well. First of all, love is not merely an emotion, although many emotions are involved in the love experience. Love is a happening, something that is often not planned or expected or even intended. It involves levels of consciousness, self-development, emotional freedom, personal and social responsibility, tolerance, physical awareness and acceptance, knowledge, and much, much caring. To care of another person, in the most significant sense, is to help the individual grow and actualize oneself. Caring for someone means that you desire to see that person and expand and become all that he or she is capable of becoming. In order to do this, one must first of all care for oneself. One must be on the road to actualization of one’s own potential before one can be fully capable of interest in the needs, goals, or well-being of another person. Just as one cannot give what one has not got, neither can one take someone to a place one has not yet been. The idea that self-love must precede love of others is important to an understanding of what it means to love. Self-love does not mean selfish narcissism. Self and narcissism are not the same things. The ego is the center of the consciousness; the self is the center of the entire being. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
If you can realistically and wholly love your self (including your ego, but not merely in a narcissistic way), you then have enough self-regard to reach out, to experiment, to risk getting involved with others and caring about them. Narcissism is a superficial feeling of liking for the ego or for the roles we play or for a particular aspect of the ego, such as a skill, your appearance, or possessions. Narcissism, like masturbation, is an important part of self-development, but it can become a problem, for you and others, if you do not move beyond it. Narcissism shows itself as conceit, boastfulness, possessiveness, or emphasis on one or two parts of your selfhood, on materialism, or on success or achievement. It can help you firm up your ego identity, but then it should be left behind. The values and pressures of American society often make it difficult for many individuals to move beyond narcissism. Our societal priorities, such as getting ahead at any cost and paying excessive attention to how you look, how you come across socially, or being a winner, encourage narcissism. However, if you are aware of the other aspect of self-love—love of self, not ego—and its importance in the achievement of mature love, you can overcome these pressures. Characteristics that make up mature love are true, caring, knowledge, respect, and responsibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If we place a little more patience in the process and a greater amount of faith in the Lord, our challenges will find their way toward successful conclusions. Trust is the foundation upon which love must be built: no trust = no love. To trust means to believe. Trust has the same meaning as the theological concept of faith. It is derived from a Greek word meaning literally to put yourself in the hands of the object of your faith. To allow someone to get close to you, you must have faith in that person’s motives and in your own. You must trust that neither of your will try to hurt the other, that you will both be working toward a mutually beneficial relationship. Trusting others requires that you first must trust in yourself. You must believe in your own potential. You must be confident enough in your own identity that you can risk sharing yourself with another person. “If thou art sorrowful, call on the Lord thy God with supplication, that your souls may be joyful,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 136.29. Trust is always a risky business. Almost everyone ha trusted the wrong person and been hurt. Some people have been so badly hurt that they believer they can never trust again. Other, however, keeping the risk of pain in mind, know that most trust is warranted. We have to trust someone or else live in alienation and fear. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Let us rejoice in the blessings of peace, hope, and direction, blessings that so many of our Father’s children do not enjoy. Trusting in the Lord with all our hearts will allow us not to lean unto our own understanding. In all our ways, we must acknowledge God, and he shall direct our paths. God lives and loves each of us. I know our Father in Heaven has a perfect plan for us. As we follow this plan and the example of our Savior, we can find peace in this developing World, our hearts can be filled with hope, and we will receive the direction we need. Caring is the next building block of mature love. Caring is an active concern for the life and growth of those whom we love. This means we cannot simply talk about how much we care for something or someone, but we must also act upon it. Caring for others begins with self-caring. Somehow the World is hungry for goodness and recognizes it when it sees it. There is something in all of us that hungers after the good and true. Goodness is the attribute most needed and longed for not only in our individual lives but also in families, communities, states, and nations. If we are to effectively foster and utilize the great goodness of the people around us, we must strengthen both our families and our communities. The family is without question the God-given primary vehicle for the development and expression of personal goodness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, we also live in communities. People are by nature social beings whose lives and feelings are eternally connected and intertwined with those of others. Almost invariably, individuals reach their fully potential only in association and in community with others. Intimate knowledge of another persona is another factor necessary for love. Knowledge as it is meant here is much more than just familiarity with facts about a person. True knowledge of another person is very much like intuition. It is an emotional as much as mental experience. Regardless of the amount of time we spend with another person, picking that person’s brains and observing every facet of that person’s behavior, we may still have little true knowledge of that person. Why is this so? First of all, to know another person we must first know ourselves. When we have a deep, honest awareness of our own identity, we can begin to understand what goes in others. In addition, knowing another requires an openness and a willingness to be known ourselves. This requires trust. It means removing some of the defensive barriers we erect around us. It means taking off the false faces and masks that we wear as we play our many roles in life. This calls for authenticity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Honestly expressing ourselves to others is exceedingly risky, but if we sense they are a good person, the risk-talking may pay off in the closeness we feel as we gain true knowledge of another. Respect is another building block of love. Respect is a word that has been used and misused so often, it is a wonder it has any real meaning left to it. The root of the word comes from the Latin respicere—re- means back again, and spicere means to look. There is in the word, then, the connotation of taking another look, of seeing a person as if for the first time. As a child, some people think their fathers are the dumbest men alive. When they grow up, they are amazed at how much their fathers have learned! Obviously, this is talking about that fact that one’s own maturation has given one a new perspective on their father. One may suddenly see their father anew—whether the older man actually had learned anything new or not. When we respect people, we appreciate their uniqueness and hold them and all that they are in high regard. This does not mean that we like everything that they do, but that we accept them in their entirety, apart from riles, prejudices, circumstances, and relationships. We esteem their integrity, their wholeness, as human beings. To respect others, we must first have self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Responsibility is the final element necessary for love, and it should actually be spelled “response-ability,” to emphasize the meaning, the ability to responds. To have response-ability for another means to trust, care for, know, and respect someone so fully that we are aware of the person’s needs. Being aware, we try to meet as many of those needs as we responsibly can, without robbing that person of his or her own self-respect and responsibility. We are responsible to people, ore than we are responsible for them. Self-responsibility must precede responsibility for others. This means using one’s own resources to meet one’s own needs. It is not always easy to be responsible, but unless you are, real loving of yourself and other cannot take place. “With their wicked words they will try to hold you down. No this is not our fate, the lives in which they are bound and there is something more we know, it had to be found. I know the World will not wait, the tide is turning around, and there is not enough time. In the fallout of the wasted, in the half light I stand before you in the last dance of an old life. Now the cool wind’s blowing and we cannot stay, but it is alright. When the night is gone, I will still be here,” reports Emma Hewitt (Not Enough Time). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Turn My Brimming Eyes Away as Experiment to Me is Every One I Meet
For a moment I felt an abrupt rush of countless points of white light sweep across the field of view, as if the unseen million of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes. Very bright colors, the wonderful loveliness of vivid colors gone before I could name them. The disappearance of overt authority is clearly visible in all spheres of life. Parents do not give commands any more; they suggest that the child “will want to do this.” Since they have no principles or convictions themselves, they try to guide children to do what the law of conformity expects, and often, being older and hence less in touch with “the latest,” they learn from the children what attitude is required. The same holds true in business and in industry; you do not give orders, you suggest; you do not command, your coax and manipulate. Even the American army has accepted much of the new form of authority. The army is propagandized as if it were an attractive business enterprise; the soldier should feel like a member of a team, even though the hard fact remains that one must be trained to kill and be killed. As long as there was overt authority, there was conflict, and there was rebellion—against irrational authority. In the conflict with the commands of one’s conscience, in the fight against irrational authority, the personality developed—specifically the sense of self developed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I experience myself as “I” because I doubt, I protest, I rebel. Even if I submit and sense defeat, I experience myself as “I”—I, the defeated one. However, if I am not aware of submitting or rebelling, if I am ruled by an anonymous authority, I lose the sense of self, I become a “one,” a part of the “It.” The mechanism through which the anonymous authority operates is conformity. I ought to do what everybody does, hence, I must conform, not be different, not stick out; I must be ready and willing to change according to the changes in the pattern; I must not ask whether I am right or wrong, but whether I am adjusted, whether I am not peculiar, not different. The only thing which is permanent in me is just this readiness for change. Nobody has power over me, expect the herd of which I am part, yet to which I am subjected. It is hardly necessary to demonstrate to the reader the degree which this submission to anonymous authority by conformity has reached. However, I want to give a few illustrations taken from the very interesting and illuminating settlement in California. In this upscale development in Roseville, California was made to house hundreds of people, partly in clusters of rental garden apartments at Pearl Creek Apartments rent for one-bedroom apartment from $1,630, partly in ranch-type houses in Rocklin, California at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails for sale starting at mid $400,000’s. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The inhabitants of this community are mostly junior executives, with a sprinkling of chemists and engineers, with an average income of $62,748.05-$73,206.06, between 25 and 35 years of age, married, and with one or two children. What are the social relations, and the adjustment in this package community? Whole people move there mainly out of a simple economic necessity and not because of any yen for womb image, after exposure to such an environment some people find a warmth and support in it that makes other environments seem unduly cold—it is somewhat unsettling, for example, to hear the way residents of the new suburbs occasionally refer to “the outside.” This feeling of warmth is more or less the same as the feeling of been accepted: “I could afford another place than the development we are going to,” says one of the people, “and I must say it is not the kind of place where you have the boss or a customer dinner. However, you get real acceptance is indeed a in a community like that.” This craving for acceptance is indeed a very characteristic feeling in the alienated person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless one doubts that he or she is acceptable, and why should a young, educated, successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves—because they are not themselves. The only haven for having a sense of identity is conformity. Being acceptable really means not being different from anybody else. Feeling inferior stems from feeling different, and no question is asked whether the difference is for the better or worse. Adjustment begins early. One parent expresses the concept of anonymous authority quite succinctly: The adjustment to the group does not seem to involve so many problems for them [the children]. I have noticed that they seem to get the feeling that nobody is the boss—there is a feeling of complete co-operation. Partly this comes from early exposure to court play. The ideological concept in which this phenomenon is expressed here is that of absence of authority, a beneficial value in terms of twenty first century freedom. The reality behind this concept of freedom is the presence of anonymous authority and the absence of individuality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
What could be clearer for this concept of conformity than the statement made by one mother: “Johnny has not been doing so well at school. The teacher told me he was doing fine in some respects but that his social adjustment was not as good as it might be. He would pick one or two friends to play with—and sometimes he was happy to remain by himself.” Indeed, the alienated person finds it almost impossible to remain by oneself, because one is seized by the panic of experiencing nothingness. That it should be formulated so frankly is nevertheless surprising, and shows that we have even ceased to be ashamed of our herdlike inclinations. The parents sometimes complain that the school might be a bit too permissive, and that the children lack discipline, but whatever the faults of Park Forest parents maybe, harshness and authoritarianism are not among them. Indeed not, but why would you need authoritarianism in its overt forms if the anonymous authority of conformism makes your children submit completely to the It, even if they do not submit to their individual parents? The complaint of the parents, however, about lack of discipline is not meant too seriously, for “What we have in Park Forest, it is becoming evident, is the apotheosis of pragmatism. It would be an exaggeration, perhaps, to say that the transients have come to deify society—and the job of adjusting to it—but certainly they have remarkably little yen to quarrel with society. They are, as one puts it, the practical generation.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Another aspect of alienated conformity is the leveling-out process of taste and judgment which describes “The Melting Pot,” or as some like to call it “The Smelting Pot.” “When I first came here I was pretty rarefied,” a self-styled “egghead” explained to a recent visitor. “I remember how shocked I was one day when I told the girls in the court how much I had enjoyed listening to The Magic Flute the night before. They did not know what I was talking about. I began to learn that diaper talk I lot more important to them. I still listen to The Magic Flute but now I realize that for most people other things in life seem as important.” Another woman reports that she was discovered reading Plato when one of the girls made a surprise visit. The visitor “almost fell over from surprise. Now all of them are sure I am strange.” Actually, the sensitive woman overestimates the damage. The others do not think her overly odd, for her deviance is accompanied by enough tact, enough observance of the little customs that oil court life, so that equilibrium is maintained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
What matters is to transform value judgment into matters of opinion, whether it is listening to The Magic Flute as against diaper talk, or whether it is being a Republican as against being a Democrat. All that matters is that nothing is too serious, that one exchanges views, and that one is ready to accept any opinion or conviction (if there is such a thing) as being as good as the other. On the market of opinions everybody is supposed to have a commodity of the same value, and it is indecent and not fair to doubt it. The word which is used for alienated conformity and sociability is of course one which expresses the phenomenon in terms of a very beneficial value. Indiscriminating sociability and lack of individuality is called being outgoing. The language here becomes psychiatrically tinged with the philosophy thrown in for good measure. You can really help make a lot of people happy here. I have brought out two couples myself; I saw potentialities in them they did not realize they had. Whenever we see someone who is shy and withdrawn, we make a special effort with them. A poignant note comes into our discussion when we remind ourselves that this excessive concern for satisfying the partner is an expression, however perverted, of a sound and basic element in the sexual act: the pleasure and experience of self-affirmation in being able to give to the partner. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The man is often deeply grateful toward the woman who lets herself be gratified by him—lets him give her an orgasm, to use the phrase that is often the symbol for this experience. This is a point midway between lust and tenderness, between sex and agape (or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the type of which is the love of God for humans)—and it partakes of both. Many a male cannot feel his own identity either as a man or a person in our culture until he is able to gratify a woman. The very structure of human interpersonal relations is such that the sexual act does not achieve its full pleasure or meaning if the man and woman cannot feel they are able to gratify the other. And it is the inability to experience this pleasure at the gratification of the other which often underlies the exploitative sexuality the compulsive sexuality of the Don Juan seduction type. Don Juan has to perform the act over and over again because he remains forever unsatisfied, quite despite the fact that he is entirely potent and has a technically good orgasm. Now the problem is not the desire and need to satisfy the partner as such, but the fact that this need is interpreted by the persons in the sexual act only a technical sense—giving physical sensation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
What is omitted even from our very vocabulary (and thus the words may sound square as I say them here) is the experience of giving feelings, sharing fantasies, offering the inner psychic richness that normally takes a little time and enables sensation to transcend itself in emotion and emotion to transcend itself in tenderness and sometimes love. It is not surprising that contemporary tends toward the mechanization of sex have much to do with the problem of impotence. The distinguishing characteristic of the machines is that it can go through all the motions but it never feels. A knowledgeable medical student, one of whose reasons for coming into analysis was his sexual impotence, had a revealing dream. He was asking me in the dream to put a pipe in his dead that would go down through his body and come out at the other end of his penis. He was confident in the dream that the pipe would constitute an admirably strong erection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
What was entirely missing in this intelligent scion of our sophisticated times was any understanding at all that what he conceived as his solution was exactly the cause of his problem, namely the image of himself as a screwing machine. His symbol is remarkably graphic: the brain, the intellect, is included, but true symbol of our alienate age, his shrew system bypasses entirely the seats of emotions, the thalamus, the heart and lungs, even the stomach. Direct route from head to penis—but what is lost is the heart! Impotence is increasing these days despite (or because of) the unrestrained freedom on all sides. All therapists seem to agree that more men are coming to them with that problem—though whether this represents a real increase in the prevalence of sexual impotence or merely a greater awareness and ability to talk about it cannot be definitely answered. Obviously, it is one of those topics on which meaningful statistics are almost impossible to get. It is clear that men have an urge to get help on impotence. Whatever the reason, it is becoming harder for the young man as well as the old to take “yes” for an answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
To see the curious ways the new puritanism shows itself, you have only to pen an issue of Playboy, that redoubtable journal reputedly sold mainly to college students and clergymen. You discover the scantly clad girls with silicate breast side by side with the articles by reputable authors, and you conclude on first blush that the magazine is certainly on the side of the new enlightenment. However, you look more closely you see a strange expression in these photographed women: detached, mechanical, uninviting, vacuous—the typical schizoid personality in the negative sense of that term. You discover that they are not sexy at all but that Playboy has only shifted the fig lead from the genitals to the face. You read the letters to the editor and find the first, entitled “Playboy Priest,” telling of a priest who “lectures on Hefner’s philosophy to audiences of young people and numerous members of the clergy,” that “true Christian ethics and morality are not incompatible with Hefner’s philosophy,” and—written with enthusiastic approbation—that “most clergymen in their fashionable parsonages live more like playboys than ascetics.” You find another letter entitled “Jesus was a playboy,” since he loved Mary Magdalene, good food, and grooming, and castigated the Pharisees. And you wonder why all this religious justification and why people, if they are going to be “liberated,” cannot just enjoy their liberation? #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Whether one takes the cynical view that letters to the editor are planted, or the more generous one that these examples are selected from hundreds of letters, it amounts to the same thing. An image of a type of American male is being presented—a suave, detached, self-assumed bachelor, who regards the woman as a “Playboy accessory” like items in his fashionable wardrobe. You note also that Playboy carries no advertising for trusses, bald heads, or anything that would detract from this image. You discover that the good articles (which, frankly, can be bought by an editor who wants to hire an assistant with taste and pay the requisite amount of money) give authority to this image. Harvey Cox concludes that Playboy is basically antisexual, and that it is the latest and slickest episode in man’s continuing refusal to be human. He believes the whole phenomenon of Playboy is only a part vividly illustrates the awful fact of the new kind of tyranny. The poet-sociologist Calvin Herton, discussing Playboy in connection with the fashion and entertainment World, calls it the new sexual fascism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Many people desire to live out of mind, to experience their nonrational or irrational selves. They want, out of curiosity, out of need, out of a feeling of incompleteness, to know the rest of themselves, the part of them that is usually hidden away, like the family of skeletons. Playboy has indeed caught on to something significant in American society, it is believed to be the repressed fear of involvement with women. I go farther and hold that it, as an example of the new puritanism, gets its dynamic from a repressed anxiety in American men that underlies even the fear of involvement. This is the repressed anxiety about impotence. Everything in the magazine is beautifully concocted to bolster the Illusion of potency without ever putting it to the test or challenge at all. Noninvolvement (like playing it cool) is elevated into the ideal model for Playboy. This is possible because the illusion is air-tight, ministering as it does to men fearful for their potency, and capitalizing on this anxiety. The character of the illusion is shown further in the fact that the readership of Playboy drops off significantly after the age of thirty, when men cannot escape dealing with real women. This illusion is illustrated by the fact that Hefner himself, a former Sunday-school teacher and son of a devout Methodists, practically never went outside his large establishment in North Chicago. Ensconced there, he carries on his work surrounded by his bunnies and amidst his nonalcoholic bacchanals on Pepsi-Cola. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Times Literary Supplement: Christ Will Explain Each Separate Anguish in the Fair Schoolroom in the Sky!
I shall know why, when time is over, and I have ceased to wonder why. He will tell me what Peter promised. I locked eyes with him, and it seemed for an instant I caught hold of shared secrets, things that they all knew, things they could not tell, things so profoundly connected to their wealth and their roots that they could never be outgrown or expurgated or overcome. As soon as we look at the relation of sex and love in our time, we find ourselves immediately caught up in a whirlpool of contradictions. In Victorian times, when the denial of sexual impulses, feelings, and drives was the mode and one would not talk about sex in polite company, an aura of sanctifying repulsiveness surrounded the whole topic. Males and females dealt with each other as though neither possessed sexual organs. The details were considered a little unpleasant to discuss. However, some people believed that ignoring such a vital part of the human body and self would lead to a morass of neurotic symptoms. We now place more emphasis on sex than any society since that of ancient Rome, and some scholars believe we are more preoccupied with sex than any other people in all history. And this is not just an American obsession. Across the ocean in England, for example, from bishops to biologists, everyone is in on the act. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Open The Times Literary Supplement or any other newspaper, any day (Sunday in particular), and the odds are you will find some pundit treating the public to his or her views on contraception, abortion, adultery, obscene publications, homosexuality between consenting adults or (if all else fails) contemporary moral patterns among our adolescent. Many therapists today see patients who come for help to talk about sex, a great deal of sexual activity, practically no one complaining of cultural prohibitions over going to bed as often or with as many partners as one wishes. However, what our patients do complain of is the lack of feeling and passion. The curious thing about this ferment of discussion is how little anyone seems to be enjoying emancipation. So much sex and so little meaning or even fun in it! Where the Victorian did not want anyone to know that he or she had sexual feelings, people are now giving it away like biscuits at tea time, and ashamed if they do not. Before 1910, if you called a lady sexy she would be insulted; nowadays, she prizes the compliment and rewards you by turning her charms in your direction. Our patients often have the problems of frigidity and impotence, but the strange and poignant thing we observe is how desperately they struggle not to let anyone find out they do not feel sexually. The Victorian man or woman was guilty if one did experience sex; now people feel guilty if they do not. #RandolpHarris 2 of 19
One paradox, therefore, is that enlightenment has not solved the sexual problems in our culture. To be sure, there are important beneficial results of the new enlightenment, chiefly in increased freedom for the individual. Most external problems are eased: sexual knowledge can be bought in any bookstore, contraception is available everywhere and couples can, without guilt and generally without squeamishness, discuss their sexual relationship and undertake to make it more mutually gratifying and meaningful. Let these gains not be underestimated. External social anxiety and guilt have lessened; dull would be the man who did not rejoice in this. However, internal anxiety and guilt have increased. And in some ways these are more morbid, harder to handle, and impose a heavier burden upon the individual than external anxiety. The challenge women used to face from men was simple and direct—would she or would she not go to bed?—a direct issue of how she stood vis-à-vis cultural mores. However, the question men ask now is no longer, “Will she or will she not?” but “Can she or can she not?” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The challenge is shifted to the woman’s personal adequacy, namely, her own capacity to have the vaunted orgasm—which should resemble a grand mal seizure. Through we might agree that the second question places the problem of sexual decision more where is should be, we cannot overlook the fact that the first question is much easier for the person to handle. In my practice, one woman was afraid to go to bed for fear that the man would not find her very good at making love. Another was afraid because she did not know how to do it, assuming that her lover would hold this against her. Another was scared to death of the second marriage for fear that she would not be able to have the orgasm as she had not in her first. Often the woman’s hesitation is formulated as, “He will not like me well enough to come back again.” In past decades, you could blame society’s strict mores and preserve your own self-esteem by telling yourself what you did not did not do was society’s fault and not yours. And this would give you some time in which to decide what you do want to do, or to let yourself grow into a decision. However, when the question is simply how you can perform, your own sense of adequacy and self-esteem is called immediately into question, and the whole weight of the encounter is shifted inward to how you can meet the test. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
College students, in their fights with college authorities about hours girls are to be permitted in the men’s rooms, are curiously blind to the fact that rules are often a boon. Ruled give the student time to find oneself. He was the leeway to consider a way of behaving without being committed before he is ready, to try on for size, to venture into relationships tentatively—which is part of any growing up. Better to have the lack of commitment direct and open rather than to go into sexual relations under pressure—doing violence to his feelings by having physical commitment without psychological. He may flout the rules; but at least they give some structure to be flouted. My point is true whether he obeys the rule or not. Many contemporary students, understandably anxious because of their new sexual freedom, repress this anxiety (one should like freedom) and then compensate for the additional anxiety the repression gives them by attacking the parietal authorities for not giving them freedom! What we did not see in our short-sighted liberalism is sex was that throwing the individual into an unbounded and empty sea of free choice does not in itself give freedom, but it more apt to increase inner conflict. The sexual freedom to which we were devoted fell short of being fully human. #RandolpHarris 5 of 19
We all have observed drama after drama, engaging in sex was like setting out to shop on a dull afternoon; desire had nothing to do with it and even curiosity was faint. The crucial point is that in sheer realistic enlightenment there has occurred a dehumanization of sex fiction. The battle against censorship and for freedom of expression surely was a great battle to win, but has it not become a new strait jacket? Our dogmatic enlightenment is self-defeating: it ends up destroying the very sexual passion it set out to protect. Maybe more people should focus on intimacy. Although many people deny its operation in themselves, most psychologist recognize the existence and importance of a need for intimacy. Intimacy comes from the Latin, intimus, meaning the innermost. This is a need for more than just closeness; it is a need to be on the inside of another person’s experiences. If we share intimacy wit another person, it is as if we are inside that person’s skin and able to experience some of the inner life of that person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
For a great many of us, there is not enough closeness, not enough being with another person. Although there are undoubtedly many people whose needs for intimacy are being met, there are many others who do not know how important such closeness is for them, or, if they do know, they are unable to satisfy their need for it. Marriage counselors and other psychotherapists indicate that high up on the list of problems that people bring to them is an inability to get close, to let someone get close to them, or to sustain any form of shared intimacy. Some people who are deprived of intimacy begin to display neurotic behavior. An individual who is neurotic has an emotional condition characterized by much anxiety and conflicting motives; this condition is often stimulated by choices that all seem bad. However, two people can feel close while taking a walk, having a talk, looking into each other’s eyes, sharing a burdensome responsibility, experiencing common grief, joy, worry, guilt, or sexual desire. All the many different forms of intimate expression can be divided into groups or dimensions. People who are really fully functioning human beings relate to others through all of these dimensions; ultimately, no judgments can be made as to which of these dimensions is more important, desirable, or necessary. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
You are energy, you body is energy. The unfolding, the development of your biological process is you, is your body. Your body is an energetic process, going by your name. It delights me to say that I am my body, with deep understanding of what that means. It gives me identity with my aliveness, without any need to split myself, body and mind. I see all my process—thinking, feeling, acting, imagining—as part of my biological reality, rooted in the Universe. However, the new emphasis on technique in sex and love-making backfires. It often occurs to me that there is an inverse relationship between the number of how-to-do-it books perused by a person or rolling off the presses in a society and the amount of sexual passion or even pleasure experienced by the person involved. Certainly nothing is wrong with technique as such, in playing golf or acting or making love. However, the emphasis beyond a certain point on technique is sex makes for a mechanistic attitude toward love-making, and goes along with alienation, feelings of loneliness, and depersonalization. One aspect of the alienation is that the lover, with his age-old art, tends to be superseded by the computer operator with his modern efficiency. Couples place great emphasis on bookkeeping and timetables in their love-making. If they fall behind schedule they come anxious and feel impelled to go to bed whether they want to or not. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
My patients have endured stoically, or without noticing, remarkably destructive treatment at the hands of their spouses, but they have experiences falling behind in the sexual time-table as a loss of love. The man feels he is somehow losing his masculine status if he does not perform up to schedule, and the woman that she has lost her feminine attractiveness if too long a period goes by without the man at least making a pass at her. The phrase “between men,” which women use about their affairs, similarly suggest a gap in which women use about their affairs, similarly suggests a gap in time like the entr’acte. Elaborate accounting and ledger-book lists—how often this week have we made love? did he (or she) pay the right amount of attention to me during the evening? was the foreplay long enough?—make one wonder how the spontaneity of this most spontaneous act can possibly survive. The computer hovers in the stage wings of the drama of love-making. “Don’t you miss yourself, and all you used to chain, it always ends. And you keep on running backwards, keep on chasing your own demons, so don’t waste another hour, and let me in. Disarm yourself, release the fear. Disarm yourself, and hold me near. Give yourself to me. Look to other people turning, while you’re hiding in the shadow, so don’t run away in silence. Let me in,” reports Emma Hewitt and Dash Berlin (Disarm Yourself). #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
It is not surprising then, in this preoccupation with techniques, that the question typically asked about an act of love-making are not, Was there passion or meaning or pleasure in the act? but How well did I perform. Take for example the tyranny of the orgasm, and the preoccupation with achieving a simultaneous orgasm, which is another aspect of the alienation. I confess that when people talk about the apocalyptic orgasm, I find myself wondering, Why do they have to try so hard? What abyss of self-doubt, what inner void of loneliness, are they trying to cover up by this great concern with grandiose effects? Even the sexologists, whose attitude is generally the more sex the merrier, are raising their eyebrows these days about the anxious overemphasis on achieving the orgasm and the great importance attached to satisfying the partner. A man makes the point of asking the woman if she made it, or if she is all right, or uses some other euphemism is possible. We men are reminded by Simone de Beauvior and other women who try to interpret the love act that this is the last thing in the World a woman wants to be asked. Furthermore, the technical preoccupation robs the woman of exactly what she wants most of all, physically and emotionally, namely the man’s spontaneous abandon at the moment of climax. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This abandon gives her whatever thrill or ecstasy she and the experience are capable of. When we cut through all the rigmarole about roles and performance, what still remains is how amazingly important the sheer fact of intimacy of relationship is—the meeting, the growing close with the excitement of not knowing where it will lead, the assertion of the self, and the giving of the self—in making a sexual encounter memorable. It is not this intimacy that makes us return to the event in memory again and again when we need to be warmed by whatever hearths life makes available? Our bodies are sensitive to a wide variety of stimulations. We respond to every form of physical contact and touch. The skin of our bodies is loaded with the most sensitive information-gatherers, delicate receptors that keep the brain in a constant state of awareness. It is a most basic form of getting information and of getting close. Our intimate encounter involve verbal, visual, and even olfactory [sense of smell] elements, but above all, loving means touching and body contact. Perhaps the touch is so basic—it has been called the greatest of all senses—that we tend to take it for granted. Unhappily, and almost without our noticing it, we have gradually become less and less touchful more and more distant, and physical untouchability has been accompanied by emotional remoteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
It is as if the modern urbanite has put on a suit of emotional armour and, with a velvet hand inside an iron glove, is beginning to feel trapped and alienated from the feelings of even his [or her] nearest companions. It is a strange thing in our society that what does into building a relationship—the sharing of tastes, fantasies, dreams, hopes for the future, and fears from the past—seems to make people more shy and vulnerable than going to bed with each other. They are more wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual openness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy. The way sexuality is being used today is causing a state of alienation from the body and a separation of emotion from reason, and the body is being used as a machines. “There are few more depressing sights than a progressive intellectual determined to end up in bed with someone from a sense of moral duty. There is no more high-minded puritan in the World than your modern advocate of salvation through properly directed passion,” reports the London Times Literary Supplement. A woman used to be guilty if she went to be with a man; now she feels vaguely guilty if after a certain number of dates she refrains; her sin is morbid repression, refusing to give. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And the partner, who is always completely enlightened (or at least pretends to be) refuses to allay her guilt by getting overtly angry at her (if she could fight him on the issues, the conflict would be a lot easier for her). However, he stands broadmindedly by, ready at the end of every date to undertake a crusade to assist her out of her fallen state. And this, of course, makes her no all the more guilt-producing for her. This all means, of course, that people not only have to learn to perform sexually but have to make sure, at the same time, that they can do so without letting themselves go in passion or unseemly commitment—the latter of which may be interpreted as exerting an unhealthy demand upon the partner. The Victorian person sought to have love without falling into sex; the modern person seeks to have sex without falling into love. The new sophisticate is not castrated by society, but like Origen is self-castrated. Sex and the body are for him not something to be and live out, but tools to be cultivated like a T.V. announcer’s voice. The new sophisticate expresses his passion by devoting himself passionately to the moral principle of dispersing all passion, loving everybody until love has no power left to scare anyone. He is deathly afraid of his passions unless they are kept under leash, and the theory of total expression is precisely his leash. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The new sophisticate’s dogma of liberty is his repression; and his principle of full libidinal health, full of sexual satisfaction, is his denial of eros (drive of love to procreate; urge). The old Puritans repressed sex and were passionate. That is as in the passion of Fallon and Michael on Dynasty, in the episode A Real Instinct for the Jugular (original air date 7 December 2018 on the CW), and it was a very different thing. Our new puritan (with a little p) represses passion and is sexual. His purpose is to hold back the body to try to make nature a slave. The new sophisticate’s rigid principle of full freedom is not freedom but a new straitjacket. He does all this because he is afraid of his body and his compassionate roots in nature, afraid of the soil and his procreative power. He is our latter-day Baconian devoted to gaining power over nature, gaining knowledge in order to get more power. And you gain power over sexuality (like working an enslaved person until all zest for revolt is squeezed out of him) precisely by the role of full expression. Sex becomes our tool like the caveman’s bow and arrow, crowbar, or adz. Sex, the new machine, the Machina Ultima. This new puritanism has crept into contemporary psychiatry and psychology. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
It is argued in some books on the counseling of married couples that the therapist ought to use only the term “fuck” when discussing sexual intercourse, and to insist the patient use it; for any other word plays into the patients’ dissimulation. What is significant here is not the use of the term itself: surely the sheer lust, animal but self-conscious, and bodily abandon which is rightly called fucking is not to be left out of the spectrum of human experience. However, the interesting thing is that the use of the once-forbidden word is not made into an ought—a duty for the moral reason of honesty. To be sure, it is dissimulation to deny the biological side of copulation. However, it is also dissimulation to use the term fuck for the sexual experience when what we seek is a relationship of personal intimacy which is more than a release of sexual tension, a personal intimacy which will be remembered tomorrow and many weeks after tomorrow. The former is dissimulation in the service of inhibition; the latter is dissimulation in the service of alienation of the self, a defense of the self against the anxiety of intimate relationship. The former was the particular problem in the 1800s, the latter is the particular problem of ours. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The new puritanism beings with it a depersonalization of our whole language. Instead of making love, we have sex; in contrast of intercourse, we screw; instead of going to bed, we lay someone or (Heaven help the English language as well as ourselves!) we are laid. This alienation has become so much the order of the day that in some psychotherapeutic training schools, young psychiatrists and psychologist are taught that it is therapeutic to use solely the four-letter words in sessions; the patient is probably masking some repression if he talks about making love; so it becomes our righteous duty—the new puritanism incarnate!—to let him know he only fucks. Everyone seems so intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of Victorian prudishness that we entirely forget that these different words refer to different kinds of human experience. Probably most people have experienced the different forms of sexual relationship described by the different terms and do not have much difficulty distinguishing among them. I am not making a value judgment among these different experiences; they are all appropriate to their own kinds of relationship. Every woman wants at some time to be laid—transported, carried away, made to have passion when at first she has none as in the famous scene between Fallon and Michael in Dynasty. However, if being laid is all that ever happens in her sexual life, then her experience of personal alienation and rejection of sex are just around the corner. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If the therapist does not appreciate these diverse kinds of experience, he will be presiding at the shrinking and truncating of the patient’s consciousness, and will be confirming the narrowing of the patient’s bodily awareness as well as his or her capacity for relationship. This is the chief criticism of new puritanism: it grossly limits feelings, it blocks the infinite variety and richness of the act, and it makes for emotional impoverishment. It is not surprising that the new puritanism develops smoldering hostility among the members of our society. And that hostility, in turn, comes out frequently in references to the sexual act itself. We say “go fuck yourself” or “fuck you” as a term of contempt to show that the other is of no value whatever beyond being used and tossed aside. The biological lust is here in its reducito ad absurdum. Indeed, the work fuck is the most common expletive in out contemporary language to express violent hostility. I do not think this by accident. However, does physical intimacy mean sex? In the broadest meaning of the term—sensuality—it does mean sex. Yet, even though most people may automatically think of sex when they hear the words intimate or intimacy, sexual caressing or intercourse is far from being the only form that physical intimacy takes. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Indeed, there is no guarantee at all that two people, involved in the most passionate forms of sexual behavior, are being intimate in the least! Sometimes sexual activity is a means of evading, hiding from, denying, or taking intimacy. How can this be? Sexual response is a relatively unconscious, or even automatic, behavior. While the best sexual expression is the most conscious, the most aware, the most holistic of our experiences, it can still happen without much thought or willing. However, being intimate, getting close and expressing it, requires a great deal of consciousness and intent. Because we have come to see sexual expression as a very intimate form of behavior, many people are able to convince their partners (or others) and even themselves that they are really close when, in fact, they have given little of themselves to the relationship. Physical intimacy, like other dimensions of intimacy, requires that the individuals involved be at home with their bodies, that they like, enjoy, and accept their physical beings, and that they recognize and appreciate the importance of touch and caress and other such forms of making contact. However, the Queen of England averred on her wedding night, that sex is too good for the common people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It was too late for man, but early for God; creation impotent to help, but prayer remained our side. How excellent the Heaven, when Earth cannot be had; how hospitable, then, the face of our handsome neighbor, God! Tenderness and respect—never selfishness—must be the guiding principles in the intimate relationship between husband and wife. “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband,” reports 1 Corinthians 7.2-4. It is the destiny of men and women to join together to make eternal family units. In the context of lawful marriage, the intimacy of sexual relations is right and divinely approved. There is nothing unholy or degrading about sexuality in itself, for by that means men and women join in a process of creation and in an expression of love. The union of the genders, husband and wife (and only husband and wife), was for the principal purpose of bringing children into the World. Sexual experiences were never intended by the Lord to be a mere plaything or merely to satisfy passions and lusts. We know of no directive from the Lord that proper sexual experience between husbands and wives need be limited totally to the procreation of children, but we find much evidence from Adam until now that no provision was ever made by the Lord for indiscriminate sex. #RandolphHaris 19 of 19
All Other Hearts I knew My Worthiness is All My Doubt—Conform My Soul as ‘t Were a Church
The Savage Garden—it is just a phrase I used to use for Earth in the old times when I did not believe in anything, when I believed the only laws were aesthetic laws. But I was young then and expecting further miracles. Before I knew we knew more of nothing, and nothing more. Sometimes I think of the phrase again when the night is like this, so accidentally beautiful. Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of mortal by mortal. Since the modern capitalist employs labor, the social and political form of this exploitation has changes; what has not changed is that the owner of capital uses other mortals for the purpose of his or her own profit. The basic concept of use has nothing to do with cruel, or not cruel, ways of human treatment, but with the fundamental fact that one mortal serves another for purposes which are not one’s own but those of the employer. The concept of use of mortal by mortal has nothing to do even with the question whether one mortal uses another, or uses oneself. The fact remains the same, that a mortal, a living human being, ceases to be an end in himself, and becomes the means for the economic interests of another mortal, or oneself, or of an impersonal giant, the economic machines. “For he truly spake many great things unto them, which were hard to be understood, save a mortal should inquire of the Lord; and they being hard in their hearts, therefore, they did not look unto the Lord as they ought,” 1 Nephi 15.3. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
There are obvious objections to the foregoing statements. One is that modern mortals are free to accept or to decline a contract, and therefore one is a voluntary participant in one’s social relation to the employer, and not a thing. However, this objection ignores the fact that in the first place one has no choice but to accept the existing conditions, and secondly, that even if one were not forced to accept these conditions, one would still be employed, that is, made use of for purposes not one’s own, but of the capital whose profit one serves. The other objection is that all social life, even in its most primitive form, requires a certain amount of social co-operation, and even discipline, and that certainly in the more complex form of industrial production, a person has to fulfill certain necessary and specialized functions. While this statement is quite true, it ignores the basic difference: in a society where no person has power over another, each person fulfills one’s functions on the basis of co-operation and mutuality. No one can command another person, except insofar as a relationship is based on mutual co-operation, on love, friendship or natural bonds. “Do ye not remember the things which the Lord hath said?—If ye will not harden your hearts, and ask me in faith, believing that ye shall receive, with diligence in keeping my commandments, surely these things shall be made known unto you,” reports 1 Nephi 15.11. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
Actually we find this present in many situations in our society today: the normal co-operation of husband and wife in their family life is to a large extent not any more determined by the power of the husband to command his wife, as it existed in antiquated forms of patriarchal society, but on the principle of co-operation and mutuality. The same holds true for the relationship of friends, inasmuch as they perform certain services for each other and co-operate with each other. In these relationships no one would dare to think of commanding the other person; the only reason for expecting one’s help lies in the mutual feeling of love, friendship or simply human solidarity. The help of another person is secured by my active effort, as a human being, to elicit one’s love, friendship and sympathy. In the relationship of the employer to the employee, this is not the case. The employer has bought the services of the worker, and however human one’s treatment may be, one still commands one, not on a basis of mutuality, but on the basis of having bought one’s working time for so many hours a day. The use of mortal by mortal is expressive of the system of values underlying the capitalistic system. Capital, the dead past, employs labor—the living vitality and power of the present. In the capitalistic hierarchy of values, capital stands high.er than labor, amassed things higher than the manifestations of life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Capital employs labor, and not labor capital. The person who owns capital commands the person who only owns one’s life, human skill, vitality and creative productivity. Things are higher than mortals. The conflict between capital and labor is much more than the conflict between classes, more than their fight for a greater share of the social product. It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the World of things, and their amassment, and the World of life and its productivity. Every time I insist on having my own rights, I hurt the Son of God, while in fact I can prevent Jesus from being hurt if I will endure the challenge myself. A disciple realized that it is one’s Lord’s honor that is at stake in one’s life, not one’s own honor. My life’s spiritual honor and duty is to fulfill my debt to Christ in relation to lost souls. Every tiny bit of my life that has value I owe to the redemption of Jesus Christ. Am I doing anything to enable Christ to bring his redemption into evident reality in the lives of others? “In the name of the Almighty God, I command you that ye touch me not, for I am filled with the power of God, even unto the consuming of my flesh; and whose shall lay his or her hands upon me shall wither even as a dried reed; and one shall be as naught before the power of God, for God shall smite that individual,” reports 1 Nephi 17.48. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Closely related to the problem of exploitation and use, although even more complicated, is the problem of authority in modern mortals. Any social system in which one group of the population is commanded by another, especially if the latter is a marginalized member of the population, must be based on a strong sense of authority, a sense which is increased in a strongly patriarchal society where the male gender is supposed to be superior to and in control of the female gender. Since the problem of authority is so crucial for our understanding of human relations in any kind of society, and since the attitude of authority has changed fundamentally from the past to the present, authority is not a quality one person has, in the sense that one has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to oneself. However, there is a fundamental difference between a kind of superiority-inferiority relation which can be called rational authority and one which may be described as inhibiting, or irrational authority. An example will show what I have in mind. The relationship between teacher and student that between slave owner and slave are both based on the superiority of the one over the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The interest of teacher and pupil are compelled in the same direction. If the teacher succeeds in furthering the pupil, he or she is satisfied. If the teacher has failed to do so, the failure is the teacher problem and the pupil’s problem. The slave owner, on the other hand, wants to exploit the enslaved human being, which is why the call them salves. It is an effort to classify them as problem which is not even worthy of being. The slave owner wants to exploit the slave as much as possible; the more one gets out of the slave, the more the slave master is satisfied. At the same time, the slave seeks to defend as best he or she can one’s claims for a minimum of happiness. These interests are definitely antagonistic, as what is of advantage to the one is detrimental to the other. The superiority has a different function in both cases: in the first, it is the condition for helping of the person subjected to the authority; in the second, it is the condition for one’s exploitation. The dynamics of authority in these two types are different too: the more the student learns, the less wide is the gap between one and the teacher. One becomes more and more like the teacher. In other words, the rational authority relationship tends to dissolve itself. However, when the superiority serves as a basis for exploitation, the distance becomes intensified through its long duration. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The psychological situation is different in each of these authority situations. In the first, elements of love, admiration, or gratitude are prevalent. The authority is at the same time an example with which one wants to identify one’s self partially or totally. In the second situation, resentment or hostility will arise against the exploiter, subordination to whom is against one’s own interests. However, often as in the case of a slave, one’s hatred would only lead to conflicts which would subject the slave to suffering without a chance of winning. Therefore, the tendency will usually be to repress the feeling of hatred and sometimes even to replace it by a feeling of blind admiration. This has two functions: to remove the painful and dangerous feeling of hatred, and to soften the feeling of humiliation. If the person who rules over me is so wonderful or perfect, then I should not be ashamed of obeying him or her. I cannot be one’s equal because he or she is so much stronger, wiser, better, and so on, than I am. As a result, in the inhibiting kind of authority, the element either of hatred or of irrational overestimation and admiration of the authority will tend to increase. In the rational kind of authority, the strength of the emotional ties will tend to decrease in direct proportion to the degree in which the person subjected to the authority becomes stronger and thereby more similar to the authority. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The difference between rational and inhibiting authority is only a relative one. Even in the relationship between slave and master there are elements of advantage for the slave. One gets a minimum of food and protection which at least enables one to work for the master. (Provided one does not get beat to death for not producing enough, or disabled to the point they cannot work and are deemed useless, at which point food and shelter and the luxury of life might cease.) On the other hand, it is only in an ideal relationship between teacher and the student that we find a complete lack of antagonism of interests. There are many gradations between these two extreme cases, as in the relationship of a factory worker with his or her boss, or a farmer’s son with his father, or a hausfrau with her husband. Nevertheless, although in reality the two types of authority are blended, they are essentially different, and an analysis of a concrete authority situation must always determine the specific weight of each kind of authority. The character of society a mixture of rational and irrational authority, with essentially a hierarchical blend, based on divine law and tradition, where the ownership of capital allows one to buy and thus command labor of those who do not, and the latter has to obey, under penalty of going on government relief or starvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
One cannot deny that in America today, there is a certain blending between slavery and freedom, the new and the old hierarchical pattern. The state, especially in the monarchial form, cultivates the antiquated virtues of obedience and submission, and applies them to new contents and values. Obedience, int the middle class, is still one of the fundamental virtues and disobedience one of the elementary vices. “They were confounded and could not contend against me; neither durst they lay their hands upon me nor touch me with their fingers, even for the space of many days. Now they durst not do this lest they should wither before me, so powerful was the Spirit of God; and this it has wrong upon them. And it came to pass that the Lord declared unto me: Stretch forth thine hand again unto thy brethren, and they shall not wither before thee, but I will shock them, saith the Lord, and this will I do, that they may know that I am the Lord their God. And it came to pass that I stretched forth my hand unto my people, and they did not wither before me; but the Lord did shake them, even according to the word which he had spoken,” reports 1 Nephi 17.52-54. At the same time, however, rational authority had developed side by side with irrational authority. Since the Reformation and the Renaissance mortals had begun to rely on their own reason as a guide to action and value judgment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
The mortals felt proud to have convictions which were theirs, and they respected the authority of scientists, philosophers, historians, who helped them to form one’s own judgments and to be sure of one’s own conviction. The decision between true and false, right and wrong, was one of the utmost important and, indeed, both the moral and the intellectual conscience assumed a paramount place in the character structure of current mortals. One may not have applied the rules of one’s conscience to mortals of a different color or even of a different social class, yet to some extent one was determined by one’s sense of right and wrong, and at least by the repression of the awareness of wrong-doing, if one did succeed in avoiding wrong action. “May God arise, may his enemies be scattered; may his foes flee before him. As smoke is blown away by the wind, may you blow them away; as wax melts before the fire, may the wicked perish before God. However, may the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; may they be happy and joyful. Sing to God and praise to his name, extol him who rides on the clouds—his name is the LORD—and rejoice before him. A father to the fatherless, a defender of windows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a Sun-scorched land,” reports Psalm 68.1-6. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the possession of the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or we suffer from this neglect of ourselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. “And the fire will never leave us though the path divides between us. You always had the strength to walk alone and the quiet hours would haunt you and the wilder winds, they called you, I almost had the strength to let you go. Why were you falling? Far, far away. I still remember you and those days could not get better. I keep it all, this will not fade, I will never let it. I know you gave it all so good, I cannot forget it. Still lost in you, on that day we will stay forever. Stay forever. And I know that time is speeding, experiences fleeting. I would give them all away to bring you home. Why were you falling? Far, far away. Forever lost in you and those days could not get better. I keep it all, this will not fade, I will never let it. I know you gave it all so good, I cannot forget it. Still lost in you, on that day we will stay forever. Forever lost in you…” reports Emma Hewitt (Still remember). Power incubates within the soul and then makes its influential move into life as the expression of the soul. If there is so soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soulfulness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Not with a Club the Heart is Broken, Nor with a Stone—I think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven!
Oh, and it is the same old beat with you, Erich, you Devil, you want to do it, you want to, you want to see it, you greedy little beast, you cannot give her over to the Angels and you know they are waiting! You know the God who can sanctify her suffering has purified her an will forgive her last cries. Mental health is to be determined objectively and society has both a furthering and a distorting influence on mortals, contradicts not only the relativistic view, discussed in the past, but two other views which I want to discuss now. One, decidedly the most popular one today, wants to make us believe that contemporary Western society and more especially, the American way of life corresponds to the deepest needs of human nature and that adjustments to this way of life means mental health and maturity. Social psychology, instead of being a tool for the criticism of society, thus becomes the apologist for the status quo. The concept of maturity and mental health in this view, corresponds to the desirable attitude of a worker or employee in industry or business. Maturity is the ability to stick to a job, the capacity to give more on any job than is asked for, reliability, persistence to carry out a plan regardless of the difficulties, the ability to work with other people under organization and authority, the ability to make decisions, a will to life, flexibility, independence, and tolerance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Maturity is the virtues of a good worker, employee or soldier in the big social organizations of our time; they are the qualities which are usually mentioned in advertisements for a junior executive. To one, and many others who think like one, maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. “And now my beloved beings, I had said these things unto you that I might awaken you to a sense of your duty to God, that ye may walk blameless before him, that ye may walk after the holy order of God, after which you have been received,” reports Alma 7.22. If you remain true, you will get the sign that God is with you. When you come to your wits’ end and feel inclined to panic—do not! Stand true to God, and he will bring out his truth in a way that will make your life an expression of worship. Put into practice what you have learned. Make a determination to trust in God. “The house of the LORD God is to be here,” reports 1 Chronicles 22.1. If you have always prided yourself on your sensitivity to the needs of others, you may find resistance when you adopt toughness. Sometimes when people look at it, it is like someone turned on the Christmas lights, it makes them giddy and full of joy. Will you be accepted? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. However, in contrast to this view is the one which runs from Dr. Freud, and which assumes a basic and unalterable contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction which follows from the alleged asocial nature of mortals. For Dr. Freud, mortals are driven by two biologically rooted impulses: the craving for sexual pleasure, and for destruction. The aim of one’s sexual desire is complete sexual freedom, that is, unlimited access to all women and men one might find desirable. Some mortals discovered by experience that sexual (genital) love affords them their greatest gratification, so that it becomes in affect the prototype of all happiness to him or her. These types of people must have been impelled to seek their happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make genital erotism the central point of one’s life. Primitive humans have yet to cope with no, or exceedingly few restrictions to the satisfaction of those basic desires. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Primitive mortals can give vent to their aggression, and there are few limitations to the satisfaction of one’s sexual impulses. In actual fact, most primitive mortals knew nothing of any restrictions on their instincts, some do not even “feel” that they have instincts. Civilized humans have exchanged some part of their changes of happiness for a measure of security. The happy savage’s aggressiveness has two sources: one, the innate striving for destruction (death instinct) and the other the frustration of one’s instinctual desires, imposed upon him or her by society. While mortals may channel part of one’s aggression against oneself, through the Super-Ego, and while a minority can sublimate their sexual desire into love of humanity, aggressiveness remains ineradicable. Mortals will always compete with, and attack each other, if not for material things, then for the prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancor and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect and that the ineffable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Since for Dr. Freud love is in its essence sexual desire, he is compelled to assume a contradiction between love and social cohesion. Love, according to him, is by its very nature egotistical and antisocial, and the sense of solidarity and humanly love are not primary feelings rooted in mortal’s nature, but aim-inhibited sexual desires. One the basis of his concept of mortals, that of their inherent wish for unlimited sexual satisfaction, and of his destructiveness, Dr. Freud must arrive at a picture of the necessary conflict between civilization and mental health and happiness. Primitive mortals are healthy and happy because one is not frustrated in one’s basic instincts, but one lacks the blessings of culture. Civilized humans are more secure, enjoy art and science, but they are bound to be neurotic because of the continued frustration of one’s instincts, enforced by civilization. For Dr. Freud, social life and civilization are essentially in contrast to the needs of human nature as he sees it, and mortals are confronted with the tragic alternative between happiness based on the unrestricted satisfaction of one’s instincts, and security and cultural achievements based on instinctual frustration, hence conducive to neurosis and all other forms of mental sickness. Civilization, to Dr. Freud, is the product of instinctual frustration and thus the cause of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Dr. Freud’s concept of human nature as being essentially competitive (and asocial) is the same as we find it in most authors who believe that the characteristics. Dr. Freud’s theory of the competitive struggles for survival. It can also be translated into the sphere of economy. There are basically two types of people, the homo sexual is and the homo economicus. One is after sex, the other is after money. Both the economic mortal and the sexual mortal are convenient fabrications whose alleged nature—isolated, asocial, greedy and competitive—makes Capitalism appear as the system which corresponds perfectly to human nature, and places it beyond the reach of criticism. The necessary conflict between human nature and society, imply the defense of contemporary society and they both are one-sided distortions. Furthermore, most ignore the fact that society is only in conflict with the asocial aspects of mortals, partly produced by itself, but often also with one’s most valuable human qualities, which is suppresses rather than furthers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
An objective examination of the relation between society and human nature must consider both the furthering and the inhibiting impact of society on humans, taking into account the nature of mortals and the needs stemming from it. The neglected pathogenic function of modern society needs to be highlighted. Many of the self-defeating behaviors are motivated by conscious needs. For instance, there appear to be people all around us who have a strong dislike for themselves. In each of us there may be a tinge of dislike for some aspect of our self: freckles, hair, teeth, vocabulary, color, accent. However,most of us manage to combine our dislike of parts of ourselves with very good feelings about the rest of the package. A few people, though, manage to reach a point where they entertain active hatred for their entire beings. They manage to pull off some of the greatest self-defeating stunts since the six hundred marched into the Valley of Death in the Crimean War! Some of these people do it with alcohol, using it precisely because they know it will put them into a state in which they will commit self-defeating or losing behavior. They drink to get courage or strength enough to hurt themselves. There are many who do the same with drugs of various kinds. Again, this is not to dispute the physiological factors of addiction or habituation. It is simply to emphasize that even before the physiological hook gets into some people, they hook themselves onto a drug or habit that will inevitably bring them down. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
An example of the conscious needs that motivate self-defeating behavior is dependency. Some people refuse to take their medicine because they like or need to be dependent on their doctors or they need their family’s concerns. Others get themselves in trouble with authorities because they need to keep themselves tied to their parents or spouses; they build a bond of trouble-rescue-restriction-release-trouble, a cycle that repeats itself week after month after year in some cases. Why? It is a bit too simple to say that the needs are always entirely conscious or even always entirely unconscious.Just as our physiques are three-dimensional, our complexities encompass behaviors that have horizontal, vertical, and depth dimensions as well. Add to this the dimensions that we call time and space and you have a model of human behavior that cannot be sketched on a flat piece of paper. Therefore, we must keep in mind the person, who will play more roles in one’s life, but—like an actor—the mortal is one person and all one’s roles are the individual, too. This multi-dimensioned person is each of us. Mixed in with all the motivations we have described as being universal are the ones that are unique to each of us. There is, therefore, no one answer to the “why?” of the behavior, whether it is the behavior of one or many. It may be instructive, but only instructive, to see what may cause actions in particular cases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If a mortal has a strong need to enter into complicated situations from which one cannot extricate oneself, we may uncover some of the reasons why, but only some of them. If you do something, even after an authority figure has told you to stop, changes are that among your individually unique needs is the need to engage in whatever destructive behavior you have been warned to stop, apparently this need is stronger than your need to stay out of danger. Some people engage in bad behavior because they feel a strong need to be punished. They feel that they can only be satisfied or happy when they are being pushed out or put into a situation where they are in some sort of danger of losing out. When these types of people win or achieve something, they feel and empty, hollow sort of triumph. Only when these individuals have guilt so ingrained in their being are punishing themselves or being punished can they admit to feelings of satisfaction. It is hard for guilt given people to admit this to friends. Not even their wives or husbands have ever heard them say these things, but their spouses notice over the years that they only seem completely happy and at ease when they are being pressured, when they are driving themselves to take on unnecessary extra work. It seemed to one woman that her husband was “trying to kill himself,” with his overly emotional and wild criminal behaviors. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Dr. Freud thought we each have an instinctive death wish. We do not find the evidence for this to be either conclusive or impressive. However, we know that many people learn to deal with their guilt feelings or their negative self-concepts by punishing themselves or by being punished. Without using the term as a diagnosis, this behavior is often called masochism. A person who is still doing something dangerous, even after being warned not to, is a symbol of all the things one does that one has been told one should not do. One is almost totally absorbed by and concerned with guilt. The diagnosis of potential death and danger us almost like a priestly issue of penance: this is what one must undergo to purge oneself of one’s guilt. Some people are begging to be punished because they want to get their just desserts, which could even be death, for being the bad person they are. “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the LORD what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing,” reports 1 Chronicles 21.24. This long example, we repeat, deals only with one person. It is not meant to explain all people who engage in risky behaviors or careers, all compulsive people, or to condemn all teachings about guilt. It is, however, instructive. Guilt, as experienced by most of us, is the feeling we have when we have let ourselves down, when we have not lived up to our own expectations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
As such, it is a good motivator: guilt enables us to shift our gears and try a different speed or direction in our behavior. We should feel guilt for committing certain social indiscretions or violations of necessary and expected behaviors. If I step on the foot a woman by accident, both my love for people and my social responsibility will produce guilt feelings. Hopefully, I will be a more careful walker in the future. However, if I tore up my feet, sold my shoes, and swore never to go near people again, I would probably be labeled neurotic—given to extreme guilt reactions. When anxiety and other strong emotions produce fears or self-defeating responses in us, we are experiencing a form of neurosis. This particular problem in living is quite common in the lives of most of us. Each of us at times, precisely because we view our many facets as separate, lets this imagined separateness become virtually real. As the gaps in our thinking about our selves grow, so the gaps and distortions really grow in our everyday behavior. It we imagine that we have a good self and a bad self, any attempt to emphasize the one we want or need to emphasize exaggerates our behaviors in that direction, almost as if we were to say: “See? That other part of me does not even exist!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Of course it exists, It is just as real and as important apart of your total self as any other part. However, it is only a part. However,it is only a part. It is so interwoven and inextricably tied in with all the other facets that often you do not know which one is which. That in itself is not bad, either. Rather than trying to single out which part is which, one would be much better off simply accepting and living with the entire package. However, this is so simple to say and so difficult to do. We are encouraged by our society’s values, by its mores, by so many things, to live only partially. Some of the negative consequences of such splitting up are separateness, marginality, and alienation. “There is a God, and he created all things, both the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon,” reports 2 Nephi 2.14. As children of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of moral agency, the capacity and power of independent action. Endowed with agency, we are agents, and we primarily are to act and not merely be acted upon—especially as we seek learning by study and also by faith. As gospel learners, we should be doers of the word, and not just hearers only. Our hearts are open to the influence of the Holy Ghost as we properly exercise agency and act in accordance with correct principles—and we thereby invite God’s teachings and testifying power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Randolph Harris II International Institute 